Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - He Lost a $100 Million Company Overnight (And How He Rebuilt) (Aaron Day)

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Aaron Day built a tech empire from his dorm room to $100 million in revenue with 500 employees. Then, one phone call from the bank in 2008 wiped it all out.In this episode of Escaping the Drift, John Gafford talks to Aaron about the brutal reality of the banking system, why he believes the next crash will be worse than 2008, and how he rebuilt his wealth using gold and cryptocurrency. Aaron explains the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), why he bought a gold mine, and how entrepreneurs can "drift-proof" their assets against government overreach.💬 Did you enjoy this podcast episode? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford *************💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.*************✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:Instagram ▶️ / thejohngaffordFacebook ▶️ / gafford2🎧 Stream The Escaping The Drift Podcast with John Gafford Episode here:Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 *************#2008Crash #BankingCrisis #Entrepreneurship #Bitcoin #GoldStandard #AaronDay #EscapingTheDrift #FinancialCollapseSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of like it says in the opening man, the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, beaming live the internet into the studio. I got a guy who's done some amazing things. And you'll see where that goes in. Yeah, that's a terrible pun.

I get it. He is somebody that has spent the last, I mean, his whole life, really, working with some incredible companies and building some incredible things. And he most recently has taken on the role, CEO of a company called a maze, which is really leading what some would call the strategic evolution. and is the leading player in the creator content ecosystem, empowering individuals to transform their passions into thriving and stable businesses.

Some wouldn't say that. That's what his Publiss has said. But maybe we'll say it at the end of this. We're going to find out. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Aaron Day. Aaron, how are you? Great, John.

Thanks for including me. And hope you're getting ready for a nice holiday season. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, the holidays are upon us and all of the things that come with it. I don't know where you spend the holidays. You know, we do, we're going to get to my favorite thing this week,

which is every year, I stole this from my friend Kent Clotheaer, and I do it here. And Kent told a story one time in a mastermind that I'm a member of. And he said, you know, when I grew up, you know, my mom was one of those people that we had to put the Christmas presence on Layaway, right? For those who you don't know what the layaway is, is this where you go to a store, you pick stuff out, You give them a little bit of money now, and then when you get paid, you can afford to come back.

And what he does now is he just randomly gathers a group of high-level entrepreneurs, and they go out and they just go into stores like Burlington Co factory or stuff like that. And they say, hey, could you go do me a favor and pull all of the layaways that you have with kids clothes or toys, all of them? And then they just pay them off, just randomly for people that do that. And I've stolen that idea. We're getting ready to go do that after this. I love it. It's one of my favorite things to do during the holidays because my mom was also one of those layaway people back in the day.

So, yeah, I appreciate it. And it's my little fun way to give back. What's your, before we get into a maze, what's your favorite way to get back for the holidays? What do you love to do? Well, for many, many, many years. So my mom who passed away in 2021 from some of the effects of COVID ran the largest batter woman shelter and child shelters in Orange County, California.

So for many, many years, I would dress up as Santa Claus and go to the shelters and give away gifts to the kids and families that were pretty severely abused, right? And I have to tell you that it's probably one of the hardest things you can ever do is sit there at Santa Claus and watch these kids come up and you give them one gift and the excitement in their faces and the expression of just joy. but physically you can see what they've been through and so like that. And so I did that for many years. And that's still to this day probably one of the most, you know, grateful things I've ever did. And it made me appreciate my mother so much because she dealt with it 365. I dealt with it one day of the year, right? But that to me has been one of my lifelong favorite traditions at Christmas to give back, right?

I love that. That's awesome. So let's jump right in. By the way, the new generation of Layaway is Clarna in case you didn't need it. What is it? What is it? What is it? It's called Clarnas. So if you go to, if you go online and you buy anything, you're going to see payment options

and you'll see Clartan and Clarnet lets you pay as Layaway, right? I've actually had the CEO of that product on my show. So yes, I'm very aware of what that is because he's been like I get referred to all the time as the next generation of QVC or the live shopping network. Layaway is Clara. So there you go. Things don't change much over time. Well, let's talk about, let's talk about amazing.

what a maze does. Let's talk about it. Yeah. So fundamentally the easiest way to think about a maze is that is, is where that company that is embedded in YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Twitch, all these big social platforms. And when you get to a certain number of subscribers, a little button pops up and says, would you like to monetize? And for the millions and millions of people who are using social media to create, you know, either content to create a community or they're creating content to promote their business. They see this little option of this little company called a maze and they can start to create an embedded e-commerce experience in their social media channels.

