🐔 the sky fell on May 1, 2025 like I called it in August 2023

Lexology and Benesch formally declared it: influencer marketing class actions are going viral.

I didn’t theorize it the problem as a last ditch effort to save my startup, Swaypay. I metabolized it as the reason Swaypay was dying an inevitable death and I began pivoting to building SwayID (the first creator marketing compliance infrastructure) in 2023 from living inside the fallout since Jan 2022.

A small character named Chicken Little believes the sky is falling after an acorn hits her head.

She panics. She spreads the warning.
She is mocked, dismissed, ignored.

In some versions, the story ends with Chicken Little and her followers being devoured by the fox either because they trusted the wrong authority, or because no one took the warning seriously until it was too late.

the core themes:

• Premature truth-telling is framed as hysteria

• Early warnings get laughed off

• Institutions don’t listen…until it’s too late

• Perceived delusion becomes actual foresight

• The consequences are existential, not theoretical

On May 1, 2025, a Lexology article co-authored by Stephanie Sheridan, Meegan Brooks, Michael Meuti, and Hannah Laubach at Benesch Law, formally declared it:

With influencer endorsements now under legal fire, brands are being warned:
Make sure your influencers disclose their sponsorships or prepare to be sued.

And just like that,
the sky “fell”.

The market need for the value SwayID provides was finally validated at the market level.

why this hits different for me:

I didn’t start by studying the lawsuits.
I started by watching my own product, Swaypay, break against behavioral patterns no one was naming.
Swaypay was supposed to democratize influencer marketing.
But underneath the hype, I saw the rot😀 

• Deceptive influencer posts normalized as necessary for virality

• Brands offloading risk onto creators

• Marketers pretending ambiguity was protection

• Mounting frustration from consumers

All of it building pressure.
It was only a matter of time before something cracked.

I wasn’t theorizing / spiraling / panicking without cause.
I was actively metabolizing as the system chewed through the very thing I was trying to build instead of ignoring it the way every single person in the influencer marketing ecosystem seemed to be doing before I came along and began pointing it out.

I learned about exposure by being exposed.
I watched institutional partner support step back.

That’s when I realized:
I wasn’t just building a rewards platform.
I was standing inside a house with no foundation.

The biggest oh sh*t moment of my life.

So in 2023, with no support, I took the biggest career bet of my career:
I burned Swaypay down.
And built SwayID.

As a defensive system.

Not just for the brands and agencies.
For the creators. For the ones who post, get tagged, and don’t know they’re one caption away from liability.

SwayID isn’t a SaaS tool. It’s a nervous system.
Built by people who’ve already been inside the fire,
to keep others from getting burned by it.

The lawsuits are no longer isolated.
We’ve moved beyond “just a few cases” into a legal pattern too large to dismiss.

what i wish someone told me in 2022:

If a behavioral pattern repeatedly breaks your product,
that pattern is the real problem, not your inability to execute.

You might chase surface symptoms: marketing, messaging, hiring.
But if the same friction resurfaces again and again, you’re not seeing startup failure.
You’re seeing systemic failure.

Swaypay didn’t fail at my hands. Time was its enemy. I caught it and corrected it.

In Warren Buffet’s words:

The system was already broken.
And because it was, Swaypay would eventually break too.

SwayID began the moment I stopped fighting user behavior—
and started building the legal infrastructure that behavior was quietly begging for.

This isn’t just about pivoting.
It’s about learning to read denial as data.
That data won’t show up in your MRR or dashboards.
It shows up in your nervous system as the reason you can’t sleep at night.

That’s the real signal.

Don’t ignore it. Build from it.

Kaeya