🚨 Help me find my fiancé his better half. 💕 And by “better half,” I mean the commercially-minded founder, operator, salesperson, connector, investor or product studio partner who sees something technically impressive and immediately thinks, “I know who needs this, how we sell it and who I need to call.” Shane is a technical founder, self-taught data scientist and AI engineer working across machine learning, multimodal AI, model architecture, data infrastructure, APIs, automation and production-ready applications, with 10+ years in marketing and video editing. Since taking a career gap last October to build full-time, I can bring him an idea and within a 12-hour workday he can turn it into a functioning application, while also being capable of going much deeper and building the underlying technology himself. And I’m not just the supportive fiancé saying “I believe in him.” I’ve been the sole income provider during this career gap, intentionally funding our lives so Shane has the runway to spend his days building because I’m THAT bullish on him, and after 12+ years building businesses and generating revenue for brands, I consider this an investment. The problem is he now has nearly finished and ready-to-launch AI products COLLECTING DUST because once Shane proves something can be built, his brain wants to solve the next problem. 😂 He doesn’t need another Shane, he needs the complementary business/GTM brain who can SELL, DISTRIBUTE + SCALE what he builds. Maybe that’s a nontechnical founder, serial entrepreneur, GTM/sales operator, early-stage investor, venture builder or product studio, but the title matters less than finding someone entrepreneurial, exceptional at people, sales, partnerships and business development, while also being collaborative, down to earth and high-integrity. And because we’re a bonded pair 😂 Shane also comes with a Creative Director + Strategist whose work has contributed to $500M+ in client revenue since 2017. If you ARE this person, DM me. If someone immediately came to mind while reading this, PLEASE tag them, send them this post or make the intro. And if you’re a founder actively looking for a technical co-founder at the pre-seed / sweat-equity stage, or a funded company looking for someone like Shane on a paid build or technical partnership basis, comment below or reach out too. 💕⛏️ #AI #TechnicalFounder #StartupFounder #DataScience

MY HEART @missterriholley your story, your praises, your unconditional love and appreciation... all of it is what makes you, YOU. Thank you for this! You made my morning. 💕

And one day, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll end up working with the love of your life not once, not twice, but yet another time (truthfully, I’ve lost count). 😂 Nearly 8 years ago, Shane Murphy and I met as direct response video editors at Mutesix in Culver City, California. Fast forward to today, and we’re joining ContentJet as Head of Performance Creative and Head of Digital Technology… yes, you heard that correctly! We are leading our own parts of the business, TOGETHER. 🥹 And to think it all started with me asking the internet to help me find my fiancé’s “better half” in business. 💀 Within minutes, the video went viral and the internet ironically reminded me that we’ve always complemented each other in business too. Apparently the algorithm gods decided they owed us one, because the Reel was served to the ContentJet team, they watched it, and made the first move. (Cassandra Kranjec, you rock! 😉) So how will this marketing + machine learning duo work together in partnership with ContentJet? 👀✨🤝 The challenge with scaling paid media isn’t just spending more, it’s building a creative engine that can keep producing enough of the right ideas, tests and iterations to support that spend without sacrificing quality. My job is bringing a decade of tested performance creative strategy to ContentJet, shaped across thousands of accounts in nearly every vertical you can imagine, hundreds of millions in ad spend and billions in revenue, then turning that experience into the systems, testing plans and strategy our team uses to scale clients without sacrificing quality for volume. Meanwhile, Shane is personally building the technology underneath all of it, creating the systems, infrastructure and machine learning capabilities that allow our creative engine to keep up as the volume scales. 🤖 Eight years ago, we didn’t know it, but we were just getting started. Now we get to build what comes next, side by side, once again. @shinyobjectz_ #ContentJet

Seeing trends on your own feed is not the same as seeing patterns across multiple accounts, verticals, creators, formats and millions of dollars in monthly media spend. One tells you what’s popular on your FYP, the other helps tell you what’s actually impacting performance at scale and across the board.

