The Rise of Influencer Marketing: Glewee’s Vision for the Future
Influencer Marketing Platform

Christian Brown's entrepreneurial journey began in his small Massachusetts hometown, where he escaped the boredom of winter by diving into the vast world of online communities and social media.
“I was a product of the internet,” Brown said on the Software Spotlight podcast. “I spent a lot of time during high school building brands, whether e-commerce oriented, website oriented, and scaling that up.”
This early immersion in digital spaces sparked Brown's passion for entrepreneurship, branding, and social media marketing. He started his first successful band in high school, running it profitably through college while studying advertising and marketing at DePaul University in Chicago.
It was during those college years that Brown began leveraging influencer marketing to promote his brand and others. He saw the power of this emerging channel but also its flaws and inefficiencies.
“Kids were creating social pages with hundreds of thousands of followers,” Brown explained. “But when a brand was reaching out to them, they didn't know how to do the contract. They didn't know how to monetize that following.”
Listen And Share This Software Spotlight Podcast
Watch And Share This Software Spotlight Podcast
In this exclusive interview, Glewee co-founder Christian Brown traces his entrepreneurial journey and provides an insider's look at the booming influencer marketing industry. He explains how Glewee's innovative marketplace allows brands to discover and book influencers at scale, streamlining influencer campaigns. Brown shares his vision for influencer marketing's future as an authentic complement to traditional advertising.
Glewee Streamlines Influencer Marketing
In 2018, Brown teamed up with his best friend Dylan Duke to start manually facilitating influencer marketing deals. Their hands-on experience highlighted the need for a scalable solution connecting brands and influencers seamlessly.
“We were young, 18, 19, 20. Our whole friend group was young at the time,” Brown said. “We were just like, you know, there's a scalable solution to this.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced college classes online, the two co-founders had the time to turn their vision into reality – creating Glewee, a comprehensive influencer marketing platform.
“Ever since then, we've been building our double-sided marketplace that pertains to the same loops, holes, issues, and pain points that we saw in those manual days five, six years ago,” Brown said. “Now we've built a scalable solution for tens of thousands of people on both sides of our market.”
How Influencer Marketing Complements Traditional Advertising
On the podcast, Brown provided an insightful overview of how influencer marketing fits into the advertising landscape's evolution from the traditional “MadMen” era of print, TV, and radio ads.
The dot-com boom introduced digital ads on websites and blogs in the late 1990s. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram then enabled micro-targeting and democratized ad buying for businesses of all sizes.
“That disrupted the industry because now your everyday people could place ads on Facebook,” Brown said. “So now it almost like democratized how to place ads.”
Influencer marketing represents the next wave, allowing brands to work directly with content creators who can promote products authentically to their highly engaged followers.
“Influencer marketing is not here to disrupt how a traditional advertising flow would work,” Brown explained. “It's here to add another arm or another layer to marketing campaigns that are much more testimonial-based, evergreen, and real because influencer marketing is meant to not feel like an ad, but it is just another ad.”
Glewee's Marketplace Connects Brands and Influencers at Scale
Unlike traditional agencies and influencer marketing middlemen, Glewee has created a streamlined, self-service marketplace to make this channel accessible to businesses of all sizes.
“Over on the right side where we sit, Glewee has built a self-service platform where any brand of any size can come in, search through over 10,000 influencers spanning over 3.5 billion followers, and book them directly on a campaign,” Brown said.
The platform features influencers ranging from 10,000 followers to over 40 million followers, including celebrities like the D'Amelio sisters, Addison Rae, Logan and Jake Paul, and Emmy-winning actress and musician KenBunny.
However, Brown emphasized that an influencer's ability to forge authentic connections with their audience is more important than sheer follower counts.
He cited an example of Stanley going viral after the CEO jumped into a TikTok conversation about their indestructible mugs, generating 150 million organic views.
“At the end of the day, it's a matter of being authentic, creating a genuine and real connection,” Brown said. “That's probably one of the misunderstood elements of…social influencing.”
Understanding Influencer Marketing FAQ
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing involves brands partnering with influential content creators to promote products/services to the creator's highly engaged social media following. It allows for authentic, testimonial-based marketing.
How is it different than traditional advertising?
While traditional ads disrupt the user experience, influencer marketing integrates promotional content natively through creators' organic posts. It complements rather than replaces traditional advertising channels.
What are the benefits of influencer marketing?
Key benefits include better audience targeting, higher engagement rates, authentic endorsements from trusted influencers, and performance-based pricing models tied to measurable results.
How do brands find and work with influencers?
Platforms like Glewee provide self-service marketplaces where brands can search influencer profiles, review analytics, and book them for campaigns directly without agencies or middlemen.
Is influencer marketing just for big brands?
No, influencer marketing is now accessible and affordable for businesses of all sizes thanks to platforms that streamline and scale the process of finding and booking influencers.