William Gassner: Stack Influence

Our interview of William Gassner for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere, in Episode Six of Season Nine.

We interview William Gassner. William is co-founder of Stack Influence.

In our conversation, we dive deep into the world of micro-influencer marketing, explore the future of platforms like TikTok, and William shares invaluable advice for aspiring creators looking to build authentic, passionate communities around their content.

This episode is packed with actionable insights!

A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by William Gasner. Welcome to the podcast.

William Gasner:
Thank you, Jon. Great to be on.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You are the co-founder of Stack Influence.

William Gasner:
I am.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Your website says connecting brands to everyday creators. I want to do a deep dive in that, but before we go to that, it is not like this was the first company you started or co-founded.

William Gasner:
It is not. It is not.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And before we started the interview I was talking to you about where are you from originally? Where are you from originally?

William Gasner:
I am from a tiny island off the coast of Rhode Island. It's actually the smallest town and Rhode Island's the smallest state, smallest town in Rhode Island at least. So a thousand year round residence becomes somewhat of a summer destination, jumping up to about 30,000 people in the summer. But yeah, I graduated high school, went from kindergarten through high school with the same 13 people.

Jon Pfeiffer:
See, I went through my high school graduating class at 25, and there were 13 of us.

William Gasner:
That's also small.

Jon Pfeiffer:
There were 13 of us that went from kindergarten through high school together, so I know

William Gasner:
That's amazing. Very similar.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. So do you still keep in touch with them?

William Gasner:
I do. I do. Amazingly, once you are in diapers with people for that long, they're all across the states and the globe now, but it's like anytime I see them it's like day one, so yeah, absolutely. Still.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then you went to Brown University?

William Gasner:
I did.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Which I confessed my ignorance when I was in high school. Did not know that was in the Ivy Leagues, the Ivy League, but it is after Brown. What did you do?

William Gasner:
So I actually went to school for biotechnology, weirdly enough,

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I got to interrupt you a second. You were in a right name, some kind of lab. Yep. Yeah, tell us about that and then because so different from what you're doing now.

William Gasner:
It absolutely is, but there's a lot of weird overlays from marketing and creators to science. So yeah, I worked in a poly genetics lab. I was very, as you can see, my plants behind me, pseudo botanist and very with a specific kind of focus on poly and genetics and plant biology. But ended up leaving that, and I love plants, I love growing things, I love experimenting basically. But I left that job to kind of become somewhat of a digital nomad before that. And throughout honestly high school, I started a few different e-commerce businesses, was making handmaking cutting boards, and then started a jewelry company as well. So simultaneously to my pursuits of plants and biology, I was very heavily invested in the kind of product development, being very creative, the e-commerce world, and kind of self-taught on across the board of marketing, social media. And that threw me into a world of actually building my own things and really becoming a master of web development. And so I actually,

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let me interrupt you just a second. Yeah, please just set the timeline. When was

William Gasner:
This? So I started my first physical product business at 13 with my brother who was 11 at the time. This was, I could do the best backwards 2005 I think. And then that I started really diving into the e-commerce world 2008. It took me three years of selling at farmer's markets and a lot of in-person sales. And then graduate 2013, moved to LA to actually start a web development and marketing agency.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. Can't let that go unasked. Why did you think you had to move to la?

William Gasner:
I didn't necessarily have to, but growing up on an island, I loved to surf and had some friends out there and a friend of mine who I ended up starting this company with had a minivan. We packed up our bags and just cruised around the coast and surfed and started a web development and design agency.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So the van life before the van life was a thing.

William Gasner:
Exactly, exactly. In California, it's been a thing for a while, but we were following suit of that same path, but that really dove me deeper into the online marketing world. Simultaneously started launching a few other e-commerce businesses myself that spearheaded me into influencer marketing, social media marketing, and that's really, I can fill in the blanks there if you'd like, but that is long and short of it. What led me to start the Stack influence platform.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. I'm curious, when did you first get involved in social media and what drew you to social media?