So why is that different than, let's say, a Shopify or big commerce or one of these big e-commerce platforms? we built the company, John, to be natively embedded in social media platforms so that when somebody's viewing content, somebody could be watching this podcast right now, watching this live streaming event right now, and our stores are live shoppable. So you can buy something in content, live, and you don't have to leave the platform. And so if you think about that, the benefit for what we do is we empower millions of people to create excelling experience while they're creating really exciting content,

which is really, really fun for us. But at the same time, the platforms are not disinivized to not promote it because we're not forcing the consumer, the viewer, to leave the platform. So that's what we do in a nutshell. And everything else we do is around that. It's how to optimize that, how to accelerate that monetization effort for those creators, right, those content creators. Now, when you said that it was natively existing in these apps,

is this something that you went out and created a deal with directly with the Instagrams of the world, the YouTube's of the world, or is this a program that you get and it kind of works through API to integrate with those things? No, we were the first that we did this. And I'll tell you a bit more about my background, how we came to this. When we found this company in September of 2021, the thesis of it was we were going to embed commerce in these big platforms.

So it's natively embedded. So things like buy on YouTube, which allows you to sell and buy something on YouTube, fundamentally we're integrated into that so that selling experience is native inside the platform. Doesn't mean you can't have a store and amaze and post it on your website, posted through your social channels, sell other ways. But the way people find us is they find us in the social media platforms, right? And that's a great thing for us because it brings lots of creators to us at very low cost.

So, okay, so talk to me about how did you pull that off? How do you walk into an Instagram of the world of these big platforms and say, we want to do this and they don't just go, yeah, that seems like a good idea and then call their eight million developers down the hallway and start replicating you. How did you pull that off? So, so two answers to that. The first one was, so before I, before I found, we founded a maze, I was at Canva. and my main job at Canva was to integrate Canva into high volume traffic platforms.

Think FedEx, think Pinterest. So we build out this model of putting a design engine inside of all these large platforms. And so I spent over three years working for the founders of Canva, building out this idea of the next generation of content creation would come live in platform. And so during that period of time, I got to meet with all the executives from all these big social platforms. in these e-commerce platforms. And as the time evolved, it became very apparent

that design platforms were commoditizing a bit, but the selling experience was still very archaic, right? And so I had that natural sort of progression from, hey, we want to add a design experience to, hey, we want to add a selling experience in our platform. The fundamental piece is the platforms have two core goals. Create more content,

and allow the content creators to monetize more so they create more content, right? So it's just cyclical process. So we did that. Now, why would Instagram not just go do this themselves? So fundamentally what we do, which is what we call under the iceberg, is we have a huge amount of tech that connects us around the world, America, United States, North America, Europe, India, Australia, with supply chain. So we connect with, you know, a lot of suppliers.

that can create products on demand, at scale, custom. And so this piece of managing the supply chain is very complicated, right? It's, and we do it really, really well. So, so yeah, Instagram could say, hey, we're going to build a selling experience, but then you'd have to have all these different layers of connecting the supply chain, fulfillment, distribution, and they don't want to do that. None of them have shown the desire to do that. Even TikTok shop, which is wildly successful this year doing very well,

still under the hood, we're integrated in there, and we provide all the fulfillment supply chain operational pieces of someone selling something on TikTok, right? So we're not the only ones that do that, but, but, you know, that piece is very complicated and it's not in their core wheelhouse. When you, so this was your idea. You came up with this. You said, so it was, it evolved over time. When we first started a maze, our fundamental feelings.

at a maze was that selling online was just too difficult. If you were to try to launch a store in 2021, 2020 sell something live, you needed programmers, you needed an agency, you needed a bunch of resources, right? It just, it wasn't, it wasn't DIY, right? You couldn't do it yourself. And we're like, look, we need to democratize this. We need to allow anyone. I don't care who you are. My nine-year-old son could sell online in a matter of minutes, right? That was our fundamental leaf is like, let's make this much simpler. And then as we started having conversations, it was like, okay, let's do this and let's embed it in the social platforms so that we can keep the revenue engines of these social

platforms running the way they want to run. And so it evolved a bit over time, but fundamentally, it was our vision. And look, this is my lifelong passion. I mean, I love helping small businesses and entrepreneurs figure out how to monetize and become successful. And I believe fundamentally today that so many small businesses don't know how to get out of the paid media hell. They don't know how to get out of the SEO hell, right? Sorry, that's a strong word. But they're stuck in this motion, John, right? They get to a certain size and they just don't know how to get bigger. And their only option is to go to Amazon and that

