How and Why Popfly Was Created: A Sit Down With Our Founder Taylor and Aaron Lutze from Second Nature

"The ability to draw creative expression out of humanity has always been super important to me. These aren't just partnerships. They're creative expressions."

That's how Taylor Hoekstra talks about what Popfly is actually built for. It's a strange thing to say about a creator marketing platform, until you hear where the idea came from.

Before Taylor started Popfly, he was working growth at an agricultural tech startup in Silicon Valley, handed a mandate to grow on almost no budget. Looking for any channel that might work. He found farmer YouTubers, guys filming their own equipment and their own land, and realized nobody had ever approached them before.

The pitch was simple: some cash, some affiliate fees, if they'd talk about the product on their channel.

It worked past the point of being a nice experiment. The farmer creators hit the team's growth targets, then blew past them. They outsold the company's entire sales force. One post from, in Taylor's words, "a guy on a combine" would sell more than the whole team combined. And the deals weren't costing much. The creators were subsidized on cash because they actually believed in the product.

He watched that pattern repeat for close to a year before he left the ag-tech job to build something around what he'd seen.

Why Popfly was built for outdoor and adventure brands

Taylor focused on the outdoor space partly because it's where he spends his own time, and because he felt inspired by the stories and athletes in the space. He felt they deserved a place where they could show off their work and connect authentically with brands that get them.

The gap was that every creator tool on the market at the time was built for fashion and fast food. Those platforms assumed a certain kind of creator and a certain kind of content, and outdoor didn't fit either. They were built for selling a $5 impulse buy, not a $200 hiking boot that needs to truly be tested on the trails. Nobody had built anything for the specific mechanics of outdoor creators and outdoor brands that relies so heavily on trust and credibility. That gap, combined with a category Taylor already cared about, is what made outdoor the place to start.

Solving the distrubtion problem

Every company Taylor had built before ran into the same wall: distribution. Getting a product in front of people was consistently the hardest part. And he is direct about what the early years actually felt like: no legitimacy, no validation, nobody caring. You tell friends and family it's going to work. It takes a long time before anyone outside your own head agrees.

Eventually people started talking. A thousand creators in, the pattern from the farmer YouTuber days had repeated itself, just at a different scale, and it meant building infrastructure that didn't exist yet, the kind of thing you need to actually work with brands like Smith, Outdoorsy, or The North Face.

What he'd seen with these creators was different than your traditional influencer. They bridged the storytelling gap in a way that felt authentic, and got people to actually believe in what they were selling.

Why community, not just content

Taylor traces how the space itself changed. Early UGC deals were transactional: post this, get paid, move on. But as the space matured, it moved toward something with more authenticity, and toward creators who wanted longer-term relationships and real communities, not one-off posts.

That shift is what got Taylor genuinely excited to build in the outdoor space. He'd watched people bounce from platform to platform chasing whatever was working that month, and none of it sticking. Loyalty and authenticity don't come from a single transaction. They come from an actual community, built over time.

That's the difference Popfly is built around: not a marketplace for one-off content, but the infrastructure for creators and outdoor and adventure brands to build something that lasts.

Now Popfly is the full infrastructure to run creator programs

Three years in, the vision Taylor describes today is almost identical to the one he started with. Same direction, same bet on creators, just built out further. What started as simply connecting brands and creators has grown into a full platform encompassing everything you need to build, scale, and measure a world-class creator program:

• User-generated content (UGC)
• Sponsored content
• Affiliate programs
• Ambassador programs
• Creator storefronts
• Adventures: Where Brands find and sponsor creator trips
• Evergreens: Your Always-on creator networks
• Creator network of 20,000+ adventure creators
• Automated giftings, licensing and payments
• Reporting and social listening

Same bet on creators. A lot more infrastructure behind it.

Everybody has a plan, as Taylor puts it, "until you get punched in the face". Actually doing the thing you said you'd do from the beginning, especially starting from scratch, is rare. Most founders end up somewhere adjacent to their original idea, or somewhere else entirely. Popfly didn't.

“The creator economy has focused on one-off transactions for too long, we’re focused on relationships—giving creators recurring revenue, long-term brand partnerships, and the tools to build sustainable careers.”

Watch the full conversation, recorded live at Outdoor Retailer with Second Nature.