Investing Billions - E330: EuropeanKid: The $32B Future of Influencer Marketing

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

What if influencer marketing isn’t about chasing mega-followers, but activating the creators who already love your brand? In this episode, I sit down with Aris Yeager, Founder of Storytime, to explore how he built a platform connecting brands with nano and micro creators to run highly targeted campaigns at scale. A creator himself known online as European Kid, Aris leverages his own social experience to help businesses automate gifting, engage loyal audiences, and measure campaign effectiveness while focusing on authenticity over follower count.

I charge $30,000 to $50,000 for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money and being like, how do we distribute this to like hundreds and thousands of smaller craters that love our brands? That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market. Beats by Dre, skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made them successful. What was that model? Even though these are like various celebrity-oriented brands with like one face, is that they're actually activating so many different nanomacro-creators.

Somewhere around a decade ago, the business world started to take media seriously. You had Mr. Beast, you had George Clooney with his brands, he had The Rock. You're now taking this attention that 2 billion people and transferring it into a business.

Tell me about what you're building. Obviously, those are great case studies of success stories, but I've seen there's so many stories of like failed celebrity brands. But it's yeah, like when you have distribution, it's everything in business. And for me, the most important thing was what I learned was how to really do influencer marketing. And for me, I noticed that like I'm exceptionally good at it. So I wanted to also build in that space because like from that experience, I noticed that like also my background is I've always been very entrepreneurial. And for me, like, being able to innovate in this area was, I've always wanted to create startups.

So for me, I was like compelled to do a startup next in that space. And that's kind of what pushed me to this next chapter. Just an elevator pitch. What is story time? It's a marketplace that allows creators to instantly connect with different businesses. I want to say local businesses, but we work with, you know, even huge chains now. But it's supposed to be a very easy way to automate the gifting going on. So especially with like the microgiftings, like a cup of coffee, a workout class, you know, a nail salon studio,

they can instantly put offers and like reach hyperlocal creators to come in and redeem offers in exchange for posting content. You're not focused on a large influencer. You're focused on these micro influencers. Tell me about these micro influencers. Who are they and why are they such a lucrative part of the market? My philosophy with story time is that the future of implants and marketing is all nanomicro. brands want to work with people that love their brands, right? If you can activate at scale hundreds and thousands of small people, it's a lot more effective

as one big creator. And right now what you're looking at these big brands like Casamigos, Kardashians, you know, they spend a lot of money on like one specific influencer. I don't think that's going to be the future of influencer marketing. Tell me about specific influencer and a specific business on your platform and how does story time help them. Imagine Joe and the Juice, right? They want to gift out a bunch of products. The most effective person that Joe and the Juice wants to target are hyper-local creators that are going to be able to go in and redeem an offer like, you know, in exchange we're posting a very simple story. So

we're going to be able to activate thousands of creators that have a very relevant reach to Joe and the Juice. But imagine not even Joe in the Juice, like Devolution, which is a coffee shop only in New York City. We're very specific, like we're very focused on the data behind activating like specific locations from the influencers that are going to help target the business.

You have a fashion influencer. She might be 25 years old, has 10 to 50,000 followers, and Joan Jejuice wants to reach her audience, and they give her $25 gift to basically make a simple post. So she's getting a free gift for just a story,

a brand that she probably wants to share anyways, and Joan the Juice is getting access to her network and being able to distribute to her followers. It's almost like, like Joe and the Juice can instantly kind of use our platform to just reach thousands of creators locally to push certain campaigns that are like a lot more effective as running meta ads or any other type of like pushing, right? Because it's, it's supposed to be organically done. This is a network effect business of sorts, kind of like Facebook, Uber, where you have a

supply site and the demand. side. How are you able to get past the chicken egg problem that plagues every single network effect business? Having my experience as a creator just gives me so much more legitimacy to be going into this space. And I think like, because I saw it firsthand as an issue that I had. And for me, that was one of the most important parts of like when I approached, when I approached the product with my co-founder, you know, very much like considering, okay, what is the issue that I'm facing? Because I know that this issue is being faced by all types of creators. And then,

then really focusing on how do I leverage my network and the ability to connect. I think I'm very good at connecting with other amazing founders. And my biggest objective was getting feedback from all the different founders of that big chains, like for instance, the founder of Sweet Green, the founder of Oakberry, the founder of Kaba, and understanding is the market, like, what's, what's the issue that they're having with activating creators? And how can I help? I've known you since you first started a company. And every month you're coming to me with a newer version with a better improved version, that's downstream of this customer feedback, sitting down talking to your customers, just incessantly improving the product.

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That context turns raw signal into conviction. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Check it out for yourself at alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. So interesting because when I look at companies, I think about what is their unfair advantage? And network effect businesses are so hard to build. You are able to bridge that zero to one because they look up to you. You have millions of followers.

