Why LTK founder Amber Venz Box walked away from a revenue stream “in the millions”

Most e-commerce companies dream of building a subscription model that generates meaningful recurring revenue. Fewer are willing to walk away from it once they do.

That’s the bet Amber Venz Box is making.

As co-founder of LikeToKnow.it or LTK, she built an online affiliate and commerce marketing company to monetize her work as a personal shopper and early online influencer on her own website and on social networks like Instagram. Now, as LTK focuses on its own social shopping platform featuring individual creators, her plan is to pivot away from charging brands and instead openly share the data her platform has collected about creators and product sales with them.

The decision reflects her belief that the creator economy is entering a new phase—one where creators are increasingly building businesses around audiences they can reach directly.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Amber Venz Box gets candid about stepping away from a model that generated predictable revenue, where she thinks the creator economy is heading next, and what it’s like building a startup outside of Silicon Valley or New York.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You recently made LTK’s Brand Platform free for brands, walking away from a meaningful SaaS revenue stream. What drove that decision, and when did you realize the SaaS model wasn’t the right fit anymore?

It was a very deliberate founder decision. This wasn’t something the team brought to us, certainly not the finance team...As of this summer, we’re 15 years into our business, and we’ve created a whole new category. Many times I realized that you have to put yourself out of business to grow into the next best version of yourself.

We started to see there was a lot of friction in the old model at a moment when the industry was primed for scale, and so a couple things shifted. One is that we recognize that not having full transparency into all the data of the creators you’re working with was a real pain point for brands.

So instead of gating that data behind a paywall, we decided to offer it for free to brands of all sizes…Instead of protecting this short-term line of business, we felt the opportunity was to bring every brand into creator marketing—because if they’re now giving more campaigns, there’s more creator earnings. There’s more growth across the entire industry. That becomes a much bigger opportunity just for us as an entire category.

How difficult was that internally?

When we decided we needed to build out our own consumer platform for our creators to be able to have an owned space to meet their audience every day, we had people who disagreed. We lost C-suite team members because they didn’t understand the vision.

It was a huge shift. There was friction—people were either on board or off board, and we parted ways with some. The same happened in this instance. Baxter [Box, LTK’s co-founder and Amber’s husband] and I came back from a vacation and said we’ve thought this through: We’re going to turn off a revenue stream that was in the millions.

This causes friction across every category, because your sales team is compensated on selling something that makes money…There was a transformation amongst our leadership team to better align with who was on board with this kind of future vision.

What systems need to be in place for creators to turn their community into a business?

One of the first things is they think of themselves as a professional. The second is they have a true plan of what their business is going to look like, meaning: How often are you going to publish? What are my goals? How am I going to measure that?

One of the most important and unsaid things in the creator industry is making sure you’re providing the service the consumer wants in the way they want…People like to be in aggregated content channels, whether it’s an Instagram, it’s an LTK, it’s a TikTok or LinkedIn, and so meeting that customer expectation is something that LTK has taken on on their behalf.

You have to know what the value of your business is. I tell creators: Your opportunity set is your daily reachable audience—however many people know you, and you can reach them daily, reliably. Don’t get distracted by shares, sends, saves, follows, and all those things that ultimately don’t matter.

LTK is based in Dallas, not Silicon Valley or New York City. How did that distance from startup hubs shape the way that the company was built?

When we started the business in 2011 in Dallas, if you were not in energy or real estate, there wasn’t a discussion to be had about investment.

What that meant was that we had to bootstrap our business and build something that was sustainable from day one, so we had to be conservative and radically so, and really make bets that we knew would pay off.

The downside of that is slower growth, because you’re having to earn the dollar before you spend it. The upside of that is that we had probably a decade of people having no idea the industry that we were building or the influence that we had, and so we enjoyed the benefit of that, of being able to test and learn, and then by the time we popped our head up, we had built an entire industry. In the years following that, there was a total boom in investment into the creator space…Having a decade to ourselves was something that became very valuable.

Our family still owns the majority of the business. We run the board, so we’re in a position of control that not many businesses have.

What do you think most people still misunderstand about where the creator economy is heading?

I think creators are starting to realize this, but the broader industry I don’t think has yet: the deep importance of an owned audience. Over the last year, every platform has now moved from a core following feed to an interest-led, algorithmic feed. You overlay that with AI, and ultimately that turns creators into content machines for platforms.

You have to realize that as a creator, your job is to get that customer out of that platform so you can build a relationship with them. The smartest creators are realizing that, but the broader industry is just awakening to the revenue that they gain from creators who are social-only creators is what I describe as at-risk revenue.

As a brand, if you’re making investments in someone who only has a social media audience, I don’t think of it as a long-term investment…One algorithm change can take their business, and therefore take the investments that you’ve been making in them as a partner. This concept of owned audiences and algorithmic audiences is, for elite creators, becoming a very important topic.