How Creators Make Millions With Spring: CEO Chris Lamontagne Interview

You know, the comment section is really where the gold happens. You know, it's really where the interaction between fan and creator starts to interplay. The creators who engage in comment sections are the most successful when it comes to commerce because they're listening. A lot of the most successful products that have sold on Spring were actually started life as comments from a fan. Yeah, I'm Chris LaMontagna. I am the CEO of Spring. CEO at Spring. Uh, I took over Spring about 5 years ago, uh, moved to San Francisco, originally from the UK, from a place called Liverpool, which explains the accent. Uh, and yeah, took over originally what was Teespring and turned it into Spring, which today is the, the leading creator commerce platform. Uh, we help creators create, sell, and fulfill products. Um, and that's the business that we're in, really focused on creator economy. Thinking about maybe not just creators today, but probably the next decade for creators. And that's how we think as a platform and as a business.

Awesome. Are you able to share any stats around like how many creators are on the platform or like how much revenue is generated through the platform or anything like that?

Yeah, yes. So we've got 9 million creators on the platform. It's a huge, huge number. Obviously not all creators are selling products yet. So we see a lot of active creators. We see about 300,000 to 400,000 active creators every month on the platform. We have about 80,000 to 120,000 net new creators sign up to the platform every month right now. So there's a huge, huge influx of creators looking to be able to sell in commerce. As a platform, we've generated over $1 billion in lifetime revenues. So, huge platform and, you know, really paying the large majority of that back to the creator over the past decade. Um, and, uh, the, the platform's kind of been through many different guises. So in the very beginning, Teespring— and a lot of people know Teespring— was this kind of t-shirt merchandise business. Um, when I got introduced to the platform, I always really thought actually it really served the creator economy because of this idea that It's create, sell, fulfill within one platform. And you know, something I recognized pretty early on is a creator's full-time job isn't commerce, it's to be a creator. Therefore, having a fully contained ecosystem where we basically handle a lot of the difficult stuff that creators don't want to take on was really the main sell for when we see creators. And when we see creators who sign up to Spring, It's because they've got an amazing idea and they want to get it to market, and they don't really want to have to think about supply chain or returns or payment gateways or credit cards being declined or customer service. And that's really where Spring's kind of end-to-end verticalized platform was the real kind of opportunity where this came together.

That's awesome. And just outta curiosity, like, so it seems like, like it was, it's interesting, like with the Creator Economy for like so long it was like, the brand, like the product that was like the extension of the creator was just straight up merch. What prompted that transition to like, we're gonna expand into like so many other physical goods?

Yeah, and I think it's like, I think what prompted it was the creator recognizing that it wasn't just about a logo on a product anymore, and it was really the meaning behind the product itself. And over time, what we started to see was, narratives started to be weaved by individual creators where, you know, I think back to some really good examples where creators were using their merch or their products almost as part of their content. So it would be like we saw this huge influx of creators where the punchline to the joke would be a piece of merch, which is like you start to recognize that it's like this convergence between content and commerce. Like kind of interplaying as one or interchanging as one. And I think that was like a really interesting moment. And then I think there's another kind of trend at play there, whereas, you know, we've kind of came from a background of brands. I think there's a really interesting question to ask. What is a brand today? And if you think about content creators as we know them and in kind of our world, is a content creator just not just a digitally native brand? It's a brand that was born online. And in fact, it can change. And if you think about, you know, some of the incredible creators, I'd argue that like Ryan's Toy Review started as a creator, but, you know, it's now wholeheartedly a brand. You know, you've mentioned Black Rifle Coffee. I know there's like on our platform, we've got Mariah Elizabeth. We've seen Aphmau, who's a huge gamer who sells a ton of product kind of in the merch ecosystem. So I think there's this bigger trend at play, which is like this more existential question about what is a brand. And actually, are content creators essentially the new way of attracting the way consumers consume and think about product is actually just funneled through content creators in that way?

