“Yeah, there's no other life for me.”

LaTecia Johnson was working at an early-stage start up when a colleague suggested that she might want to start one of her own. Johnson, who thinks of herself as a “reluctant leader” (she was always picked for captain on the college basketball team, “even when I didn’t want it”) had never considered it. Her career had taken her through numerous growth and marketing roles, as well as positions at Fortune 500s, including Apple and Nielsen, and she had worked with companies at all stages – from founding to acquisition – but becoming a founder herself was the one leap she hadn’t taken. 

At the time, she’d been in conversation with Prerna Sharma and Tyler Norwood at Antler. They suggested she try the residency for eight weeks. “They said, ‘maybe it turns out it's the thing you can't live without, or you go through that process and you're like, actually I wanna go back to an executive role or whatever’,” says Johnson. On day two she realised: “Yeah, there's no other life for me.” 

The creator economy OS

In January 2024, Johnson founded INGENIUS Studio. The Austin-based SaaS startup is an AI-powered platform that transforms the way brands and creators can build and execute scalable marketing campaigns. Dubbed the “creator economy OS” by Forbes, INGENIUS is a platform that goes beyond basic follower counts in order to help brands identify and evaluate creators that match their audience needs, and generates a bespoke strategy. Creators too, can benefit from the platform – through INGENIUS they can pitch brands and position themselves for high-value partnerships. 

Johnson built INGENIUS to solve a number of problems she had encountered at every stage of her career, right back when she was an analyst at Nielsen a decade ago, to her more recent work consulting on growth strategies. All these companies, she says, were struggling to integrate digital technologies into their marketing stack. “Technology has advanced so much,” she says. “But if all of these tools are coming to market, why does literally every company that I go into have, you know, a couple of people running things out of a spreadsheet?” The “aha moment” was when she realised that most of the people building these tools had never actually done the job. 

From weeks to minutes 

The reality of marketing, particularly with creators and influencers is complicated and convoluted. Creators need to be researched, identified. Reach out can be bogged down by agencies and sub-agencies and sometimes – if you don’t have an existing relationship with a creator or their manager – it can be hard to make contact at all. “It can take weeks to stand up a comprehensive creative program,” says Johnson. With INGENIUS, a brand marketing team can go “from idea to strategy to implementation in under five minutes.” This was how fast one agency was able to implement a strategy using the platform and Johnson has also collaborated with a multinational company that was able to execute a campaign with a thousand influencers where it was able to attribute and measure over a billion impressions within 72 hours.

The team told Johnson that usually it would take three to four weeks after the campaign to be able to assess whether it was successful or not. With INGENIUS, says Johnson, “after 72 hours they knew, to a 90% efficacy, whether or not the campaign was successful, what the next steps were, what they needed to do, and who the creators were that we should or shouldn't work with.” 

“We quantify culture”

Prior to today, Johnson says, marketing just looked at the number of eyes you could get on a brand or product. Enough eyes, the theory goes, will eventually lead to conversions. But the thing that matters now is context and taste. “Do you understand the context when you’re marketing to your audience? Do they identify with that and do they already have an affinity to you?” says Johnson. “That is something that INGENIUS can say. We quantify culture. We can take all of these disparate pieces of data and actually tell you the answers to those questions so that as a firm, you understand the return on influence.”

In the eighteen months since Johnson took the leap to becoming a founder, things have moved fast – but it’s been a steep learning curve. “The biggest lesson as a founder is that there is no playbook – you really do have to figure out the type of leader that you want to be.” She’s painfully aware of the disparity in funding that goes to black founders – last year it was just 0.4% – and is used to people telling her things can’t be done. “It hasn't been the easiest, you know, but what gives me hope and what excites me are the investors that support you. Antler was my first check and that’s purely based on merit. The number of investors that I have on the cap table are believing in the world that we want to create. And that's the exciting part.”

Building for the future 

INGENIUS is now building momentum commercially. In the past 90 days inbound demand has grown five times, “and if there’s a Fortune 100, or 500 list, they’re on it.” Inquiries are from companies that are investing in culture, says Johnson, companies where brand awareness is top of the funnel, but “being able to understand and contextualize that is what’s going to give them the edge over the next decade.” 

Johnson built something that was missing from the market – one that is set to grow from $25.4 billion in 2024 to $97.6 billion by 2030 – and now she is shaping it. She has observed competitors changing the language they use to describe their value proposition, which tells her INGENIUS has shifted dial. “Our unique selling point is that we are building a cultural measurement engine,” she says. “And until we started building it did not exist.”

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