Ten years ago, Dylan Huey made his first social media account. He was 14. Three years ago, he deleted every video on his TikTok account, which by then had 4.4 million followers.
He was making the transition from creator to creator-economy founder.
REACH, the business he founded in 2024 that combines creator marketing, talent management, venture, social data analysis, and a content studio, cleared $2 million in revenue last year.
In this episode:
— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor
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A creator turns founder to serve creators
In early 2023, Dylan Huey deleted every video on his TikTok account — nearly 2,000 uploads, boasting a combined like count over 210 million. He had 4.4 million followers.
The now-24-year-old entrepreneur got his start on Musical.ly in June 2016, the first social media app he downloaded right after his parents gave him his first iPhone.
Within a week, Dylan tells me, he had 30k followers; within six months, about 100k. For three years, he livestreamed up to five hours a day — viewers might sit with him while he did his English homework.
By 16, Dylan was managing other creators, including Lil Huddy, who he says he helped grow from around 200k to over 5 million followers in about 18 months.
By 17, managing creators and making content “all by myself,” he was burning out. And as Musical.ly turned into TikTok, the platform got crowded. “I did not have enough time to learn how to do TikTok dances,” he says. “I’m gonna let them do their dances and have fun with that.”
Though he still posts on LinkedIn and Snapchat, Dylan has largely transitioned from creator to founder since graduating college in 2024, running a five-pillar business serving both creators and brands that he says brought in over $2 million in revenue last year. REACH includes:
A marketing agency with over 100 brand clients
A talent management group representing over 250 creators
A venture division invested in over 15 companies
A film and television division
A data and analytics division
A TikTok live division was shuttered earlier this year. The data division was acquired — a company called Sourcify, which serves the other four pillars by monitoring and analyzing creator-brand data across social media — tracking “six million creators and 300,000 brands,” Dylan shared.
A creator goes to college
Before REACH was a seven-figure business, it was a club for student creators at the University of Southern California, founded in 2017. Dylan joined as a freshman in 2020 and became president in spring 2022, midway through his sophomore year. That summer, he built a “franchisee model” for taking REACH national. Students at UCLA, Penn State, and UPenn, who’d found REACH on TikTok and Instagram, launched the first chapters beyond USC, and the national organization incorporated in 2023.
Today, there are about 100 chapters at colleges across the country, with a total membership around 5,000, combining for around 500 million followers. The alum network numbers around 1,000, with a combined following around 800 million.
Among the alums is Alan Chikin Chow, whose Alan’s Universe YouTube channel alone has 103 million subscribers — roughly an eighth of that total. As everywhere in the creator economy, the power law is present in the REACH ecosystem.
Many alums never sought to build a large audience in the first place, instead looking to work behind the camera, on the brand side, or elsewhere in the ecosystem beyond the traditional creator role.
A student organization spawns a for-profit business
By early 2024, Dylan was about to graduate; he needed a job. He’d already found a path inside REACH, but hit a wall. USC does not allow outside organizations to support student organizations other than through “approved in-kind donations,” and “individual students may not receive personal financial benefit” from organizational fundraising.
And while NIL rules have let college athletes take endorsement deals since 2021, they don’t extend to student organizations.
As director of outreach early in his sophomore year, Dylan pitched brands on the club’s “40 members” and “20 million followers,” and landed Puma, Boohoo, and BYLT Basics. But the deals were based on gifting and activations; members couldn’t be paid.
“The first year I took over as president at USC Reach, we worked with NASCAR, and I love NASCAR, but we [weren’t] able to make sure that our creators are getting paid … We just weren’t able to do that because we weren’t allowed to be a for-profit organization because of the restrictions of these universities.”
Still, there was a clear opportunity, and he was well-positioned to build within it. As he prepared to graduate, Dylan worked with a Silicon Valley law firm to set up a for-profit business called REACH that would remain legally separate from the student organization network, which is a 501(c)(3).
Let’s say a brand wants to work with college students
Read the REACH 2025 College Index here.