That's actually really interesting. And I'm like totally going off my questions now 'cause like this is kind of fascinating.

Let's just riff, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. What's the creator's brand, like I completely agree. It's like, what do you think it is like that makes like a creator a great brand? Like, what are there like in your mind specific sort of like attributes that some creators sort of like embody that, that, that lends themselves to that?

And I think there's a real self of like being self-aware of like what the creator is and what the, what the community is. I think it's really about understanding that community. Is definitely a part of that. But I also think there's a change that's happened as well. If we think about how we used to ingest brands, used to sit in front of a TV, probably all of us about the same time, you'd be get fed advertisements in between programmatic shows and you would like, you'd be fed brands or you would see a billboard or you'd read the newspaper, read a magazine, you'd be fed brands. Now I think we've got a completely different relationship in the way we're fed information. And, you know, through social platforms specifically, you know, the attention economy has kind of really started, well, has evolved over the last two decades really. But I think what's interesting about creators is that if we agree that the future of attention is social, which, you know, I think it's probably pretty fair to say, And there's a really interesting question that like, well, why are people on social platforms? Is it to listen to brands? I don't think so. I don't think that's what anyone— I certainly didn't sign up to Instagram to be targeted by ads. No one did. You're on Instagram or you're on a social platform to see something that necessarily maybe you don't see on a daily basis. And what we start to see is that we see that the difference between creator and fan versus buyer and customer is so different. Creator and fan is, there's an organic relationship that exists between creator and fan. As a fan of a creator, I choose to follow that creator. Whereas a brand, in most circumstances, it was all push, push, push, push, all these adverts. Whereas creator is pull. So we see this kind of like change in dynamic. So, you know, if I was to break it down into different buckets, I would say a creator being super self-aware and understanding their community and then recognizing that that community is in search of something. Is it in search of great content, news, stories to be made to laugh? There's a whole variety of different things. It's then the creator's job to unpick what that is and how it then translates to commerce or to content in those different ways. And that's where we see it work so well.

Yeah. It's interesting too, like one thing, like when I talk to a lot of like the brands that we work with and I talk about like the dynamics of like the creator and their fans, like it's, I almost like feel like too, even like fan almost feels like one notch below sort of like the reality. 'Cause it's like, I think oftentimes like the relationship that the, creators have with their fans, it's like more of like this, like it's not quite a friendship, but it's like a scalable friendship. It's like this like in-between area where I feel like a lot of the creators that do like a really great job, like there's like a level of like intimacy that they're able to—

it's that like, and we've talked about this before, but it's the idea of like the comments section, you know, the comments section is really where the gold happens. You know, it's really where the interaction between fan and creator starts comes into play. And I would argue, and you know, we've definitely seen it in our data, you know, with all the different creators that we have, the creators who engage in comment sections are the most successful when it comes to commerce because they're listening. A lot of the most successful products that have sold on Spring were actually started life as comments from a fan. You know, to give you an example, we had a, we've got an amazing YouTube creator called Moriah Elizabeth on Spring. She's a DIY craft creator. She drops a video every Friday. She does a lot of arts and crafts and painting, really, really hyper-engaged audience. And she, on one of her videos, she took an old Rubik's Cube and I painted the Rubik's Cube and people had watched this video. Anyway, one of her fans in the comments said Mariah should totally have her own Rubik's Cube. Now we read the comments, it got a lot of likes, a lot of traction. Mariah commented back, that's a great idea. We actually went out to Rubik's Cube and posed it as an initiative and we're like, hey, we, huge creator, she's really engaged her audience. What would it look like if we made a hair on Rubik's Cube? Could we do it? We figured it out. I think she ended up selling about 16,000 Rubik's Cubes. And it started life as a comment. So, you know, it's a great callout for creators is like, are you scouring the comments section? Because the clue is in the comments.

I love that. That is like such a good like TikTok line. Like, I'm totally going to use that. The clue is in the comments. Like, that's so good.