Amazon distribute their product, right? There's a better way. There's a better way to do this. And I think that's what we're trying to build. So this is, so I'm just curious. So because I'm kind of envisioning as I'm listening to this, right? I'm thinking about like, I don't remember what it was. Was it like minority report or whatever? Tom Cruise was like a dystopian future. And it was like every time somebody said something on like an ad that walked by,

they talked to you and then that product would kind of appear. Is this like, is there a day? Because right now this is very like the company is choosing what products they're selling, right? It's obviously their products. This isn't an arbitrage deal where they're, or is it where they're saying like, okay, I'm going to get, I want to get an affiliate deal with this product and I'm selling this as an affiliate deal or is this there, you try to push actual products that are their own? You know, so it's a combination.

So affiliate deals are really, really, really, really popular right now, right? Because it's, it's Amazon's way of saying, hey, we're going to give you low cost distribution to fans, right? So they come in and say, hey, go in, click this button and promote this product. But you think about that, that's what influencers do. They promote a product. They promote something. They get a small, two, three, four percent revenue share.

I'm promoting something. But are they really building their own brand? They're not. They're kind of diluting their brand because they're saying, hey, look at me. I'm a lifestyle influencer. I'm a health care influencer. you know, I'm a barbecue enthusiast. I'm a woodworker, whatever, whatever I do, right?

I'm passionate about this. And oh, by the way, here's some of the products I like to use. And let me make a little bit of money off promoting those. So we can do that. And we play in the space, right? But what we really focus on is like, hey, I'm going to build my own brand. I'm a woodworker. I'm a yoga instructor.

And I'm going to build my own brand, my own community, and my own physical product. products, right? And so we're, we're trying and in that scenario, you know, you're talking about margins of 25, 30 percent or higher, which really is a real business, right? So, and, and a lot more control. You have control of the data. You control of the community, the fans. So, so, so we, we really, we really are focused on, we internally, we call it one P, John, first party. We are building first party brands at scale. And that's a really important thing for me to say to you, because at scale means it's a software company. It's not an agency. It's not an ad agency. Tons and tons of people

help build 1P brands and small quantities as an agency. We're trying to do it with tech. We're trying to do it at scale with millions of people. Yeah. Because it's funny. I just for some reason I thought about this where you're going. Like you could sign like a bulk affiliate deal with like all these products and then have AI that as you were posting a video or doing a live or talking about like, God, car insurance is so expensive. They had about like, ooh, car insurance. And then like the affiliate would pop up. Like whatever.

Oh, peanut butter. And then there's like a Jiff peanut butter thing that pops up. Like literally you could just, I don't know. I don't know if that would work, but that's just kind of when I was thinking when you said that. So if I'm a creator, like how big of an audience do I need to have before I start considering going down to build my own products route? So our most successful sort of size is between 10 to 30,000 followers.

So where we're seeing the most success with creators that are basically monetizing the most, being able to make enough money to where they can become a full-time job is somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 30,000 followers. Now, if you have 100,000 followers, you've got a million followers, you have more, I guess, audience to monetize with physical products and stuff like that. But you also have a much bigger audience that you have to keep happy with content. And so you start to realize that, hey, if this could be content creation hell, because I might have to create content five times a day, seven days a week, to keep this million audience really active. You think of Mr. Beas, right?

How much content is he creating, right? Enormous amounts of content to keep those 400 million people happy. Whereas if you're a specialist, if you're a niche creator, you're focused on a very niche vertical, your community becomes very, very loyal and very dedicated to what you're doing. It's very interactive, right? It's collaborative. It's interactive. And so what you'll find is that our creators that have 10,000, 20,000 followers,

when they launch a product, everybody buys it. The conversion rates like 70%. And so they make a lot of money during that period of time. And then they'll think of something else, and they'll do it together with the community. The community is very engaged. It's very interesting for me, right? I mean, and if you think about it, to get to 10,000 followers on social media these days with all the tools you have isn't that hard if you have a unique idea, unique concept, niche content, right? What niches have you seen right now that are really converting at high level?