Outside of REACH, Dylan says, there is “no database, there’s no management company that only manages college influencers.” This enables REACH to set pricing minimums to benefit its network.
The for-profit REACH is a strong, efficient ecosystem. Each arm supports the next. I asked Dylan to describe the flow.
“Brand says, I want to work with college students. I don't know what I want to do. I just want to do something. Great, what's your budget look like?”
A larger budget means full-service. The marketing agency builds a strategy, leveraging creators from the talent management roster or student organization where possible. If there’s a product placement opportunity in one of the movies REACH is working on, they’ll make it happen.
A smaller budget means the client builds their own strategy, and REACH focuses on connecting them with the right creators to execute that plan.
A promising startup means REACH might ask for equity in exchange for discounted services.
On the other side, if it’s not a brand but a creator reaching out, they’ll receive much the same services, just flipped:
The marketing agency connects creators to their brand clients
The talent management arm helps the creator build a longterm strategy, maybe helping them work with startups in exchange for equity or land work through the film and TV division.
Last year, Dylan shared, revenue was over $2 million. They’ve been doubling down on the talent management division and their edge in college marketing. Talent management makes up the majority of their 40-plus staff, with a headcount over 25.
Like many management companies, REACH takes a 20% commission, and most of the roster is signed exclusively.
The talent roster is not limited to college students. Creators range in age from 13 to the 50s, and Dylan says 30–40 creators ask to sign each week. Those who do sign are often multi-hyphenate talents looking to build businesses beyond pure content.
As for the business Dylan wants to build, in his own words:
“I like to ‘fake it till you make it.’ So … the way I describe Reach is what I want it to look like in two years. And I describe Reach as a new media conglomerate for anyone interested in entertainment to be able to come into our ecosystem.”
He expects Sourcify to grow fastest. Today it gives REACH’s own teams an edge; he also wants other management companies and agencies using it: “I really want to be a tech-enabled company and have tech products that other people can utilize,” he says.
In typical REACH fashion, there’s a creator-side tool coming, too: Sourcify is building AI to automate brand outreach for creators.
Learn more about REACH.
Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.
Using the collective power of thousands of creators
Preparing for my interview with Dylan, there was one topic I found more exciting than any other: the collective power of this network of creators. Again: some 5,000 student members combining for around 500 million followers and some 1,000 alums combining for around 800 million followers.
A key feature of the creator economy is that it’s typically every creator for themselves. An organization like this is incredibly rare in the creator economy:
A circumstance-bonded group (college student content creators)
With a desirable product (millions of followers, many also college-aged)
And a universal, bottlenecked access point (to work with them en masse, you have to talk to REACH)
More and more advertising dollars flow to creators — to independent digital media entrepreneurs, to put a point on it — each year.
For most of the brief history of the digital creator economy, pricing has been a bit of a Wild West. As a brand representative looking to spend your budget, how do you value one creator over the other? How do you know their audience has the characteristics you’re looking for?
Brands tend to have more power than creators. They have the budgets; they set the prices. If one creator refuses to lower the fee, at this point, there will typically be a comparable creator who will.
I asked Dylan if REACH is able to set prices, if they have that negotiating power with the brands they work with. Yes:
“When brands reach out to us, you know, we do set that price. We do say, hey, we can get you creators, we can get you a hundred creators, but here's the minimum price that we have to go to, because we're happy to say no to brands.”
Dylan pointed out that college students are often expected to provide free labor. Free internships, right? That this organization can help them get fair compensation for their labor is, again, rare in the creator economy.
These sorts of creator “unions” do exist, for example:
The Creator Union, founded in the UK in 2020
The Creators Guild of America, launched in the US in 2023
More specialist communities like Project C, for creator-journalists
But they’re still small. Their power is still minuscule relative to that of the platforms, or the brands spending the most on creator marketing.
Whenever a content creator I meet asks me for advice, or I’m speaking to a workshop or college class, my primary suggestion is to seek out peers and work together. Build these networks yourself if you cannot find a perfect fit.
