Volume 35

PRIME Hydration Sales Plummet 50%, Boy Room Nets 5M Views, TikTok Unveils Notes App, Airchat Launches with Tech Titans

_Creator Spotlight_

Sketch

If you haven’t heard the phrase "What’s up, brother?", allow me to introduce you to Sketch, a livestreamer on Twitch that has been taking over the internet by storm with his hilarious antics playing Madden, where he coined the phrase.

Since January of this year, he has grown a whopping 635,159 followers on Twitch alone!

Here’s a great video from Know Your Meme that tells you everything you need to know. The phrase has made its way so far that even UFC fighters and football players have gotten behind it.

So without further ado, let’s get into some stories!

_News_

PRIME Hydration Sales Are Down 50% From Last Year

What’s going on? According to an article by consumer magazine The Grocer, sales of PRIME have crashed since the start of 2024, with year-on-year sales down over 50%. As we all know, creator-founded products have been all the craze these past few years, from MrBeast’s Feastables chocolate to NELK Boys’ Happy Dad seltzer. The idea of built-in distribution is quite appealing for the launch of the product, but that strategy can come at the cost of building a real foundation if done improperly.

Legacy brands take years and years to build and need an authentic story; this journey cannot be replaced with an open checkbook alone.

_News_

Boy Room Stacks Up More Than 5M Views on Debut

The Fast Track After a tumultuous period marked by a trademark conflict with the esports group FaZe Clan, which resulted in a cease and desist notice for using “Faze” in its name, producer Adam Faze has come out the other end by rebranding his content network to be called “Gymnasium” and successfully launching his first series "Boy Room".

What’s Boy Room? Boy Room is a short-form show hosted by comedian Rachel Coster that gives walkthroughs of men’s rooms in New York City with a kick of sarcasm and comedy to it. In its first week, the series has amassed more than 5M views - very impressive!

You can watch all the episodes here.

_News_

TikTok Launches Notes App to Compete with Instagram

More social media beef? Yeah you heard that correctly. TikTok is launching a competitor to Instagram called TikTok Notes. The app is currently available for limited testing in Australia and Canada. According to many articles that have been written on the matter, TikTok is making an attempt to not only compete with Instagram, but outshine them through additional features such as being able to add headlines to your photos.

Why does it matter? Honestly, it doesn’t really. This is just another example of a social media platform competing for market share. I will say, these kinds of feats are incredibly difficult to pull off, as we previously saw with Facebook’s Lasso, its prior TikTok clone which it had to shut down.

However, ByteDance has built a proven track record of being able to achieve high growth in short periods of time, and being able to retain them, so it will be interesting to watch this play out, to say the least.

_News_

Twitter-Competitor Airchat Comes Out Guns Blazing

What’s the scoop? In the past couple of weeks, you might have received an invitation to Airchat, a new competitor to Twitter that has chosen to emphasize voice content creation rather than text. Airchat was founded by Naval Ravikant and former Tinder exec Brian Norgard, two seasoned veterans of Silicon Valley, so it makes sense that they’ve been able to make noise in such a short period of time.

How do I get access? Airchat is currently invite only, so you will need to get access through someone that is already on the app. If anyone wants an invite, respond to me here and I’ll get you in. The app has already drawn in well-known tech personalities among its early users such as Y Combinator CEO and San Francisco political provocateur Gary Tan, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, VC and Elon Musk confidant Jason Calacanis, and obviously, yours truly, Jacob Pace.

That’s all we have today, folks! See you next week.