Interviews
The Structured Playbook for Ramping Up Digital Marketing
How to Build a Customer Feedback Engine with Enquire CEO Matt Bahr
The Ebbs and Flows of Scaling a Startup with Loop CEO Jonathan Poma
The Case for DTC Customization with Prose Co-Founder Paul Michaux
How to Leverage Sustainability to Drive Revenue Growth
How to Scale a DTC Growth Agency with Common Thread’s Taylor Holiday
Building Web3-Enabled Commerce Engines with Novel CEO Roger Beaman
The Future of Unified Commerce with Violet CEO Brandon Schulz
Unlocking Brand Design & Development with Doris Dev’s Justin Seidenfeld
Why Shogun Built a "Head" for "Headless" with Co-Founder Nick Raushenbush
Leveraging Reviews as a Growth Engine with Junip CEO Stuart Arsenault
Tactical Lessons from Scaling HelloFresh with CEO Dominik Richter
The Next-Gen Operating System for CPG with Cresicor CEO Alex Whatley
The Taika Playbook: Designing Custom R&D Engines
Influencer Marketing & Gen-Z Community with TBH CEO Elena Guberman
MuteSix Field Guide: How to Unlock Your Brand’s Optimal Ad Strategy
Cutting Acquisition Costs and Democratizing Data with Disco's Conner Sherline
Headless Upgrades and Category Dominance with Builder’s Steve Sewell
How to Build a Luxury DTC Brand with Last Crumb CEO Matt Jung
GTM Tools and Driving Reliable Revenue with ShipBob’s Casey Armstrong
Leveraging Automation and Socializing Stacks with Alloy CEO Sara Du
Loyalty Trends and DTC Referral Flywheels with Smile CEO Mike Rossi
Angel Investing, Growth Tactics, and eComm Stacks with James Beshara
Networking Flywheels and Flexible Financing with Settle CEO Alek Koenig
Designing Zero to One Growth Funnels with Julian Shapiro
Jeff Chang on Growth Funnels, Acquisition Playbooks, and Rapid Testing
Sahil Bloom on Content Strategy, Brand Voice, and Audience Growth
Data Paralysis and DTC Growth Levers with Source Medium’s Feifan Wang
How it works (for brands)
Swipe to launch AI-generated ads
Brainstorming 100 unique, 40-second scripts is painful.
Manually matching 20 clips (from your 10,000-video library) to each shot in your 100 unique scripts is even more painful.
Creating 10 permutations of each of the 100 ads (for A/B testing) is maximum pain.
This writing is getting very long, but imagine voiceovers, captions, music, & manually uploading all 1,000 ads to Meta & TikTok on top of this.
Icon solves this with Adswiper: all you have to do is swipe right or left on AI-generated ads.
Adswiper handles scriptwriting, script-to-shot matching (using existing videos from Google Drive + AI-generated videos), permutations, voiceovers, captions, music, & more.
Swiping right will also automatically create ready-to-launch adsets across all channels (Meta, TikTok).
Connect data sources
Connect your video library (Google Drive, Dropbox, Air) & ad accounts (Meta, TikTok).
Videos from both of these will be imported as building blocks for your AI-generated ads.
What they're saying
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Tim Chen
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Maneet Khaira
Products
Replaces CapCut ($7.99/month), Adobe Premiere ($54.99/month)
Swipe right or left on AI-generated ads made from videos in your Creative Library.
Uses AI for scriptwriting, script-to-shot matching, permutations, voiceovers, captions, music, & more.
Replaces Ad Managers (direct use)
Swipe to launch AI-generated ads automatically on all channels (Meta, TikTok).
Replaces Foreplay ($49-$99/month + $20/user), AdSpy ($149/month)
Use winning ads from top brands to inspire AI-generated ads in Adswiper.
Replaces Recharm ($500-3K/month), Air ($250-$2K/month)
Store, tag, create, & split videos with AI.
Replaces Motion ($1K-$10K/month)
See which ads are winning to inform AI-generated ads in Adswiper.
Replaces Billo ($99/video)
Get AI-generated UGC videos for your Creative Library.
Story
Kennan Davison
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Roman Khan
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Kevin Jin
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Why us
Track record of things that can't be faked
Icon is the best team helping brands get winning ads with AI.
Our CEO/Founder (who is writing this, sorry for writing in 3rd person) brings experience from Skio, Pinterest, Hulu, Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency), League of Legends (Top 200 North America, 100M+ players globally), & Y Combinator S20 (solo founder).
At Skio (subscription management software for brands on Shopify), he was CEO/Founder of the company from 2021 to 2024 helping grow revenue from $0 to $10M+ ARR in 3 years (w/ 90% margins) and a team of 50 (on $8.4M raised). Skio is profitable and still growing >100% YoY.
Our tech investors include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Kevin Hartz (A*, Eventbrite), Max Altman (Saga), Alex Botez (Chess), as well as founders & executives of OpenAI, Ramp, Flexport, Pika, Karat, & Cognition.
Our D2C investors include Ron Shah & Ash Melvani (Obvi), Roman Khan, Nick Shackelford, Jimmy Kim (Sendlane), Kevin Lee (Immi), Justin Mares (Kettle & Fire), Steph Liu (Levitate), Sara Du (Alloy), Jason Wong, as well as founders of Eight Sleep, Yotpo, Siena AI, Replo, Novel, Parker, GR0, DCL Logistics, Aftersell, Platter, Openborder, Prescient AI, Daasity, & more.
Our team has also worked with 1000+ brands like Liquid I.V., Milk Bar, Polaroid, Barstool, Unilever, Bulletproof, 100 Thieves, Vega, KOS, KITSCH, True Botanicals, mindbodygreen, Transparent Labs, GHOST, Wild One, OpenStore, The Nue Co., Immi, DRMTLGY, Boba Tea Protein, KraveBeauty, Glamnetic, Doe Lashes, Magic Mind, Remedy Organics, & Siete Foods.
Focused on helping brands get winning ads
Icon is focused on helping brands get winning ads vs. also juggling the underlying AI tech.
We believe our approach is fundamentally better because we're free to choose the best technology partner for a specific job.
To illustrate this, maybe one AI-video partner specializes in face closeups while another partner specializes in body movements (where face doesn't matter as much).
If we built all underlying technology in-house, it would create a fundamental conflict of interest where we can't offer a competitor's tool (that might be better) without losing revenue.
Other options
Other options