And it's like, look, I get it, you know? And I think there's also a piece to that, though, Brendan, as well, where it's like we've been in this attention economy where it was all about eyeballs, right? It was like, do shit to get lots of eyeballs like watching your stuff. I think we might be moving to like a new world where it's not so much about eyeballs, it's about conversations and it's about like real meaningful conversations of understanding maybe slightly smaller communities. Do people need 90 million followers? I'm not sure. Do you need, you know, I'm like such a big subscriber with 1,000 true fans and 100 true fans, these concepts that In fact, if you really truly like fan graph your community and you understand that within your community you've got super fans and we see it in our data where we've got like creators whose fans, like there's a subset of fans who buy every single product that ever gets released. That's incredible. Such loyalty that, you know, big traditional brands would kill for that type of customer. But it's because the depth of the relationship is completely different. You know, I'm not sure I'm a fan of a brand. Probably a buyer of a brand. And maybe some people have different relationships there, but that's where I think the nuance comes of kind of the world that we live in.

Yeah, I completely agree. I also completely subscribe to that notion that sort of like there's like almost this trend towards like these small intimate communities and the core fans. Like, I feel like the rise of Discord is like a testament to that in a lot of ways, to cultivate that really core community. Um, you know, you reference comments and stuff, but, but are there tactics or platforms or advice you would give to a creator to, to, to really kind of like build, you know, their 1,000 true fans essentially?

Yeah, I think like actually the, the probably the best advice that we would give. So obviously data and understanding and learning, you know, we try and productize a lot of that to be able to help creators. But I think part of that lies in kind of the business model as well. Some of the horror stories we hear about commerce where a creator has gone out and has screen printed like, you know, 100,000 hoodies that are sitting in a warehouse somewhere or in someone's garage or you know, like they're real things and really happen. Or I have got this great idea for like making my own sauce that I'm gonna sell to all my creators that's cost like, I think what you've gotta do is you've got to be able to build more of an agile process to understand what is it that I wanna put in front of my fans and also how can I like test, iterate, and learn and like kind of operate it almost the way, you know, if you look at some of the like, the methodology that like a look at MrBeast has on YouTube where it's like testing thumbnails, testing different titles, testing content. I think you've gotta think about commerce in a very similar way. And at Spring specifically, you know, our kind of origins are from like that print-on-demand world where we've been there where there's not boxes of stuff lying around somewhere. Instead, you could theoretically, and you know, we see some creators do this really well, create a new piece of commerce a new product based on every single video you ever launch. Yeah, there's no cost to that. There's no, uh, real, you know, life kind of, uh, difficulty, which is a completely different way. You know, if you look at— I'm trying to think of a good example here, but we've seen it on our platform before— it's like, if you understand that your content is doing really well, why not supplement and be able to add products to that. You know, we did, we did a couple of partnerships in the past with Netflix where, you know, Netflix were trying to release content in their products in line with the way their products were trending. But, you know, they weren't able to move quickly enough. So like, if like in the Tiger King example, when everyone was going wild over Tiger King, everyone wants to create products right then in that, in that moment because it was only live for, you know, it was the thing for a week. But most traditional kind of consumer brand licensing takes months to try and, you know, get off the line. So thinking content, and it's like, for me, it's all underpinned in this concept of content and commerce being converged and interchanging and interplaying with each other. If you think like that, I think that's the test and iterate success approach.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense too. It's like sort of like goes hand in hand with like in a lot of ways just Like, I mean, yeah, content and commerce. Back in the old days, content was 3 channels. So you had like, you know, 3 big candy bars and that was it. And now it's sort of like there's infinite amount of content. There's like infinite snacks. It's sort of like every niche is being filled by products.

Well, look this week, do you see the MrBeast try out Willy Wonka?

Yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but I, I keep meaning to. I saw that. That's amazing.