A few weeks ago, Terr shared a post about how UGC Pro's video courses, community, and free resources helped her build an entirely new chapter of her career. And I'm not gonna lie, this one hit me HARD. 😭 When I started UGC Pro in 2022, I knew I didn't want to create just another guide teaching people the generic info that had already been available on the Internet because UGC was never JUST about being good on camera or aesthetics...

We built UGC Pro to help people create content. But seeing someone lose their job at 58 and build an entirely new career as a UGC creator AND creative strategist by 61? I don't think I fully understood how much this could change someone's life until I first learned about @missterriholley's story. 🥹

Organic social and paid ads are NOT the same. Is the gray area thinner than EVER BEFORE? Absolutely. But knowing how to create content people watch vs. creative that drives measurable business outcomes? Two VERY different beasts, guys. Pleaseee don't get it twisted! 🤣

NYC FRIENDS! 🗽 Who's around October 19–22?! Heading to New York with @ContentJet for a pretty exciting week! 🎤 10/20: Partnering with TikTok for their Level Up: Apps & Gaming Ads Workshop! I'll be joining a creator panel and helping lead conversations around UGC, performance creative, and creating ads that actually drive results. 🥂 10/22: App Leaders rooftop mixer with ContentJet, TikTok & FunnelFox! And outside of the events, we're looking to connect with founders, marketers, brand leaders, agency partners, and really anyone doing cool things in the creative, AI, or marketing space. If you're in NYC and want to grab coffee, talk shop, or explore collaborating, LET'S CONNECT! 🤝 🎟️ TikTok workshop: luma.com/ttappny?utm_source=… 🌃 Rooftop mixer: luma.com/app-leaders-party-n… Who should we meet while we're there?! 👀 #appweek #nycevent #tiktokevent #nycappweek

I've been saying this for almost a decade now: Creators should understand strategy and strategists should understand content. The best performance creative happens when those two worlds stop operating like they're entirely separate disciplines.

Founders, growth marketers, creatives, AI builders: I'll be in NYC Oct 19–22 with @ContentJet! 🗽 🎤10/20: Partnering with TikTok for an Apps & Gaming Ads workshop 🥂10/22: App Leaders rooftop mixer Let's connect while we're in town! DM me 👀 Events linked below 👇 🎟️ TikTok workshop: luma.com/ttappny?utm_source=… 🌃 Rooftop mixer: luma.com/app-leaders-party-n…

At 58, she lost her job... at 61, she's working as a UGC creator AND creative strategist. That person? One of our OG students, @missterriholley! 💕 Three years can change the entire trajectory of your life. Please stop convincing yourself you're too late to start! 🥹

“Mentor” is not a seniority level, it’s a completely different skill set.

NYC, we're coming for you! 🗽✈️ I'll be in New York October 19–22 with the @ContentjetUGC team, and we've got a pretty exciting week lined up! October 20: We're partnering with TikTok for their Level Up: Apps & Gaming Ads Workshop at TikTok NYC, where I'll be joining a creator panel and helping lead creative discussions around UGC, influencer marketing, performance creative, and what it actually takes to produce meaningful creative at scale. If you're an app or gaming founder, growth lead, or performance marketer looking to get started or scale on TikTok Ads, we'd love to have you join us! 🎟️ Request your spot: lnkd.in/gjywx5wF October 22: We're also hosting an App Leaders rooftop mixer alongside TikTok and @Funnelfoxhq bringing together founders, growth leaders, and people building in the app ecosystem. 🥂 Event details: lnkd.in/g_T2BQgb And outside of the events, we're hoping to make the most of our time in NYC! I'll be joined by ContentJets Chief Commercial Officer, alongside our new Global Head of Business Development. We'd love to connect with founders, brand leaders, and growth marketers looking to scale their paid creative without sacrificing quality or strategy. Whether you're struggling to keep up with creative volume, need more meaningful variation in your testing, or are exploring ways to scale creator-led performance creative, we'd love to talk shop and see where ContentJet could help! We'll be around Monday through Thursday (next week), so if you're in NYC and want to grab coffee (or drinks 🍻), explore a potential partnership, or just connect, drop a comment or shoot me a DM on here or LinkedIn! 👀 #appweek #nycevent #tiktokevent

Being a “UGC Coach” doesn’t mean I’ll hire you over a creator who isn’t a mentor. Teaching UGC and being excellent at UGC are two different skill sets.