William Gasner:
Absolutely. So what really drew me was the products that I was initially promoting. So obviously social media is a fantastic way to get the word out about your brand. And so started developing my own profiles for e-commerce promotion, you could say. But really found that the human element instead of some people when they start a brand, their social media is just product promotion over product promotion. And I felt a lot of my social presence ended up being myself and being a creator myself. And I found that that attracted more people to the brand itself. So as an example, my jewelry brand that I developed was natural designs made from beep stones. And a lot of the designs had, for those of you who know what a stone stack is, or a balancing structure, some people call them Karens. That was a predominant design of the jewelry that I produced. But simultaneously, I love actually creating Stones Stack sculptures myself.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You're that guy that leaves them Azuma Beach.

William Gasner:
Exactly right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. I've

William Gasner:
Always, yeah, I've tried to inspire a lot of people to do them. There's some now amazing guys out there who do some mind blowing stones stacks, but that really dove me into the world. I had a few posts that got hundreds of thousands of views from me creating Stones Stack. And so I realized that this, not necessarily influencer but creator world of social media, the power it has, especially when you're starting out as a brand or just as creator, how do you get the word out about whatever company you're starting? And especially when you have not much of a marketing budget, you can't really spend on ads. And so social media is such a fantastic way to do that just because the social platforms allow you to get that reach. It's unprecedented in history, either back in the day, the only way is to really get the word out was getting some PR article in a newspaper or on early TV or as ads started developed, spending huge amounts of money on these ad platforms. But as social media has evolved, you could really start with nothing and bootstrap yourself to a very, very successful brand

Jon Pfeiffer:
As long as you're creative and put something out there people want to see,

William Gasner:
That's the key. Content is key.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So tell us about Stack Influence first.

William Gasner:
So Stack Influence is a platform to connect e-commerce brands to micro influencers and help automate the collaborations at scale. So for the creators listening and the potential influencers listening stack, influencer is a platform where you can easily get access to brand opportunities that you might not normally have the ability to reach out to or access, right? And have very streamlined negotiation processes, posting guidelines, confirmation so you don't have to spend time with a million types of back and forth and potentially create longer term relationships with those brands as affiliates. So you're getting commissions of sales, monetizing that content in the long run or ambassadors kind of almost sponsorships, getting consistent product free product opportunities, cash rewards for doing certain actions. And then on the brand side or the e-commerce side, brands have the ability to tap into a huge amount of creators and help them additionally save time managing those relationships because the platform kind of handles all that heavy lifting and also scale up those promotions, right? Because dealing with the micro influencer world, meaning influencers predominantly with less than a hundred thousand followers.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well that's what I was going to ask you is how you define micro influencers because everybody defines it differently.

William Gasner:
It's absolutely true. The standard definition, and I'll explain my personal definition, but the standard definition is you have mega influencers, a million plus macro, a hundred thousand to a million micro, 10,000 to a hundred thousand and nano less than 10,000, right? 90%. Some metrics say higher of social media falls into that micro nano pool. And what we're on a mission for stack influence to do is to democratize the greater economy or the influencer industry, is to give power, take power away from the celebrities, the Kardashians of the world and give it to the 90% because the playing field's changed now with social media and we can dive into why that's the case, but now basically everyone can be a creator and everyone can be an influencer and you can leverage your social platform. I mean we're influencing everyone every day naturally by posting content online. Might as well get the money from that or be able to monetize it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, say I'm a creator and I want to take part in this, what do I do?

William Gasner:
You simply go to stack influence.com and sign up. You have to get approved, but we have a very open-ended community. You actually only have to have a hundred followers to get approved on the stack influence platform. You do need to have certain engagement thresholds, you have to have post frequency. So the last post you did can't have been last year what you got to be frequently posting. We also want your posts to be brand friendly, right? Authentic profiles. We don't want, honestly, we deny people who do too many product promotions. We want authenticity. We don't want scandalous things in your post and we don't want you faking followers. But most social profiles fit this bill. And some people, I mean people come to our platform and they're like, how am I considered an influencer or how could I be a creator? I had a few hundred followers or a few thousand followers.