Brendan, it's, it's, it's the best example to what we're talking about. It's a 17-minute advertisement. Of Feastables, which is this incredible piece of content with, you know, the merch shelf directly underneath the video, the ability to buy the Feastables. It's insane. It is true testament to what an incredible creator Jimmy and that team are because they understand the content commerce relationship between the two. Truly textbook, textbook in the way it's being done.

I would be curious, like, For you personally, what was like, was there a specific like aha moment where you, you were like, oh, like I should get into like the creator economy and this is like, this, this makes sense for me to shift into here career-wise? And if so, what was that?

Yeah, probably less so just, uh, actually yeah, maybe there's two, this, there's two parts to that. So the first one, when I got introduced to Teespring, um, I'd done some work in China around commerce of China. And I was obsessed with social com— this idea of social commerce and why do we buy through a destination and why don't we buy through social apps. So that was like initially the first kind of signal. When I joined the business, you could see quite easily that the cohort of creators outperformed everybody else. So it was kind of the business case was really easy. The real like aha milestone moments, you know, we did the integration with YouTube in 2018, which was the YouTube Merch Shelf, which was an amazing partnership. It really was. But then what was really interesting, the YouTube Merch Shelf got announced at VidCon 2018. 2019, we were back at VidCon and we were on stage. So we were back on stage with YouTube talking about merch. At the same time, Instagram, we'd just done the Instagram integration. We'd also, we were in conversations with TikTok. Just done a Twitch integration. We were in conversation with Netflix and a couple of others, and that was my— I actually hired a car and drove back from VidCon, and I was like, oh wow, yeah, yeah, it's happening. And like, you know, our bet here and understanding creator, the creator commerce ecosystem, that was my moment of recognition of like, oh, we can really support creators making money here. So yeah, that was the kind of the cool aha moment.

That's awesome. The China stuff, I personally am fascinated by. I love reading about that. Could you sort of maybe touch on that a little bit? Like what's happening in China? Because I sort of subscribe to the idea that they definitely seem to be a leading indicator for what we can expect here in the States. Do you subscribe to that? And regardless, can you maybe talk a little bit about that, the ecosystem and sort of like the role of social commerce there?

In the US or China or both?

In China, yeah.

Yeah, well, I think what was super interesting there is some of the dynamics at play. First of all, it's like a very mobile-first ecosystem, mobile-first internet. So we kind of skipped a lot of like desktop-driven e-commerce. And you know, you've got huge marketplaces, um, that, you know, the Alibabas of this world, um, that like did an incredible job. But you know, you would probably compare them to almost like Web 2.0 eBay-like ecosystems. But, but what was really interesting is like the new kind of realm. So I look at like platforms like PDD or Douyin, which is like the Chinese TikTok, you know, like, um, those platforms were like super social from the very beginning. And then they also understood that the power of creators was really the power to sell. So there's so many, like, you know, you hear it all the time here of like QVC for creators, QVC for creators. That's just inbuilt in the internet in China. Very, very different here. We're kind of almost trying to like, even the fact that we explain it like QVC for creators, I think is the problem. 'cause it's like, no, no, no, it's better than QVC. It's like, it's a completely different thing, you know? So I think we're kind of maybe stuck in trying to like, we're trying to reignite the past rather than actually think about what the future is. And I think that's the kind of one of the dynamics at play. I would say though, if you kind of transpose that to the US, if you look at every social platform right now, whether it be Instagram, YouTube, Snap, TikTok, Google, Twitter to a certain degree, every single platform has commerce on their roadmap. And you know, that's no accident, right? It's like as advertising begins to morph and becomes more difficult and targeting and the pixel, you know, cookies, all these different components begin to kind of get more difficult. Commerce and first-party data commerce is is a big push and like trying to understand organic engagement. So I think in the way you can track what's happened in China, it was just a very different ecosystem. But there's some really interesting models to look at those businesses and say, actually, they've kind of proved out the power of the creator. If you look at Singles Day, if you look at the performance of how those platforms work in terms of group buying, and there's some really interesting trends that happen in the East that haven't transposed to the West. Yet. Well, my best would say if you're going to take a stab at the next 30 years of the internet, you know, a Web3 organic commerce world is probably where we end up.