They might have 10,000 followers. You're basically what they want to be when they grow up. and because of that you're able to outreach to them and kind of build this flywheel. Everything that's come from social media, which to me to this day is honestly still kind of quite mind-boggling has like allowed me so much in business. And that's why I always implore people like start building a social following as soon as you can. Like if you're comfortable taking doing content, you should be doing content because it will, it will help you regardless in what you're doing.

Were you conscious of doing the first kind of videos? How did you overcome that fear? I've always loved acting. So for me, it's like come naturally to do like, you know, mimic like other people, make do funny accents. Like this was always like my personality growing up. So I never had an issue like being in front of camera. Honestly, I viewed as fun. Like I enjoy mocking my friends.

I think we all do it and I enjoy making videos about it. So for me, like, it came natural. Today the business model is kind of intuitive. You charge the businesses to give them influencers to give them access. Have you thought about this? 10 years from now, what could story time be in the future? What story time is, it's like a new type of currency, right? The idea is that every day we can influence our friends.

You know, you could tell your friend about a coffee shop that you went to. You can tell them about a movie that you went to that you loved. And it will be more honest than ever. For me, it's about being able to connect very, just people that love brands to be able to be wanting to get rewarded about it. So Storytime is a currency for, the idea is it's not just like influencers. I don't like the idea of people thinking it's influencers with $100,000. We're very much redefining by focusing on like, how real is this person?

A lot of the best creators that are on Storytime, they're not influencers full time. They work here in finance jobs. And the truth is, those are the most effective people. The girl has 3,000 followers. But if she goes out for lunch and she says, I go to Sweet Green every day, Sweet Green should be like, hey, we love that you go to Sweet Green. and you should be able to get rewarded for that. So the goal is to create it as a currency

that can be implemented in so many different businesses, right? And the way that like from, again, from what workout you're doing in the morning, I see you at othership. You're a loyal follower, like you're a loyal customer of othership. Yes, Sam. You should be rewarded for wanting to talk about othership on your socials, right?

Because it comes natural. And you would want a free session in exchange. So that's the goal of story time. So you're really plugging into this. authentic desire and authentic connection to the brand. I think that's something that's really missing in this market is you have, from one side, you have these advertisements highly curated, highly produced Super Bowl ads. On the other side, you have just influencers selling something that they have no connection with.

And here you found this niche where it's brands and companies and stores that influencers would naturally want to go to. Now they're just being compensated for it. The reality is, like, once you reach a certain number of followers, like you're it is harder to know that you're not a sellout because it's inevitable you're going to get crazy prices to post about things people are getting tired of celebrities kind of pushing products it feels less organic and authentic and i think it's just a matter of time before like there's a big shift in the market of you know again instead of like charging i charge 30 to 50 000 for a post which i think is

obscene but taking that money that and being like how do we distribute this to like hundreds and thousands of smaller craters that love our brands. That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market. I interviewed our mutual friends, Scott Vandenberg from Hot Start, and he has this fun that invests only in celebrity brands. And he did a deep dive into the space, and he figured out that most celebrity brands actually fail. And the ones that succeed, there's one thing in common.

They're authentic to the brand. So you've literally have had some celebrities that don't drink or have gone sober selling vodka brands. or tequila brands and those invariably fail. The problem is that most people only remember the successes. It's availability heuristics. So you only remember the things that are big. You don't remember the 99% that failed.

So I think there's this now trend to create, I guess, fit between the celebrity and the brand, which is why I love Storytime so much. You are not only a consumer of the brand, but it's core to who you are and what you do on your day-to-day base. Absolutely. last time we chatted, you were telling me about beats by Dre, skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made them successful.

What was that model? What they're honestly doing did a great job of, even though these are like very celebrity-oriented brands with like one face, is that they're actually activating so many different macro, nanomicraters. Like Rhodes was, I think they spent so much money on gifting product to creators. So it's ironic, but they did it at a very incredible level already. So I think which proves it's more than just having one prominent face of the brands. Like Beats with Dr. Dre, they sent out their beats to, I think, every single athletes.

Like every top tier athlete was wearing beats. That was all intentional. So beats by Dre, skims by Kim Kardashian. And that was the first test case of this nano influencer. or you're taking into next level and productizing it. What is story time disrupting? Who would have traditionally done this? Or is this a completely new activity?