I never thought that I could monetize this or actually become something. And the real reality is that social media has changed over the last few years where now if you're posting on TikTok, if you're posting an Instagram reel, your post regardless of your follower base can go viral. As long as you're producing great content, it's going to get shown to people beyond your follower base. So it's really leveled this playing field for anyone to become kind of creator and grow very rapidly. But yeah, you apply and then you get access right away. We survey you. So we want to make sure that you're only seeing brand opportunities that are a good fit for you. So maybe you have kids, you want to see kids products, parent products, maybe you have dogs, you want to see those, maybe you do not and you're not interested in anything besides beauty products. So you get to pick kind of categories and then you get a curated collaboration catalog you could say with different brand opportunities and some are auto approval. You can just literally right away get the product, start promoting others. The brand will have to approve you before just to make sure that things are aligned before you get to pursue that collaboration. You could say.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Are there preferred platforms? I mean is YouTube preferred over TikTok? TikTok Preferred over YouTube, Instagram preferred over either of those?

William Gasner:
Our specialty actually is Instagram, but Instagram, TikTok and YouTube shorts are the three kind of pillars of most popular platforms for at least e-commerce influencer marketing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And this is the perfect time to put your crystal ball in front of you. What's going to happen with TikTok?

William Gasner:
I personally think that it is not going to get banned that it's so big and so many US companies actually rely on it that it's either there's going to be some negotiation, whether it's used as a tactic in this tariff kind of debacle to stick around or that one. There's so many companies that now have put in bids including Amazon and Oracle and these massive conglomerates that I think one of them at least is going to get a piece of it and it's going to satisfy the government concern with China basically having so much access to US citizen data. But I don't think it's going away.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I teach a class at Pepperdine to the undergrads and most of them could care less about their privacy.

William Gasner:
Very true.

Jon Pfeiffer:
They've already given that up. That's not even a concept they think about.

William Gasner:
We're

Jon Pfeiffer:
Not talking about online digital privacy. It's like, okay,

William Gasner:
Absolutely.

Jon Pfeiffer:
But I tend to agree with you, they're going to work out a deal. It's too big and it's too addicting from an advertiser's perspective.

William Gasner:
Absolutely.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You can get on there and it's like, oh man, what time is it now?

William Gasner:
No, a hundred percent.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, so I want to get back to your platform a second. Okay. Say you're a

William Gasner:
Brand. Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I have, okay, I'm an energy drink company. I've been drinking an energy drink during this interview. I mean energy drink company. How does your platform match me with suitable creators?

William Gasner:
Great question. So first, we're specialized in automation, but we still want brands to have control over their growth objectives. And those can vary depending on whether they're trying to run masks promotions for awareness, or maybe it's to generate content like what the industry calls UGC user-generated content. So the first step for a brand when they sign up is to set what their goals are, how many influencers are they seeking to collaborate with in a specific timeframe. The second goal is to say, these are my kind of targets. This is what I already know about my brand. Maybe I know that most of my consumer base is females and their average age range is 25 to 34. So they're going to set specific targeting guidelines or guardrails you could say. And the last thing is to set what their posting guidelines are. We at SAC influence believe that creators should always have control over the majority of their creativity. We are not a platform, and other platforms have different ideas on this, but some people are like, Hey creator, hey influencer, this is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to make this specific video bouncing on a pogo stick and drinking my energy drink at the same time. Right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Creative guidelines. Yeah, I get it. There's a lot of negotiation back and forth on that.

William Gasner:
That's exactly right. But we think that people, you'd be surprised by what someone can come up with to promote your product that as a brand you would never think of yourself. So we want to obviously give certain guardrails for the influencer to follow in terms of making sure that the brand is tagged in the post, that there's FTC compliant disclosure tag, that there's actual real authentic testimonials and that the product is visible in the post. But beyond that, the brand can suggest a bunch of things. Maybe they know what's worked and what hasn't in the past, but we allow the influencers to really take those guidelines and then use their own creativity to come up with something that's original. But once the brand sets all of those in stone, the platform sets out and literally the brand gets to sit back, relax, and the platform handles all the heavy lifting of getting people products, paying people out, making sure that things are on track with their desired timeframes, analyzing posts for completion, making sure people did what they agreed to do, and then giving them a kind of tracking dashboard to monitor that whole process as it progresses.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And how do you monetize this? I mean, does this cost the creator money or is this something that's financed by the brand?