So I'll call it biohealth. Peptides, everything else. Yeah. This next generation of how do I take care of myself? how do I understand my body? What's my body going to do in the next 10 years? How do I feed my body properly? Things like that. How do I treat my body properly? Huge. And just think about it from whether you're a 20 to 25 year old and you're trying to figure out how to get to where you want to go in your life, you want to be healthy, you're trying to get energy, or if you're 65 years old

and you're trying to preserve your vitality for the next 10 years. It doesn't go away through generations. It's very, it's very, and other areas right now that it's really interesting to watch the micro apparel space. Gen Z's, millennials have grown up with instant access to content, and now they have instant access to designs for what they want to wear. So it's very interesting to watch these little micro, micro sort of niche creators that are creating, you know, apparel and selling it very rapidly, right? We have a product called Digital Fits that basically allows you to go into Roblox, and it as a gamer, as a player, creates your own digital avatar apparel. And with one click of the button, you can take that digital apparel and make it physical.

So my 9-year-old son who loves being in Roblox, playing with all his friends, goes in and designs his own avatar apparel, and he clicks it and then he orders his own shirt. He wears it to school. Within a week, all of his buddies are wearing the same shirt. They've all gone online and bought a shirt. So my nine-year-old son is monetizing something he did in a game. So those little niches, you know, and look, he sells 20 shirts.

He's happy, man. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. So that's this little story that he set up. That's his story? Yep, he set up. Wow.

And so is that is amazing embedded then in Roblox or is it embedded somewhere? Awesome. So Amaze isn't embedded in Roblox. We have our digital fit product is set up to help, help Roblox users create apparel much easier. Because if you try to create apparel now, digital apparel, you know, digital wearable skins, things like that, and Roblox, it's not an easy process. It's very complicated. It's very complicated. So we really make it simple to do that. What is not simple yet. And then we're trying to simplify it is the ability to sell that anywhere, right? And that's something that's being developed and actually worked on. And, you know, is because once again, we want to allow anyone to sell anything, right? Is this, so like this little niche product that, and this is you guys on that piece of tech, right? We built it. Yeah. You built it.

You built it. So how many little, how many little pieces, snapped together pieces like that do you guys have? So four or five. You know, this year we've launched three pretty unique products. We've launched Digital FIT, which is the. the Roblox apparel product. At Adobe Max in October, in Los Angeles,

we launched Moments AI. And you'll have to invite me back sometime in January, and we'll show you the, we're in sort of beta mode right now with Moments AI, but Moments AIs are a new live AI product. And it's very different than like going to chat, GPT. I'm going to see if I can set this down here.

I'll try to maybe give you an example here. Yeah. So what you do with, what you do with Moments AI is, you come in and you put your YouTube URL in or your Instagram URL in, and it then tracks all your social media content posting and all the comments. And because we have 14 million stores and 350 million, you know, active visitors coming to these stores all the time, collecting a lot of data, right?

And so when we see some sort of signal that that creator's content's trending, so let's say you're posting on YouTube every day, your videos and you're getting on average, let's say 10,000, 10,000 views. And all of a sudden, something hits 12,000 views. That's a signal to us, right? So our AI engine looks at it and says, okay, what are people saying about this?

And then immediately you get back as a creator, four or five suggestions of products that you may want to make from those comments. And you hit a button and use our moment's AI and it generates physical products designs and it puts it back up. So in a matter of minutes, something's trending on on social, you now give them give back products that were created from that

content, that content feedback, right? We're talking about like printables and stuff, like, like t-shirts and we're talking. Yeah, but I mean, it could be, it could be, it could be that kind of on-demand stuff, but it could also be other other things like you could have a customized coffee bag, you could have a customized wine label, you could have different things like that that are, that are responding to. And look, you can, since COVID, you can produce just about anything on demand, right? And so that idea of reading that behavior in social media and tracking that.

So that's that's another product we launched. And then we we have this product called we it's not very sexy, John. It's called store drop, right? I mean, it's just stuff that makes money never is sexy. It's store drop. And my my production managers create a new version that they call store drop V2, right? That's real exciting, right? I feel like I'm Apple now.

But anyways, so store drop V2. which we launched a couple months ago. The idea here is that I fundamentally believe in three to five years, you won't have e-commerce stores anymore. You won't have you. What you're going to have is this mass ability to create a listing, to take a product and drop it anywhere. And as soon as you drop it anywhere, you can buy it.

And it just connects. And so the evolution of store drop for us is this ability to, you're walking down the street, you have your smartphone, you see something, take a picture of it, you run it through an AI engine, and within three minutes, you drop it and you're selling it, right? And it doesn't matter what it is, right?

It may be a car and you want to decide you want to customize the car. It may be a bike. You want to customize the bike. It may be somebody's apparel and maybe artwork, whatever, right? So we're working towards this moment in time where things become sellable immediately, right?

