Nov 6, 2026 · 47 min
Crowd turns everyday consumers into an offline marketing network
Why You Need to Forget Your "Mistakes" and Focus on Your Next Thing
The episode examines whether digitally organized real-world participation can give brands better sampling, research, and customer acquisition as AI accelerates product creation.
- 1Crowd recruits targeted everyday consumers for store visits, product trials, events, research, and feedback.
- 2Incentives can produce useful marketing outcomes when campaigns reach people likely to value and use the product.
- 3Ryan Chen’s earlier ventures, setbacks, and hiring challenges became operating experience for building Crowd.
Don't miss
Ryan Chen imagines Crowd becoming an activation layer for AI products, recruiting human users to test apps, attend events, and generate feedback.
The brief
Ryan Chen describes Crowd, a platform that organizes everyday people—not just influencers—for product trials, store visits, events, research, and feedback.
The model treats offline activity as programmable infrastructure: targeted participants can help brands overcome cold starts, fill venues, test products, and generate customer insight.
Gary Vaynerchuk and Chen debate whether paying people undermines authenticity, concluding that targeting and conversion matter more than whether participation begins with an incentive.
The standout idea arrives when Chen positions Crowd as an activation layer for the AI app era, supplying the human testers that easy app creation will make essential.
Chen’s account of music, mobile apps, fundraising, hiring, and near-quit moments reframes failure as accumulated operating knowledge for building the next company.
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