Building Tomorrow’s Marketing Leaders: Inside Glewee’s Gen Z Success Formula

Many marketing leaders find themselves caught between the need for proven business acumen and the desire for fresh, innovative thinking that seems to come so naturally to younger talent.

But what if there was a way to build a team that combines both?

In this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks with Christian Brown, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Glewee, an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that’s used by over 5,000 brands and 12,500 plus influencers as a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree. Christian has pioneered a unique approach to team building, cultivating a Gen Z dream team that’s helped scale Glewee from a startup concept to a major player in the creator economy. This innovative leadership style and ability to identify and nurture young talent has not only transformed his company but is reshaping how we might think about marketing team development.

[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]

What motivated you to build a predominantly Gen Z team, and what were the initial challenges that you faced?

Christian Brown: When we first started Glewee, the idea was to create an end-to-end influencer marketplace. With that, we knew we needed an iOS app.

We needed a web platform and even furthermore, when you’re building a marketplace, you need two sides of the market to fill that. So influencers on one side, brands on one side. We understood the framework and everything we wanted to do, and we worked with a small group of friends to create, which was our MVP that we brought into the market, which was our beta, which then translated into our first release.

At that time, that’s where we started to scale up the team. When we first thought about scale and team building, we thought about the people around us. So having come from the social media space, we always joke that like we were the first generation to truly grow up in social media, we thought, “Well, who knows it better than us?”

So when we started to think about how we are going to grow our marketing team, how we are going to grow our sales team, our customer success team, we looked around us and said, “Well, why don’t we just bring our friends in?”

At the time, we were finishing up the university experience, and we were fresh out of that. And when I mean fresh, I mean two days out of it. We’d all worked great in group projects at school. We all have friends that have done other startup experiences, and we built the Gen Z team from the ground up with a group of friends that were all just like us, all Gen Z. We’re all the same age, and we really started from scratch from there.

How would you identify someone who has the potential to be a great employee?

Christian Brown: It was just about work ethic, right? For us, we were going to be working around the clock to get this thing to market, and we did exactly that, like, I mean, 15, 20 hours a day. And it was just like: “Hey. Here’s our idea. Here’s what we’re building. Do you want to be a part of it?”

And it was never like an inner and out thing. It was always like, you’re completely on the ship and you’re ready to either sail it all the way across the sea or sink with it, or you’re not.

I think that it came with the charisma and the spark that we were leading with. Everyone’s like, yeah, you know, I want to be a part of this. I want to be a part of something big and everyone believes in it. When we look back at what trades and qualities we were most looking for, I think it boiled down to social media.

Having all spent so many years before this, from when we were 16 years old onwards, creating different companies and scaling them, whether it’s ecom- or creator economy-oriented, we all spoke the same language. I think that that alone, that level of foundation, trust, knowledge, nomenclature, and everything that we are all really about.

It all aligns so well that when we really look to say, “Hey, we’re going to grow this team. It doesn’t matter what internship you had or what school you went to. It really matters what degree of social media knowledge you have and how fast you are at bringing that to the table and working with it.”

Walk us through that team structure and how you’ve organized roles to maximize some Gen Z strengths.

Christian Brown: I must say that we were a startup. We have always been a startup, and we will probably forever always act as if we are a startup. Everyone in the world who hears the word “startup” hears this next sentence, which is: “You wear a lot of hats.”

That is definitely a baseline necessity. Someone who wants to be a little bit more in a cookie-cutter role where there’s a structure and hierarchy, and every day you log on and you do exactly this, this, this, and that might not be someone that’s best fit for us. We’ve identified that through trial and error, and we know that we need someone much quicker, much faster, more nimble, ready to get their hands dirty and get in the weeds on stuff. Someone who is very versatile not only in the social platforms but also in our tech stack. That’s someone that just can sink their teeth in and love it.

When you merge that with the social media elements, we have this Venn diagram in our minds where it’s like we are looking for the exact middle of the Venn diagram of wanting to work at a tech startup and wanting to be a social media savant. Right in the middle is where we sit.

When we can continue to grow a team directly in the middle of that Venn diagram, that’s where we see the greatest success in team building, input, output, scale, execution, etc.

What have you found in terms of leadership approaches that have worked best when working with these kinds of individuals and younger team members?