And that's what sort of, you know, B2 is doing for us. So that's another. Yeah. So how do you deal with like copyright infringement? Would you be culpable in that if your software helps people clone things? So you asked a good question about 10 minutes ago about the affiliate stuff, right? So there's thousands, if not millions of small brands, medium-sized brands who are looking for distribution. There are new technologies involving every day, middleware piece, middleware technology that allows you to connect third-party brands, with new sellers, new supply, you know, right now it's affiliate, right?

But sooner or later you're going to be able to, you know, as a third-party brand, you'll be to say, hey, I want to put my product in front of 40,000 creators and let them all sell it, right? And, and oh, maybe I'll give my 40,000, you know, yoga instructors the ability to customize my new yoga line that's coming from my company, right? So there's all these things evolving right now to where you can, you can customize, you can, you can immediately tie content to product, things like that that are evolving. It's fundamental in the development of social commerce and the next generation of e-commerce

that you don't have to take someone away from where content's being viewed to a different site to buy it, right? It's a fundamental thing that has to change. And I feel like if a maze can do one thing really, really well over the next five years, it's to perfect that ability to buy when content's being viewed. I think it's critical. And if we can do that, we're a very, very valuable company. No, no, I would agree with that.

So for this to work, and if you think it's going to be this way eventually where everything is just point and shoot, where does that leave Amazon? I mean, obviously you're talking about the biggest company on Earth. Do they pivot? Did they get in this market against you? What do they do? I think Amazon's push. So they're massive push into affiliates that they understand under the hood that the idea of having one global marketplace where people go to buy everything versus this one potential global marketplace or people go to sell anything is happening. And they need to figure that out.

I don't think Amazon goes away. I don't think Amazon changes that much over the next few years. But I do think Amazon has to adapt. And people like a maze who have a high volume distribution of lots and lots of sellers, I think are going to be very interested, very, very attractive to Amazon, right? So you think they're going to get in your same game or are they going to come knocking on your door? I mean, obviously, I know the answer you want. Yeah.

Look, I care about the margin our small businesses, our entrepreneurs, our creators make, right? I care about it. I mean, we talk about this every week in leadership meetings. if they can't make 30% or more selling a product on our site, we're not going to be successful. I don't know if an Amazon model where Amazon wants to take 40%, a creator wants to take 30%, can exist together, right? I think there's a margin pressure there that's going to happen. And that's a very business response to your question.

But I really do think that somebody's going to have to give. And my fight, my battle will be that the crater continues to make as much money as possible. That brings my next question, which is how much of your process is patented? Is patent pending is patent a bowl? Yeah, so we have patents in certain areas. We have patents in certain parts of the technology. I will tell you that I don't think there's any major metal moats around the business. I think there's some wood moats and some water moats and stuff like that that we built. But in this space is evolving very, very rapidly. But I do think that we know the space really well. Right. And we've got, you. years of being integrated with these big social platforms. We know how to do this. Well, you're first to market. There's a lot to be said for that.

Yeah. We integrate. Look, we just announced this morning an integration with a company called Open Wave. Open Wave has a new app that's rolled out since July. That's just being really well received by the big music studios, right? And, you know, you're seeing this next generation of tech companies attack Spotify. And what's coming out is this new wave. of streaming slash social media combining.

So think Instagram and Spotify coming together in one tool with a bunch of new friendly ways to monetize and buy and sell things. And so you see that happening rapidly. We still are a de facto company to go to if you want to sell something. Right. I mean, all the options that Open Wave had, they chose us, right? And we will have an integration done with them in a matter of weeks versus what it may take other people months to do. Yeah, yeah. If I'm somebody, like, I've never seen a maze pop up on any of my stuff. It just hasn't popped up to me. If I'm somebody that wants to use it and I don't see it

on my stuff, how do I do it? So, okay, good question. So I have data that shows me that there's not a there's less than 1% of American consumers that have a credit card, haven't bought something from an amazed store. You just don't know all the time. It's an amazed store, right? Okay. So you, you know, So from a buyer perspective, from a fan perspective, you probably have bought something from one of our stores, right? You just don't, you don't know it. From a seller perspective, you find us because we are attractive to you if you are living and creating content all the time on some sort of medium, right? You probably find Shopify, you know, way more than us because Shopify is out there marketing to you. If you want to sell something, build a store with us, right?