The PDD is like mind-bending to me. Like, I remember reading about that, I'm like, this is crazy. It's like, it's like TikTok for shopping. I mean, like, not exactly, but like the algorithmic recommendation piece, it's like you're not even searching, it's just like knows what you want before you know.

You know, I think it's fair to say TikTok's algorithm is such a powerful recommendation engine, right? And then if you think about one of the unsolved things in the West, at least, is discovery, you know, of commerce, of discovery of product. Even Amazon hasn't figured out discovery, right? You know, it's still a search bar. It hasn't figured out how to tell you what you want yet. So, you know, if you kind of morph to this hypothetical world where it's like, Oh, I understand what product you want. And like, not just products that you might need, but actual products that you really love. In the same way you watch a TikTok video and you kind of feel good about it. You kind of feel like laugh about it. And like, I'm interested in stuff that I never knew I was gonna be interested in. So I'm on the product discovery side. And you know, if you look up other companies, like if you look at like Pinterest is again an incredible example of, you know, we all go to Pinterest, pick all this amazing stuff, and then there's no way to connect all this amazing stuff to the things that I want in my life. Like, there's just too many connected or dotted lines to each other right now. Yeah, that's— say that one, you know, probably just poses that we're gonna get there at some point.

Yeah, 100%. Um, is it cool if I ask you two really quick? Yeah, of course. Okay, cool. Yeah, I don't want to go over. Uh, and you can skip either of these if, if not. Everybody loves hearing about money. How much money are the top creators making? Or like, can you speak to like, yeah, you know, the top selling product or something like that?

Yeah. So, you know, we've definitely got creators. We've got one creator who in 2018 signed up first year, came onto the platform with $180,000, which is incredible first year. That was in 2018. This year she is on track to make $12 million. On the platform. So it's one of our top creators and you can just understand that that kind of, that kind of growth is insane. What I would call out though is there's a very different dynamic to making money that subscribers and follower count doesn't necessarily equate to success and size. We had a creator, we published this, but we had a creator, a guy called Matt Mager who was an Instagram creator, 200,000 followers approximately on Instagram. And he created a red hoodie, and like, he won't mind me saying, it wasn't the most beautiful hoodie. It was just a piece of content that really fitted his community. It was almost like the punchline of his content, red hoodie that he created, it said Dialed In on the hoodie. But he really understood his community. He used Instagram to promote, so he used Instagram stories, he used Instagram reels. He, when people started buying the hoodie, people started to repost of them wearing the hoodie. It was just a masterclass on how to sell product. In 60 days, he made $600,000 of selling this individual product in GMB. I think just with that, it demonstrates that he's got a couple of hundred thousand followers. But if you understand your community and you understand how to put things in front of them that they absolutely could not get enough of, that's the type of success that you can see. So this isn't, you know, and I think that sometimes there's this common misconception that merch or commerce is for big creators. Well, there's a good example of why it's, why it's not.

That's, that's an amazing example. And then what do you think is like the most common pitfall or worst, or like biggest mistake creators often make or like bad piece of advice creators often hear that they should avoid?

I think like with commerce, there's sometimes like a set and forget type, type approach where it's like, hey, I'll make my store, I'm going to get loads of sales. Oh, I get no sales. I'm never going to revisit it again. I think we see a lot of that and we see a lot of like, oh no, all you had to do here was kind of activate and it's not even necessarily invest, it's just you've got to keep that freshness. If you think about it, it's like imagine going to a mall and you go to Macy's and it's the exact same stuff for the last year. You're never going back, right? You know, you can apply that old kind of school merchandising, thinking about the content, thinking about the product. So, you know, what we try and encourage is, is thinking about the two at the same time, content and commerce together. I think that's the best advice. People who put a logo on a t-shirt, it's probably not gonna work. And therefore we've gotta get beyond that and think about the bigger opportunity.