Fibes

Loyalty-driven UGC marketplace where creators earn products instead of cash. Proof of concept exploring incentive design and creator economics.

COVID had everyone at home consuming content, with home media consumption surging by 80%. TikTok was exploding. Creators were everywhere. And as Gen Z watching this surge in real time, George, Arrow, and I (same team from Coopsight) started asking: what’s actually broken about how brands and creators work together?

The answer was pretty clear. Brands dump money into big influencer deals that feel inauthentic. Meanwhile, micro-influencers with small but genuinely engaged audiences create content that converts better. But there’s no efficient system connecting them. The economics are broken on both sides.

Our take was different from a typical influencer marketplace. Instead of paying cash for posts, brands would offer product rewards to creators who genuinely use their stuff. You get items from stores you already love. You’re not shilling for a paycheck, you’re showing off something you actually care about. This ranged from spicy hot ramen challenges to bespoke clothing. Brands set the creative brief, creators brought the energy.

How do you align user behavior with business goals without it feeling extractive? That question has followed me from Fibes all the way to Mosslayer.

I designed the full platform end to end. Brand-side dashboard for creating and managing challenges. Creator-side experience for discovering and submitting content. A gamified reward system that kept both sides engaged. We built an MVP and proof of concept showing the flow working.

It fizzled because we weren’t networked in the influencer space. Distribution was the hard problem and we were still students finishing degrees. Not everything needs to be a startup. Sometimes a project teaches you the thing you needed to learn and then you move on.

What stuck: incentive design. The mechanics of how loyalty programs bond users to products. How intent maps to action maps to value. That’s literally what I’m building at Mosslayer now, just with AI agents instead of human creators.