We are marketing, we have all kinds of marketing running in platform. So if you're a YouTube user, you know, content creator, you're going to see us all the time, right? Because we're promoting in YouTube a lot. On YouTube, does that your main channel? Is that the biggest? YouTube is our favorite channel because the long form content still builds what I think is the most authentic communities. Right. So people who, if you're going to take the time of your day to watch 30 minutes worth of YouTube content,

Oh, sure. Yeah, you know, you're invested. You're invested, right? If you're going to take a minute to flip through something and watch an image of somebody dancing, maybe you're invested, maybe you're not, you know, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, I mean, I think we can gauge in social media. It depends on how hot that person is. Or how terribly awfully obese they are also would probably get you to stay as long as well and make that work.

So with Amazed, does Amaze that question? for me because like we use go high level for everything on the back end. That's our favorite piece. Does it work with stuff like that? I mean, does it take the data and then create it into a CRM that allows you build community? Does it integrate that way? So yes, yes and no. So some of what we're building right now for early release next year is a bit more of what I would call a next generation of a CRM. But we're kind of taken, look, like there's so many ways to go with the creator economy. Like you probably read recently that we bought the Food Channel, right?

We bought the Food Channel because one of our favorite verticals of creators on our platform are food creators. It's fun. They're active. They monetize very well. There's not enough, you know, there's not enough community being built around all these different food verticals. So we bought the Food Channel and what we'll do with the Food Channel is allow people

to create content in the Food Channel, engage their audiences, communicate with them, much more directly, right? We're not going to, we're not going to restrict your access to your fans on the food channel. So if you come in and you create content and you get 10, 20, 50, a million followers, you'll have access to all those fans. Is it still going to function the same way that it has, like normal? Because I know the Food Channel is a syndicated channel where they do cooking shows or whatnot. Are you guys going to start taking some of your online creators and pushing them into that more traditional medium or how is this going to work? Yeah, so we just started this week with the plan where we've got about 65,000 regular sort of, I'll call it consistent food

creators on a mace. They're creating content all the time. They're monetizing all the time. We're going to allow those 65,000 people to come in and start creating content for programming on the food channel. And then as, you know, let's say we pick five or 10 percent of those people, they create content, we start promoting it, we start syndicating it around the world. And then over time, we're going to create more and more creator channels on the food channel. So we haven't come to a final agreement, but one of the creators we used to launch our moments AI was Perez Hilton. So Perez Hilton came on. He was one of our first beta sites for our new AI engine.

He got on stage and showed the product off about a month ago, a month and a half ago. He said, I would love to have a cooking show. So, you know, do we build a cooking show for Perez Hilton? in his audience base, right? So we will, but the fundamental difference there is that we're going to allow those creators to have complete access to their fans, right? And a way that hasn't been done before. Yeah, but you can also do it that way, you're using the traditional channels as,

well, not traditional, but using the online channels like YouTube as an incubator. And you can see the metrics of which one of these, what's hitting and what's not. And it makes it pretty easy for you to handpick the right people to then move them over into that platform. Yeah, look, we wanted to go back and forth. Like, we don't expect YouTube creators will abandon their YouTube channel, right? I mean, it's still a great way for them to reach audiences, right? We think that we were off, the food channel will be a bit more specific to the community

that they're, and allow that community be more involved, right? So it's a very interesting thing for us. And we're going to do that. We're doing it in three verticals where we see really, really big opportunity for tighter networking and community building between the creators and their fans, right? So what's the what's the metric that makes that a win? What's when when you're looking at this in a year, two years from now? So the metric says this worked. Up until now, the metric's been how many of the fans become creators themselves. So that's been a metric where we watch very

closely. So so remember, and I say this all the time, you know, whenever I'm, whenever, if I'm in an investor meeting, if I'm in a big, big, you know, a customer meeting, whatever, our business, we're not an agency. We're not, we're not built to service 100 customers and just take care of 100 customers, white glove anything they do. We are a software company and we service thousands and millions of creators, right? So what's interesting for us is, let's say every day in the United States, three to four thousand people sign up to be a crater on our platform. 10, 20% of those people were fans of a creator, and they realized by watching what the creator did, they could do with themselves, right?

So that metric, that's been a very important metric to us from, for the last couple years. Now, going forward, I think the metric is going to be very interesting to watch is how, okay, so I've got to explain this a bit. So this, this is something that as if you're, if you're listening to me for the first time, if you're watching me for the first time, you need a little bit more background to understand. So, so, so, so. So unlike, like, so you, you think about the top three or four e-commerce sites you go to you to buy things, right?

You go to them to specifically buy something or it's a impulse buy for something you may want. You know, you want a new jacket. You start looking around for a new jacket. In our world, the fans of these creators come into their stores every day. They're because they are so tied to these communities of these creators, they're so passionate about it. they come into these stores every day. And their frustration point is that the creator is not launching new products fast enough, right? And so for us, it's...