Being a "UGC Coach" doesn't mean I'll hire you over a creator who isn't a mentor and here's why... 🫣 As someone with 5+ years in leadership roles hiring both full-time talent and external partners, and now working as Head of Performance Creative, I’ve hired and managed creators, editors, strategists, producers and plenty of other creative operators, and I think we need to stop treating “mentor” like it’s automatically the next rung on the ladder. Being a good mentor doesn’t automatically mean you’re a better creator, strategist, editor or service provider, in the same way that being incredible at any of those things doesn’t automatically make you a great mentor, because doing the work, teaching the work and advising on the work are all different skill sets. And when I’m hiring, I’m not going to choose someone just because they teach UGC or creative strategy, because that title alone doesn’t tell me they’re actually stronger at the work than the creator or strategist next to them. What matters to me is whether they can do the job well, whether their experience is relevant, whether they understand what’s happening in the market right now, (ideally across multiple verticals) and whether they can actually execute against the needs of the brand, team or team. Especially in performance creative, “being on social media” doesn’t count as staying close to the work. Seeing trends on your own feed is very different from seeing patterns across multiple accounts, teams, creators, formats and millions of dollars in monthly media spend, where you can actually start separating “this is trending” from “this is consistently impacting performance.” The moment you take yourself too far out of the game, you start losing access to the nuance of what’s actually happening in real time, which briefs are falling apart in execution, what creators are pushing back on, where editors are getting stuck, what strategists are actually testing, what paid teams are learning from the data, and how quickly the gap can widen between what sounds good in theory and what is actually working in practice at scale. That doesn’t mean someone needs to personally execute every deliverable forever, because obviously leadership changes your proximity to the work, but I do think they need enough exposure to current execution to know when the rules have changed (which is pretty regular at this point). And this is also why I don’t view mentorship as some kind of hierarchy where the mentor inherently sits “above” the creator or creative operator. A mentor can be phenomenal at teaching, a creator can be phenomenal at creating, a strategist can be phenomenal at strategy, and a producer can be phenomenal at getting the entire machine to function, but none of those roles automatically outrank the others in expertise because they’re different competencies. If I’m hiring someone to create, I care about how good they are at creating. If I’m hiring someone to strategize, I care about how good they are at strategy. If they also happen to teach or mentor, great, but that does not automatically make them the stronger hire. “Mentor” is not a seniority level, it’s a different skill set!

UGC community: I have a microphone at two TikTok events in NYC talking about UGC + Creative Strategy, and I want YOU to have the opportunity to air your grievances. 😂 Keep in mind, my audience will be made up of a lot of the exact people who need to hear this feedback. So tell me... 🌟 If you’re a creator: • What do you wish brands understood about UGC? • What do you wish creative strategists would STOP asking creators to do? • What’s something brands ask for that immediately makes you think, “this is going to hurt performance”? 🌟 If you’re a strategist or media buyer: • What do you wish creators understood about performance creative? • What creator habit makes your job unnecessarily harder? • What “best practice” are you tired of seeing because you think it actually makes the creative worse? 🌟 If you work anywhere in the creator → strategy → paid media pipeline: • Where does the workflow break down the most? • What part of the process is way more complicated or painful than it needs to be? • What’s one thing the person before or after you in the process consistently misunderstands about your job? 🌟 And if you work in a regulated category: • Where does compliance usually kill otherwise-good creative? • What do you wish compliance/legal teams better understood about how performance creative actually works? Drop your grievances, hot takes, recurring frustrations, things nobody says out loud... all of it. I genuinely want to bring the creator + performance creative conversation into the room instead of just talking about creators while none of them are there. And if you’re in NYC the week of the 19th–23rd, say hi 👋 I’ll be there with our leadership team, so if you’re a brand looking for support with performance creative, UGC or creative strategy, hit me up and we’ll pencil you in if schedules line up.