Right now, it's being done in the most manual, inefficient way, like from agencies to either like the owner of a restaurant or trying to hire social media people to help them with their brand. Because right now, like, everyone, you go out, everyone's like flocking to understand how do we do it? influencer marketing. You have companies like Blackstone that created a TikTok. This is like unseen. Every single business is like, we need to consider influencer marketing. It's the truth. Because if you're not, you're not keeping up with the trends. So you have all these people

trying to, you know, hire positions, work with agencies. And we're just here to help the connectivity by being able to create a campaign, leveraging some of the, some AI to be able to create a campaign that's going to be best suiting for you or all you have to do is say, this is what we want to gift out. are the people that care, and we're going to help you do it in the most efficient way possible. Like, that's it. You mentioned Blackstone. Jonathan Gray is now running around doing running videos. Everyone's trying to get social and doing it intoxor mark.

I think a lot of people have cognitive dissonance, and they love to do more influencer marketing. They love to do more social, but they're also afraid of losing control. With a Super Bowl, you have this highly produced ad that they work on for a year. How should brands think about scaling in a way that's safe to their brand? it's a fine balance. And I think for instance, like, I mean, I loved Ramps activation in the Super Bowl. Like, they, it was hilarious. And it's bold, right?

But I think that, like, I think being bold is, it's obviously, we see it like in more like tech and crypto. You'll see more come to be bold than traditional like finance oriented. And I completely understand why. I'm pro-controversial content because controversial you know obviously with like sprinkling controversial always does well and that's how you can actually go viral

on social media you need to have you need to be daring and when you're doing content if you're going to just do basic content I think it's kind of redundant a lot of people are doing it so I always push businesses be daring people think about when they're on social media they like and they share they think that that's it's sort of like enjoying it

you have to really have very strong affinity. People do not give up their likes and shares for free. People really only share excellent content, content that takes risks, content that really took a lot of time and a lot of effort. People think that getting this likeer and this share is this easy task, but there's a very high hurdle for that. Exactly. Exactly.

Some of the companies that have done it the best are obviously like Duolingo has an incredible TikTok strategy where they were like, have you ever seen Duolingo's video? Yeah. It's hilarious. Like, people love it. And they are not afraid to make fun of themselves. And I think that's what's so great. Same with Ryanair.

Ryanair is like a low fare airlines company from Ireland that like you never imagine could build a social media presence, but they did. Mention tech companies, crypto companies are more daring. Sometimes I think about this as founder led versus non-founder-led. That's true. The founders are the ones that are willing to take risks. the founders are the ones that are willing to push things to their max. When you're working with brands and story time, how much is founder-led brands? How much an advantage of is that?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Like when a company's through more like corporate structure, like it's inevitable that it's harder to be daring because you have just all these different layers of like approvals they need to go by. Right before this interview, we were talking about the evolution of story time. you start out in the SMB sector where it's either easier to penetrate. Now you're going into larger brands. Being able to create campaigns with AI in the most efficient ways possible for being able to activate loyal customers. And we've been doing like an exceptional job with like some of these big chains

like Joe and the Juice and Oakberry. And obviously our model is very scalable into different markets. So now we've been going into fitness. We've been going into retail. Every kind of brick and mortar store. can kind of leverage our platform to be able to help with their gifting. And yeah, we're just obviously really cutting out a lot of unnecessary inefficiency because if you look at a huge company, they have all these marketing people that are

trying to manage manually all the gifting and connecting with creators and connecting with, and we're doing it all, we're doing it completely autonomously. And we're doing over, you know, 600 different people, 600 different collaborations a day minimum in New York City alone of people being able to get connected seamlessly to different brands to do that kind of scale required so much manual power and like and I think that's the power of kind of what we're building it. You're really the tip of the spear of AI in media, specifically in video. Tell me specifically how you use AI to produce high quality content with brands behind it. We've used AI in a lot of different areas. We've used AI in a lot of different areas.

it's based off what the business is looking for. If they're, for instance, like if a business comes on our platform says, we want to push very specific wellness oriented creators. And they can basically kind of, we can just customize it based off what their specific needs are. Every customer is different. But the point is that this kind of just allows it to be more seamless. Um, yeah. Malcolm Gladwell now I think 20 years ago, I wrote this book,

The Tipping Point, which talks about how ideas spread. They start with these mega influence. then these nano-influencers and then society. When you work with a brand that's trying to get a beachhead within a new market, how does that work? And what's the lifeline of a brand becoming influential in new market? The analogy of influencer marketing is like crypto. You have a lot of very legitimate people in crypto,

and you have a lot of very illegitimate people, like scammy. Crypto is a bad rep. Influencer marketing has a bad rep because a lot of influencers are charging more than they should be charging to businesses. And there isn't like a good amount of transparency going on with who is a good creator or not. So with me and Philip, my co-founder, where, you know, coming from the background of influence or marketing, understanding how important it is to be vetting creators, understanding the breakdown of their audiences, which are so relevant whether they should be qualifying for campaigns or not, as opposed to, oh my God, that creator has a million followers,

they must be able to have a huge impact on that business. Absolutely not. There's no vetting process. it's futile. So that's what we're all about. It's about analyzing every single data point of a creator. A brand, let's say it's a 10-store chain in New York City. What kind of budget are we talking about for somebody that wants to target this part of the market? Let's think about before story time. Imagine they want to activate people.