What I was going to say, I think the best example for that was Alex Vermosie's new book when he launched that book. That was wild. And it's because he didn't put anything out for like two years, nothing. Yeah. And we have it all the time. I mean, it's cross every vertical, every spectrum you can think of. And so I think the metric will be how many new products are built and put into these creator stores that are collaborative with the creator and the fan.

And I think what you're going to see is that you're going to see a big movement from one creator creating content that 10,000 people view and follow to one creator finding 100 fans who want to come together and create content that. 100,000 people follow, right? And so I think, I think technology is evolving enough to where these little mini marketplaces are being built, right? Does that make sense to you? Well, okay, so I'm about to say it a different way that I think, I think I understand. It's almost like you can create a little mini, multi-level marketing deal. Or say you're a creator, and you have this product idea. You get 100 people that are raving fans of you, and you say, listen, if we all do this together, I'll cut you in on some of the profits of what we do. And let's, instead of having my saturation, we'll get a massive saturation.

Yes, no, maybe. Yes, but with one extra layer to it. I don't think you're going to have this mentality of I will cut you in. I think the mentality is going to be, why don't you join my business and we'll do this together? Because the most important thing. That's every multi-level marketing pitch in history. Join my business. That's the pitch, right?

But it's because the dependency on content is so strenuous, right? You become irrelevant if you don't get content. Look, here's, it's not my favorite one to use, but it's a funny one to use. Remember the hop to a girl, right? She blew up, right? She blew up and she did a deal with Jake Paul. For a moment, she was extremely everywhere, right? And then she wasn't, right?

Now, that example of someone is what I think the creator economy is viewed at as today of these one-off hits of something just going viral and then going away. The one hit wonders, right? Yeah. But what you don't see probably as much as I see under the hood is that there's this massive swell of content creators creating content that people want to see all the time. It's why YouTube is so amazing. later, I mean, I just saw Neil one times man of the year, right? It's because

there's so many of these little niche channels that people just want to watch over and over again that aren't fly by night. But because of that, they're spending so much more time thinking about the content. We need to help them with that content monetize, right?

They need to be able to understand what their fans are thinking and sell to them more products so that they can make more valuable content. because the more money comes in, the more money can be put out into things that you want. So supporting those people's a worse along. Well, I got to tell you, I'm going to give you a compliment, which is when you have a podcast like we do, we get so many pitches for guests to be on. And one of the more popular ones is always like e-commerce. I'll show people how to set up your Amazon store.

I'm like, oh, dude, we're still doing this. And so anytime I see anything that comes up that has to do with e-commerce, I'm immediately like, like it kind of doesn't even, anymore it doesn't even get to me like my people filter it but but you got you got through saying this is the future this this is something new that people haven't heard or seen and it's and it's really interesting and it is so i'll get i'll give you that that's a massive compliment so this this is different than anything than anybody else out there that i know is doing yeah john it's it's it's a very simple uh change right i mean e-commerce for so many years was i have a product i want to sell it and I want to sell it online with no inventory. I don't want to start, whatever.

Been there, done that 100 million times, right? Yeah. This is not, I'm starting with a product. I'm starting with content and I'm building a community, right? And what is that community worth? And that's why when you ask about Amazon, I think it's obvious Amazon has to be thinking about this as well as many other companies because those communities have the power to wipe them out, right? If they don't, they don't listen, right? So, yeah. I'm actually kind of shocked that Amazon's never tried to build. I mean, you got everything else, never tried to build some sort of a community type feature into Amazon. Like build a fan page around a certain, build fan pages around products that sell a certain amount. I mean, I think they have a lot of agencies that do that for them, right?

But I mean, do they do that in their product? I, you know, I think, I think there's, look, I mean, how long ago was Amazon built? 25 years ago, 30 years ago? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, he's done okay. He's done okay for himself.

He's done. I think he's doing okay. He's doing good. All right, well, people had to know one more thing. If you had to nail it down to one more thing that we haven't talked about yet about a maze, that you think people just should absolutely know what would it be. So, okay, so we went public this year, and I lived through the process of taking a company public. We're on the New York Stock Exchange.

And all I heard about this year from every investor group I ever met with was crypto, crypto, crypto, the next generation of payment, all that kind of stuff, right? And it was interesting to me because you could feel that there's this desire and this movement to change the process of money. And I can't say it any more eloquently than that. I look at next year. And I think that what you're what you're going to see in a very, very, very big way is this movement away from focusing on. on and this is why I still love Canva. I mean, I work for Canva.