William Gasner:
Totally free for the creator. The creator is only benefiting from our platform in terms of free product and then also additional monetary benefits depending on actions they do. So how, for example, content they create, promotions they create, et cetera, they can get different rewards for those types of things. On the brand side, we charge basically in essence a per influencer management fee. So it's a very simple model. It's a flat fee. When someone successfully creates a post, it's a pay as you go system. We're not a platform that's charging massive monthly fees without any guarantees that you're going to get something. If the platform doesn't achieve your goals, you only pay for what's actually done. So if you wanted a thousand people to promote your product and the platform only got you 234 people, you're paying a flat fee times those 2 34 people, you're only paying for what's actually accomplished.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm going to shift gears a second

William Gasner:
Because

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm always curious when I talk to somebody in the industry, how do you keep up with what's going on? What is your source of keeping up

William Gasner:
Things evolve so rapidly that it's sometimes hard, but I am consistently on, first off, I'm an avid social media user myself. Try not to get too addicted to it, that negative side to social media, but I stay on top of trends. We consistently at stack influence try to educate creators to become better. So we're always looking for new techniques, new strategies, providing those in an educational database for influencers, tap into newsletters. So I try to stay abreast on a lot of the ongoing trends and then how the platforms are changing. They're also rapidly changing and adding new features every other week. So just staying in touch across the social platforms and news articles. But that's the best way I can do it. And I still miss some stuff, but

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, you're right. And it's a copycat thing too.

William Gasner:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
One thing's working then everybody wants to copy it.

William Gasner:
Exactly. Instagram copied Snapchat with stories and TikTok with reels. So it's across the board. They're all like, they see something shiny and they're going to do it and it doesn't always work, right? No, we just open AI just announced with chatt BT that they might create their own social platform and compete with meta and X.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, so I want to go back to a prediction time. I have two questions on ai.

William Gasner:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So what do you predict will be the interplay of artificial intelligence and social media?

William Gasner:
There is a lot that is that we see personally that's going to be the evolution of social media with ai. So one is that we're going to start seeing a lot more content being created. There's already so much content on social platforms, but AI is enabling and it's just starting to get very, the quality of the graphic and videos that are actually being produced now or mind boggling of how quality it is. And so brand's ability and even just creator's ability to output content is going to 10 XA hundred x. So the first thing is I think we're going to see a lot more content on the social platforms and the platforms themselves are going to cater to that. There's going to be a lot of, again, guardrails there of what content can be shown, probably tags of what's artificially generated, what's authentic in the same way that you have to tag if you're

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, that's what I was going to suggest is that I'm looking at some of the posts on Instagram now and it artificial intelligence, exactly. I guess it doesn't look real because no one could cat doesn't do that to a dog. They don't that it was like,

William Gasner:
Okay, that's absolutely correct. And it's, it's already shifting people's trust over content, right? It's like what is real? And then it gets to a point where that line is very hard to differentiate. And so then maybe you distrust kind of everything unless something's really authentic. But on the creator side, I think that where it's going to evolve is this synergy you could say between authentic real human content and AI generated content, an amalgamation of worlds. I think the purely AI generated content, as you just said, it's going to be obvious and people are going to bypass it and be like, that's fake. And I don't really care about this. I'm not sharing this with my friends unless it's super creative. There's a creative aspect to it when you produce something that's totally wild and then that's cool, but I think there's going to be a lot of the authentic content, real people creating, but then utilizing AI to maybe enhance certain aspects of it to make it more engaging or edit the content in a cool way. So that that's my hope, at least for where the future holds. And we don't just, social media just doesn't become a field of only fake things.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, it's going to put a premium, my view is it's going to put a premium on real things.

