One thing I’ve learned in business is that we’re very good at giving old ideas new names. The creator economy is a good example.
We talk about creators as though they fundamentally changed how companies are built. Grow an audience first. Earn trust before you sell. Let the market shape what comes next. Those ideas feel remarkably modern. They also sound a lot like the way founders have always built companies.
I saw that firsthand as a founder. In the earliest stages of building a company, you don’t get the luxury of being far away from the market. You’re selling, listening, adjusting, explaining the idea, hearing what people don’t understand and going back to fix it. Sometimes all before lunch.
Long before “creator economy” entered the business vocabulary, founders were already behaving a lot like the creators we study today. They built audiences around ideas before there was much of a company behind them. Products weren’t always finished, categories weren’t always familiar, and customers, employees and investors were being asked to believe before there was much evidence that they should.
In the earliest days of a business, the product is only part of what a founder is building. They’re also building belief.
Founders and creators have more in common than the business world tends to acknowledge. Both begin with an idea that has to earn trust before it earns revenue. Both learn by staying close to the people they’re trying to reach. Both adapt long before everyone else agrees with their direction.
Being that close to the market changes what a founder notices. The same question comes up five times and suddenly the positioning needs work. Certain parts of the story stick while others don’t. Hesitation is easier to understand when you’re there to hear it firsthand.
Ironically, that closeness is also one of the easiest things to lose once a company becomes successful.
What Companies Lose as They Grow
When a company is small, founders stay remarkably close to the market. They hear customer objections firsthand, notice changing priorities before they become trends and learn quickly because the feedback doesn’t have to travel very far. The people making decisions are often the same people having conversations with customers.
As organizations grow, that naturally changes. Teams become more specialized. Functions become more defined. New processes are introduced because they need to be. It’s what allows organizations to scale.
But every new layer creates a little more distance. I’ve watched this happen in organizations of every size, and I’ve been on both sides of it. As a founder, you can feel almost everything happening in the business. As an executive inside a growing organization, you have to be much more intentional about preserving that access because suddenly there are people, systems and processes between you and the market.
Customer conversations become summaries. Summaries become presentations. Presentations become meetings about the presentations. Before long, decisions are being made several steps removed from the people they’re meant to serve.
That’s one of my personal red flags in marketing. If the people making the decision haven’t heard enough from the actual people we’re trying to reach, I want to know why.
None of this happens because organizations stop caring about customers. Usually, everyone involved is trying to make the business better. But distance has a way of becoming normal when it arrives one process at a time.
By the time a company recognizes it, “the way we work” can look suspiciously like “the way we’ve always done it.”
The Distance Between Customer Insight and Action
People often assume large organizations move slowly because they’re large. I don’t think that’s quite right. I’ve seen small companies become impressively complicated all on their own, and I’ve seen large organizations make remarkably fast decisions.
More often, the deciding factor is how much friction exists between customer insight and action.
Friction shows up in dozens of small ways. Customer observations become reports before they become decisions. Research gets packaged into presentations that circulate for weeks before anyone changes direction. Teams spend more time coordinating work across departments than testing whether an idea actually resonates with the people they’re trying to reach.
Most of those processes exist for good reasons. But there comes a point when all those steps make it harder to act on what the market is telling you.
Markets, unfortunately, have never been especially respectful of planning cycles. Customer expectations keep evolving, competitors keep experimenting and new opportunities emerge while companies are still working toward internal alignment.
This is where I tend to get impatient. If the market is telling us something, I want that information as close as possible to the people who can do something about it. I don’t want six weeks of polishing the insight before we decide whether we believe it.
The organizations that respond fastest are often the ones that can actually do something with the information they have.
How AI Can Help Companies Stay Close to Customers
I think we’re asking AI the wrong questions. We’ve spent the past few years asking what AI can produce for us, how much time it can save and which tasks it can automate. There’s real value in all of that. But focusing on productivity alone misses what AI can change inside an organization.
The better test is whether AI can help an organization stay as curious, responsive and close to its market at 5,000 people as it was at 50.
Getting a first draft five minutes faster feels pretty incremental by comparison.
AI can help growing companies preserve some of the customer proximity that traditionally becomes harder to maintain at scale. Audience insights that once took weeks to gather can become available before decisions are made. Emerging patterns can surface while there’s still time to adjust strategy instead of simply explaining results after the fact.
Marketing teams can spend less time collecting information and more time deciding what to do with it. Leadership can understand what’s changing without waiting for information to climb the organizational ladder.
I want AI getting useful information to the people responsible for making decisions early enough that they can actually use it. People are still responsible for what happens next. AI can help make sure they have better context and enough time to act.
The founder who once learned directly from every customer conversation shouldn’t have to lose that advantage simply because the company has grown. Technology gives us more ways to preserve that closeness as a business scales.
Growth Should Compound Understanding
At RAD Intel, we talk a lot about the idea that every company should make the next company stronger. It’s one of the principles I keep coming back to because its value goes well beyond technology or infrastructure.
Every campaign teaches us something about audiences. Customer conversations reveal patterns we might not have seen before, and acquisitions bring new expertise into the business. Operating companies develop knowledge that can be useful well beyond the immediate problem they were trying to solve.
Organizations become smarter when customer and audience insights compound instead of staying trapped inside individual teams. Lessons from one part of the business improve decisions somewhere else. What one team discovers becomes context for another before they begin their own work.
Otherwise, you’re just accumulating information, and most companies already have plenty of that.
Founders understand this instinctively because every conversation has the potential to change what they do next. Learning happens as you operate the company, not once a quarter.
Creators understand it too. The best ones know their communities extraordinarily well because they’re in constant conversation with them. They know when something lands, when their audience has moved on and when a message starts to feel forced.
Founders and creators have always had this in common. Proximity creates intelligence. Growing shouldn’t mean getting further away from the people you’re building for. Scale gives an organization more ways to understand them.
The creator economy has reminded businesses of something founders understood long before we had a name for it: stay close to your audience, pay attention to what changes and let what you learn shape what you do next.
The smartest companies grow without losing the closeness that made them smart in the first place.