I love them. I mean, what Cliff and Mel have done is just, is this amazing democratizing design. But I think what you're going to see next year is this next generation of, of just of how content meets commerce, right? It's coming in such a big way. And I just think that, and I think what you're going to see now is you're going to see a whole, and why I brought the crypto side is I think you're going to see a whole new wave

of financing come into the market to finance, to finance these creators that are showing success at all levels in a way that helps grow their business versus the agency model. And it's, that's a, moment in time, John, for you to watch and everyone to watch because today there's 15,000 plus agencies in North America that service on average about 100 creators. Think of that. about that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And they're taking 40% of that creator's revenue, something like that, you know, on average, right? So, so, so these agencies are just attacking these small businesses that are show, these creators that are showing promise. And they're taking all the lifeblood, all the, all the, all the capital out of the business, because they, you know, trying to say,

we're going to help you grow. I think the financial markets are, are going to attack this with everything they got next year and say, why would you do this? We'll fund you. We love you. We're going to fund you in a new way. And I think, and I think you, everyone needs to get prepared for that, right? Yeah. It's like, it's like watching Motown back in the 60s when you had like, oh, we're going to make a record. We're going to give you $2 and, you know, maybe a new suit. And they have these executives that just made all the money. Yeah, there's, that was kind of the wild west of that. You see that going away that you see that going away in the next year? I think in the next year, year, too, it's going to go any big way. I mean, my, my wife and I

just watched the, the, the, the, the, the, the, pretty, pretty, pretty ugly things. to watch, right? But underneath the hood, I mean, the manipulation of no one getting paid, right? I think the financial institutions are now at a point where they realize the scope of this business, the creator economy. And I think there's a breakthrough coming next year and funding of creators, right? I really do. And we're going to, that's why we went public. We went public so we could actually play in this space and help create a venture fund and help fund a lot of these up-and-coming creators in a better way, right? So what was that? process like of going public? So emotionally and mentally, what was the process like?

Well, okay. So it was it was emotionally one of, emotionally and mentally one of the toughest things I've done in my life. The, the reason it was emotional was that it sucks so much cash out of your business for a period of time that you can't do the things you love in your business unless you are just super well funded, right? So, so the reason I think you've seen. such a decline in IPOs is that so many fun and exciting business that should probably be public have been so cash starved for so many for the last couple years right so so it was challenging but now that we're there and we're we're doing all this we're we're massively cleaning up balance sheet and we're massively creating liquidity right um i think we're there hopefully hopefully i'll help lead the way

with a bunch of of younger CEOs that are trying to figure out what what comes next in this in this space right I think being public at the stage where we are in today gives a lot of people access to to buy shares in a creator economy company that's very exciting. If you were to go out today and call your broker and say, hey, I want to buy 10 companies that are disrupting the creator economy, who are you going to buy? Meta, YouTube. I mean, you're already buying them, right? Who are you going to buy, right? There aren't that many companies in our space public, right? So it was challenging.

It was hellish, but we're through it. And I wouldn't change it for the world. Okay. What's your ticker symbol? AMZE. AMZE. Closed to AMZE. So think of A's without.

Yeah, at second A, right? AMZE. Yeah, pretty close. All right. Well, dude, if they want to find it. It's right next to Amazon, buddy.

Yeah. Yeah. And it probably looks like a bargain right now, comparatively speaking to what they're talking about. It looks like a hell of a bargain right now. It's a problem. Disagrecy. All right.

Well, cool. If they want to find you, how do they find more? How do they find you? Well, the best way to find me is amaze.co. Just go to our corporate website. I can be reached there anyway. You want to find out more about the stock. Go to our IRA site on Amaze.com and love the connect, right? Love it. Well, Aaron, dude, thanks so much. I wish you nothing but the best. It's a really cool idea. I'm glad to see that it's doing so well. And yeah, I think anytime you can, you know, it's like power to the people, man.

You're putting the money right back in the people that as much money as you can, right back in the pockets of who actually does it, which I, I love the mission. It's great. Yeah. Thank you. Great, great to be on your show, John. I appreciate the time. Yeah. Well, listen, if you listen to that, you know, today and you don't know what to do with it, my advice is go make a video to start making content, man, and make really nichey content about something you're passionate about and for people that you think that would resonate with it, because you don't need a lot of them. You just need people passionate about the same stuff you are to be able to monetize this and create a business to change your future. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody?

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping thedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor. If you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review. Give us a share.

Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we'll see you at the next episode.