William Gasner:
Absolutely, a hundred percent I think. And that's already happening. And similarly in the creator world, right? Is like if you promote any odd product, let's say as an influencer and you're doing it only for money and you don't really care about the brands and the products you're promoting, your followers understand this, right? And they're going to not trust you as much. They're not going to convert on those sales. Your engagement levels are going to drop and it's going to ruin you as a creator. And so that authenticity as a creator is what is going to thrive. And the social platforms algorithms now cater to that. It used to be the fact that you had 10,000 followers and you post on social media and everyone was on social that next few days after you posted, pretty much most of those people are going to see your content. It went into everyone's feeds. Now the social algorithms only show content to people who care. And so as a creator, if you're producing only AI generated content or things that no one really cares with, your engagement levels are going to drop. And anytime you post, you're going to reach a much smaller audience. So I think that's only going to become more adamant or impactful in the social algorithms as things evolve.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So in addition to the authenticity, what's the other tip or tips you would give to a creator to build their following,

William Gasner:
To build their following? So fantastic things. So besides obviously being much more authentic, start connecting connections are key as well, besides just content creation. So partnerships with brands can be a fantastic way to grow following. There's one thing I think that we're going to start seeing much, much more adamantly across social platforms is like social shopping integration and a merging of ads with creators. So already Meta has a feature called White Listing. TikTok calls it Spark Ads, where a brand can actually put budget behind a creator's content. And it's running an ad utilizing the creator's profile as opposed to the brand profile. If you create really great content, create a partnership with a brand, and they start running, putting ad budget behind your profile, your follower rate jacks up very, very rapidly. You get a great brand and they're spending thousands of dollars to promote your post. People are going to look at your profile and that's going to go up. So I believe we're going to start seeing a lot more, and I recommend brands do that. Alright, sorry, creators do that to create those brand relationships, but also relationships with each other. So we're starting to see cross-promotional things, right? Like two different creators creating content together and cross-promoting each other, right?

Jon Pfeiffer:
The collabs,

William Gasner:
The collabs. And that's a fantastic way to grow, right? And I've seen profiles go from zero to hundreds of thousands of followers because of that. And it came from just a personal relationship. And so reaching out to people who are in your industry and have some crossover to whatever niche you're focusing on, that's a fantastic strategy. And the last thing I would say is niche out. Focus on don't go. If you're trying to become a big creator, find where you're best at first and go kind of almost vertical by vertical and eventually go horizontal, right? Let's say as an example, as opposed to you want to become an influencer and promote product, you're promoting 20 different categories. I'd recommend, what are you actually truly passionate about? And I think influencer now has this kind of negative connotation. I personally believe the future of influencers is passion promoters as a creator, everyone is passionate or as a person, you're passionate about a variety of things. Focus on what you are most passionate about and create an audience around that because it's much easier to talk to a specific person who's interested in one thing, as opposed to a million people who are interested in 10 million things.

And that's how you can incrementally grow. And then you can incrementally expand. And you see these amazing, some of the largest, even on the company side tech companies, you look at Uber, Uber started as just rideshare, right? They could have gone to and offered a million different things. It's actually an idea I previously had that was involved in, we went way too wide and it was a massive learning lesson for us. But Uber started with just Uber. Now they have Uber Eats, now they have Uber delivery. And you go vertical by vertical. And I think that lesson can be learned as a creator. Starting out is like pick your lane, stick to your lane, and then incrementally evolve lanes over time. And you're going to just develop a much more devoted follower base. And people are going to share your content more often because they're also passionate about what you're passionate about and they'll feel that

Jon Pfeiffer:
Great advice. So I have one last question for you. Where can people find you on the internet?

William Gasner:
Go to stock influence.com. If you're a creator, at the top right, there's a signup button. It'll direct you to whether you're a creator or you're an e-commerce brand trying to connect with creators, right? So very easy funnel. You can find us across all Social Network at Stack Influence. We pretty much have that handle across the board. And always feel free to reach out to me on my personal LinkedIn or on X at William Ner.

Jon Pfeiffer:Thank you.