That's like, so imagine like the thousands of different like either, you know, emails, messages that they have to send to creators to be like, hey, like, we're here in the city, like, come talk about us. We want to work with you. Like, it would be so many hours of unnecessary. They can come to us and we can create a campaign in less than five minutes that's going to be basically weighing every single little detail that's relevant to them on like how effective, like specific. Like we have so many different data points to like really kind of align what is the most

optimal campaign for this brand. and then just put it on autopilot. Or it's actively engaging a community of people that love their products, posting it about it in the most efficient way as possible, where they're just giving out their product as opposed to paying an agency thousands of dollars. I would say at around the price of $500,000 per month, right?

Depending on how much... And then you get the data and then you could decide to scale. Yeah. Once it's proven out, it's our money. We are 10 times cheaper than any other... influencer marketing solution that's out there right now. Storytime is your first company. We founded it.

You've scaled it now to solid scale. What's been the thing that you most underestimated about being an entrepreneur? The importance of just having a team that's like aligned on, you know, just being able to outsource like specific tasks and being able to really leverage. Like, for instance, like, my time is best spent doing, like, content, doing specific meetings to engage, like, specific founders of big chains as opposed to, like, you know, trying to wrap my head around, like, technical and kind of being able to just, uh, delegates all the, like, forming a team that is able to, like, work on all the different, um, is that hard to remove yourself from parts of the business and focus on the high leverage?

Honestly, no. There was a time where I hate to say it, but I was editing a video for story time. I would spend so many hours editing it. I'm like, this is just not effective. And so everything that you do, you have to be like, why is this the best use of my time? It's a paradox because on one hand, when you find somebody that could do the tasks better than you, it's at one time very freeing because, wow, now I don't have to spend all my time on this. It's also very humbling.

Yeah. What do I do? Exactly. If I'm not the one that does this, how do I do that? And then you have to reassess, where is the high, what could I, ERIS, aka European kid? How do I leverage my time in order to grow the business versus how do I edit this video or how do I do this very specific test? Exactly. If you could go back three years ago when you were just starting European kid, before people knew who you were,

what is one piece of advice you'd give a younger ERIS that would have either helped accelerate story time in your social media career or helped you avoid cost of mistakes. Honestly, just always be daring. Like, I think, like, the only reason that I started European kid was purely because of, like, a random, you know, moment where I'm like, because of a daringness. I was like, why not? Why not just try things? So with that, like, being, like, when, when I see there's momentum picking up, I've been, being, like, so, like, pushing, pushing nonstop and trying things. I think that's, like, the most important thing. Like, How long did it take before you had your first viral hit? I remember starting around COVID,

where I was playing around with even having a TikTok account. And then after, yeah, and then I would say around a year in, I did the kind of the Louie video. And that obviously, like, that started the character. A lot of people ask about motivation when somebody's made it. It's actually pretty easy probably now to make videos, you know, millions of people watch it and take motivation. but the hardest thing is zero to one before anyone's watching.

Was that a hard part for you? Did you have a strategy to make it easier? No strategy. Very, just kind of, you know, just posting, trying to make it feel more like something that's fun and like not making it feel like a chore where it's like I need to post, I need to post. And I feel like a lot of the times now people are obsessively trying to post

and because I think that you have to be creative. I didn't know a, a, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, rich French kid would be the one that takes off, right? I just was experimenting with different angles. That's why experimentation is everything. Don't assume that you know it's going to go viral because you never know until you just try everything. And sometimes even when it's working, you don't quite know. You don't really know why it works. You have some theories and some factors, but you don't know exactly why it works. Exactly. Well, I love what you're doing. I'm proud to be an advisor to the company. It's only the second company I've advised in six years. The first one was

bit wise, which was, it worked out quite well. What could I do for you? And what would you like from our network? Just being able to get a concert your advice is always useful to navigate through all the different kind of, from raising capital to, you know, building a team. Obviously, you have a lot of I have a great network, but you have a great network. So it's our networks are very different. I think, I think it's. I have very few influencers and you have very few institutional investors. No, exactly. And I think that's where like combining that like that's the ultimate success. It's actually it's a it's all network play. Like I believe it obviously you need to work hard. But the second thing is like really taking like leveraging the network around you to get things done because that's how you're going to be about finding the right players on your team to fill the different holes where you might not have your strength. If you found this conversation valuable, please click follow how I invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors. Thank you.