Christian Brown: I think it’s leading from the front and it’s leading by example.

I think that’s something that we’ve learned over the entire duration of what we’ve built. When we get up every single morning, we’re fired up, and we’re so excited, and we know exactly what we want to get done. When we have goals, and we have ambition, and we have that drive when we lead that team—whether it’s the communication on a Slack channel, or it’s the way that we’re celebrating the wins that different team members are having, or we’re just celebrating the goals that we’re achieving as an entity.

I think a lot of that, when led with excitement and led with charm, and led with cheer, people really get behind that, and they get completely involved in it. We’ve seen over the years that that is how we’ve built our culture: [by] leading it with excitement and leading it with just true ambition and making sure that that spark never goes out because I think that it’s very contagious in both ways. Like, let’s say that we’re not happy about something. We would never show that, right? ‘Cause we need to be excited, we need to continue building, we need to continue growing, we need to continue taking this to the next frontier.

I think that we’ve seen our culture grow around that and people really, really get excited about that.

And I mean, it’s been one of the greatest things that I can sit back and report on, having built company culture and a team that wants to build what we’re building.

Talk to me more about what Glewee is today.

Christian Brown: Glewee is, like I mentioned, an end-to-end influencer marketing platform. We have an iOS app for influencers and creators, so we’ll start there.

Influencers and creators—whether they have a strong following online or whether they’re UGC creators—download and apply to our platform. We’re business partners with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. So, when an influencer is vetted and admitted into our platform, they actually connect their accounts. And then in real time, we can see their follower insights. We know a lot about their audience. We know their engagement rate. They build out their portfolio. They can even set their own rates and then they exist in our iOS app.

Then, on the brand side, brands can come into our platform and use Glewee on any of our three tiers. And it’s our objective to make it the fastest, easiest, and most affordable platform in the market.

How it works is that brands can come in, and they can [launch] a campaign. So we’ve taken the idea of creating an influencer marketing campaign, which typically is difficult. People would sit back and say, “How do I find influencers? How do I communicate with them? How do I contact them? How do I know that their posts are going to go live? How do I track all that data?”

We’ve shrunk that to a four-step process where a brand very easily can identify what its brand identity is and what their goals are for social media. They can say what social influencers should promote their product on.

We even have a new Shopify partnership with an integration. So if a brand is built on Shopify, they can one tap, connect their entire catalog, and then start promoting those products. Once that campaign gets launched, every single influencer that qualifies based on follower account, location, age, and gender gets a notification right to their phone. And it says, “Hey, this new brand has just launched a campaign.” And when I say it, Mike, I actually mean it. Influencers will apply to campaigns within 15 seconds.

These brands will come into our platform, and they’ll launch a campaign. And like I said, it just takes a few minutes, a step process. And then we tell them sometimes if we’re doing an onboarding, “Hey, refresh.”

Within seconds, we have qualified influencers who are applying, raising their hand, pitching themselves, and saying, “I would love to be a part of this campaign.” Then everything from the communication with the influencers, the contracting, the licensing rights, all the way down to the data that’s not only being displayed on social media but also sales and ROI data—all that lives within our platform on our dashboards.

We’re really allowing that SMB, that new brand, whether you’re a startup or you’re a mid-sized company, even up to our enterprise clients. We’re allowing them to have an engine and a tool to do influencer marketing like they’ve never seen before.

How do you balance giving your Gen Z team a level of creative freedom and autonomy?

Christian Brown: I think it comes from the top down, and it comes from the goals that we’re setting, how we’re communicating them, and how we’re tracking them.

Because for us, we have goals across an array of different items, and industries even, right? We know our marketing goals, we know our sales goals, we know our development goals, we know our software development lifecycle goals—we know a lot of this stuff.

So, for all of us to come together as a team and say, “This year, we are going to do this. In order to do this, we have our OKRs, which are then broken up by our KPIs, our KRs, etc.” We really identify and we state what our goals are. And then each individual contributor, which is a team member of ours, has their own silo that they’re responsible for.

And from there, it is just that you are responsible for this in this area of the business. When a user gets to this part of the business, then it comes over to a different team, and a different team, and a different team. And how we all create these funnels and sequences to ensure that our clients, our customers, and our users are flowing through every part of the business—that level of teamwork all just comes with communication and synergy.

