The biggest "oh sh*t moment" of my life.

💀 In 2021, I raised millions to fix influencer marketing—only to burn millions making everything broken about it 10x worse.

💀 I didn’t just fail to stop influencer fraud—I industrialized it. I built a system that invited millions of shoppers to fake endorsements for cash back rewards, all while convincing myself I was scaling a genuine advocacy engine.

💀 I thought I was making influencer marketing more cost efficient. Instead, I handed brands a shinier, more sophisticated way to set their marketing budgets on fire.

💀 I thought I was reducing operational overhead. Instead, I orchestrated an operational dumpster fire—fueled by fraud, fakery, and manipulation.

💀 By the end of 2023, with my 31st birthday around the corner, reality hit like a freight train. My career, my reputation—hell, even my dating prospects—EVERYTHING was on the line.

Entering 2024, I had only one option: turn this steaming pile of sh*t into gold.

Rewinding the clock…

In 2021, influencer marketing was at a tipping point:

✔️ 85% of consumers wanted to be influencers.
✔️ Social commerce was exploding.
✔️ Shein’s meteoric rise proved that mobilizing everyday shoppers as influencers was a scalable growth engine.

💡 I was convinced that Shein had cracked the code.

✔️ Turn everyday shoppers into influencers at scale
✔️ Reward 5K+ shoppers per month with cash back & exclusive discounts
✔️ Drive exponential growth through this advocacy engine

If Shein’s multibillion-dollar empire could be built on real advocacy, real purchases, and realistic rewards, then influencer marketing wasn’t just evolving in theory—it was already being democratized in practice.

So I committed my next decade to building Swaypay, the turnkey version of Shein’s model for Fortune 500 brands.

My go-to-market plan for Swaypay:

Launch a “modern Ibotta”—where everyday Gen Z shoppers would earn variable cash back for posting their purchases on TikTok.

(Because I believed that offering brands a plug-and-play system to activate everyday shoppers as influencers would become the next dominant influencer marketing engine.)

Before I built Swaypay, brands had three broken options for influencer marketing:
❌ Pay influencers to post about random products → Fake enthusiasm, fake advocacy, fake results.
❌ Tie influencer pay to follower count → A budget gamble that rewarded vanity metrics over real conversions.
❌ Rely on influencer agencies → Expensive, slow, and wildly unpredictable.

💡 I believed Swaypay would fix all of this by making influencer marketing authentic, scalable, and cost-effective.

Spoiler: It didn’t.

What I Thought Would Happen vs. What Actually Happened

How the f*** did I fail so spectacularly?

Turns out, I wasn’t just some reckless, overconfident, Icarus founder.

Swaypay’s spectacular failure wasn’t a business model issue. It wasn’t a failed execution of turning anyone into an influencer.

💡 The fatal flaw? Every new "everyday influencer" increased the probability of deceptive advertising.

I spent three years building the perfect incentive machine. What I had actually built was a system that optimized for deception at scale.

I thought: If we just replaced influencers with real shoppers, the honesty problem would solve itself.

Instead, I created a model where deception wasn’t a bug—it was the most profitable feature…

No version of Swaypay would have ever been legally viable unless two things changed:

1️⃣ A federal law would have to pass making deception more costly than lucrative for advertisers & creators.

2️⃣ A built-in compliance infrastructure would need to exist—to train creators, screen & fix content, and continuously prove compliance.

And then, in 2024, something crazy happened...

🔥 #1 came true.

And just last week, the biggest mind bender: Shein got hit with a massive deceptive influencer marketing class action lawsuit…accused of building its $30B empire on deceptive influencer marketing...

Bruh…

Federal Deceptive Advertising Regulatory History:

🔥 The writing was on the wall since 2016. In 2024, the feds finally put an end to it in 2025.

The choice became clear:

I had spent three years inside the torture chamber of influencer marketing deception. No one understood this problem better than I did.

No one feels this pain deeper than I do.

✅ So I pivoted Swaypay into SwayID.
✅ The compliance layer influencer marketing could no longer survive without.
✅ The industry’s life jacket—and my own.

Sh*t into gold.

Kaeya