I think that it comes from the layer of setting good goals, communicating them, reiterating them, and then tracking them accordingly.

What would you say has been your most successful strategy in mentoring, developing, and managing young talent in your Gen Z team?

Christian Brown: I think that when thinking about young talent, I have so many fun stories I can bring up right now.

We’ve had, I think, the idea of fostering an environment for creativity, hard work, dedication, and drive. [That] has been the number-one most successful [thing] that we’ve done.

When I say this, I think back to a few of our team members over time—specifically some of our interns who came on—joined up after their internship as full-time. And they were able to go to what we jokingly called Glewee University. It’s like when someone has been with us through their college years, we’ve been able to give a lot of people their first job out of school. We’ve been able to teach them, “Hey, look, this is your department. This is your silo. These are your goals. You need to do what you can to reach them.” And then allowing for that creative freedom to flow and going back to the Gen Z element, all of us, our minds are all over the place.

We can go on social media and spend three minutes on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. In three minutes, [we] get enough content to talk about for a month, right? We can scroll on LinkedIn and find enough stats to report back on, to build blogs on, to build social posts on, and to do all that. ‘Cause we just can consume content way faster.

I think that with that in mind, like the way that we work, it’s very much like, “Boom, I want to do this right now. I want to come up with this idea. I want to create it. I want to execute on it. I want to get it into the market. I want to look at the data and I want to test it.”

Allowing for that creative freedom to flow and then the structures to be in place to allow someone to bring that idea to life—and then also empowering them with the ability to put an idea into the market and actually see the impact it has—I think that’s something that you get at a startup. You get [it] when working with a smaller team that you wouldn’t get at a large organization just because of the way that the structure is all in place.

I think back to a team member we had for many years. He has just moved on to a new role, and he is managing the socials of a very, very large celebrity now. When he told us about that news—obviously, you think a team member who has been such an integral part of growing your company, at first, you might be a little sad or upset, however you might internally feel about that. We collectively were so, so, so proud of the person, the employee, the worker, and the creative that he had become. Like, I’m getting sentimental thinking about it. To look back and say that he was once our intern, he grew and became such an incredible individual who is so hardworking, so driven. So dedicated to his craft and he’s now in a position where he’s doing a job that thousands of people want to do. And it’s just so cool to see.

I think having seen this individual go through Glewee University and that experience that we’ve built from there, and seeing who he has become at the end of that—I will cherish moments like that for the rest of my life.

Are there any tools or platforms that you use for OKRs or anything else within that Gen Z team to help achieve success?

Christian Brown: I’d say, well, of course, a great tool is Agorapulse. I have to say that. But I think from an OKR structure, a little fewer platforms, we’re more focused on the business intelligence that we own.

Being able to take a lot of the data, what’s being generated in the market through our platform, and our revenue lines, business models, etc. And then being able to bring it into something like a power BI and create customer reports. and then obviously a lot of our leadership goals and a lot of those OKRs, we do track on platforms.

I like Trello and different boards of sorts, but I think that it’s less about the platform itself and more about how we’re displaying that information, how frequently we’re updating it and looking at it, and how we’re holding every individual. Whether they’re an individual contributor or a part of a greater team, how we’re holding everybody accountable by showing them, “Hey, here are the goals, here’s where we are, and here’s where we need to be.”

In between there is strategy, development, ideation, and execution that I think each individual person needs to focus on in their own silo and with the greater team.

How have you handled those kinds of differences in communication and work styles?

Christian Brown: I’m going to tell a fun story.

We’ve interviewed thousands of people over the duration of the past few years. A question we always ask every single time that we’ve interviewed someone is: Would you rather be a tree or a river and why?

The responses we’ve gotten are some of my favorite stories ever again because we have heard some of the most intense answers, the blandest answers, the most creative answers, and the most just A-to-B, almost binary answers.

The data will show if you look back at nearly every single person who has joined our organization, the answer is a river. The response to that has to do with fluidity, quickness, speed, and the want to always be moving. And I think that it’s just ironic, right? It doesn’t have anything to do with how we think about their application. It is just something fun to talk about in the interview. But every single one of us is a river. We’ve had some people come in and talk to a new hire. They’re like, “Were you a river or a tree?” And they’re like, “A river.”

“Would you rather be a river or a tree?”

A lot of times we’ve seen a younger individual would rather be a river for many, many reasons. We’ve seen a lot of common trends within the responses.

But with that in mind, once someone comes in, they’re kind of just like, “Yeah, let’s do it. What are we doing? Where are we doing all this work, right?”

Slack is our communication channel. We do, of course, use Miro. We use a plethora of platforms here. I’m going to open it up: Monday, Zendesk, Figma for all design, GetStream for our backend, SEMRush for SEO, Arcade for video walkthroughs, Hutch.io for data, Calendly for the calendar, Instantly for email, Hyros for attribution tracking, Zapier for zaps, obviously ChatGPT cause it’s the greatest invention of the last gazillion years. And PartnerStack, a bunch of other things.

Depending on where the individual is going to be sitting and what part of the whole org they’re going to be a part of, we say, “Hey, here’s the platforms that we use. We’ll train you up on them because we’ve become masters of them over time.”

But we also say, “Use whatever works best for you.”

If someone comes in who just had two previous roles and has an exact tech stack and workflow that they love, we are more than happy to welcome that into the overall stack. All these things I just mentioned are just new platforms that help productivity and help organization. There’s no real one that’s better than the rest. It’s all about how the individual user can master the platform.

I think we’re open in that regard to being able to say, “Hey, whatever works best for you.” It sounds corny. We’re a Google Meets company. We’re a Google Slides company. We’re a Google Sheets company. We’re a Gmail company.

‘Cause we’re all rolling right out of college, and that’s what we’re native to. So it’s whatever’s going to get the best, fastest work done without the learning curves that we want to promote.

If someone does need to learn something like design in Figma, I can teach someone design and Figma. It might take me five hours or so, but I can teach you how to be a baseline wizard. We learned it from scratch, and we use it incredibly well.

I think it all comes back to how someone wants to work, how they want to learn, and where they want to do their work, and we’re open to any and all there.

Learn from leading B2B experts in every highlight of Social Pulse: B2B Edition.

Are there specific resources or communities that you recommend leaders go to if they’re looking to better understand and work with Gen Z teams?

Christian Brown: You know, I was really thinking about this.

It’s a tough question because the idea of communities, the idea of groups, the idea of whether it’s third spaces, digitally, physically, etc—there’s so many of them.

I personally think that for any and all things work-related, LinkedIn is quite literally the number one platform in the world. LinkedIn does a fantastic job with groups. They don’t promote the groups, but I’m a part of a plethora of creator economy groups, whether it’s creator economy, U.S. creator economy, or international jobs in the creator economy, hiring creator economy. These are all different groups that I’m a part of, and people are consistently posting there.

There’s a younger crew in there, and it’s a mix of people who are looking to hire within the Gen Z creator economy space and those who are fresh in this space, looking for a new role. Exploring those groups and spreading the web beyond like just posting a job listing somewhere, I think, is where you’re going to start to find people that are almost [hidden] away.

You wouldn’t just see a general job listing, and you’re going to find very specialized people. In some of these groups, I see someone say, I specialized in running Discord servers on behalf of community engagement at e-commerce companies or gaming companies. And that’s pretty niche. And they’re like, “I want a full-time role and I want to do this, this, this.” And I’m like, “Wow, that is incredible. I’m so proud of that person for knowing themselves that well at such a young age that they know exactly what role they want to be in.” And then there’s also people that are like, “Hey, I just left this school. Here are all my socials. I’ve done this, this, this, this, this, that love and entry-level role in the marketing department of any brand of these industries.” And you’ll see people that will chime in and be like, “Hey, we have these jobs open. We’d love to chat.”

I think that these communities and these groups are fantastic because it’s pre-vetted.

To be in that group or to have the want to be in that group, you have to speak the language and be a part of the same conversation. And so I think being able to find those groups, LinkedIn in specific, there’s a lot of Slack channels that are a little more deep cut. You’d have to know where to get and how to get into the Slack channels. I wouldn’t suggest that, but yeah, check out LinkedIn, there’s some Instagram groups, but just play on social media, you know, social media is a town hall and the conversation is happening 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I think it’s the greatest tool to come out of the last 25 years because it connects not only us with the world but the world with us.