icon is (re)launching soon. we pivoted from ai ugc to normal ugc with humans in the loop it’s $399 for: * 6 human ugc ads filmed & edited (100% real / not AI) * we find creators, ship product, coach, & edit (2 creators × 3 ads) * agency whitelabel (we make ads for your clients) * admaker 2.0 software (8-products-in-1, replaces $10K /mo) * full refund if you’re not happy self-serve this with a 3-day free trial to get started alternatively our managed service offering starts at $2K /mo: * custom your deliverables (ugc, statics, media buying) * dedicated creative strategist * shared slack channel * email kennan@icon.com or dm me for a demo. I will personally demo some of these :-) 🫡🫡🫡

TIME's Platner patter: After decades of nominating buttoned-up technocrats with glittering résumés, many Democrats want candidates with flaws, faded ink, and redemption arcs that resemble their own. Platner’s past, in other words, may actually be his path. “Platner’s rise fits a moment where many Democrats feel the traditional playbook hasn’t worked, either politically or personally,” says admaker Jim Margolis, who advised Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “Democrats are willing to bet on someone who may have a few warts but feels fresh, unscripted, and tuned in. His ‘difference’ may well be his secret sauce.” newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim…

I wrote about him August 19 2025 and was definitely not part of any progressive herd anything. His campaign consultant/admaker was Morris Katz who was also working for Mamdani. Katz tweeted out the launch ad and I saw it and wrote about it. theeditors.com/p/the-enemy-i…

Somewhere a Dem admaker is furiously cutting midterm ads about the $1b ballroom and the $1.7b slush fund

If I was a Republican admaker I would just make a reel of stories like this to sink Gavin Newsom. What a comically mismanaged state.

OpenAI just shut down Sora. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised at all. When it launched, the whole internet was on fire. OpenAI positioned it as the “AI TikTok,” everyone was desperately hunting for invite codes. Sora pushed virtual avatars hard—turn yourself into a digital character and make videos to socialize. Backed by its early lead in video generation tech, it exploded: a million downloads in just five days, rocketing to #1 on the US App Store. For a moment, it felt like OpenAI was about to rewrite the entire short-video playbook. Viral spread isn’t the problem. The problem is the hype machine and the actual value the product can deliver don't line up. The video quality was genuinely the best out there. But that kind of growth can’t hold up a real social network. Social networks live on a flywheel: users create；content pulls in more users；they create even more. Sora’s flywheel never even started turning. Every single video cost a mountain of tokens. The experience wasn’t smooth, it was slow, jittery, and inconsistent. Most people couldn’t get one clip worth posting in a single session. Curiosity brought them in. One playthrough burned their credits, and they had zero reason to come back. Retention cratered from 30% to 1%. That wasn’t an ops failure. It was the growth path and the product shape that were never meant for each other. Worse still, every casual “let’s just try it” moment was burning real compute behind the scenes. The faster it grew, the faster the money disappeared—while revenue never caught up. OpenAI was reportedly spending $15 million a day just to keep the lights on, with GPU costs at $1.3 per 10-second video at the time. It all reminds me of Cluely. Cluely went nuclear with the “AI cheats for you in interviews and meetings” hook. Controversial clips sparked moral outrage, spread like wildfire, and pulled in a16z money. But outrage only attracts people who feel strongly about the topic, not people who actually need the product. Users showed up, only to discover the core feature “barely works.” Real-time suggestions lagged 5–10 seconds, hallucinations everywhere, accuracy in the gutter. Even founder Roy Lee admitted early on that the product “barely works.” All that noise across the internet…, and yet ARR was only $5.2 million. Similarly，Icon dropped $12M on the domain and launched with massive hype as the “world’s first AI Admaker and AI CMO,” claiming one-click ad generation, competitor creative cloning, and replacing entire creative agencies. Now，site’s down, team’s gone. Actually, most AI tools are just LLM wrappers with no high technical barriers. The real moat is finding your Product-Market Fit. Relying solely on vibe marketing will only be a flash in the pan. Sora，Icon and Cluely used completely different virality plays, but the fatal flaw was exactly the same: no real bridge between where their growth came from and the actual value the product could deliver. Viral spread itself isn’t the villain. The villain is when the story, the mechanics, and the delivered value are out of sync. Both Sora Icon and Cluely nailed the spread, using the wrong story to pull in the wrong crowd at massive scale. The bigger it got, the faster it burned, and the uglier the ending. In the AI era, growth isn’t about making more people know you exist. It’s about the right people finding you for the right reasons and then choosing to stay.

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Bro they’re back at it 😭😭 Now icon is a human admaker? These guys gotta be in some deep shit

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so Icon pivoted from AI Admaker to Admaker? 💀

🪦AI startup graveyard update: Icon.com — the "AI Admaker" — is dead. They spent $12M on a domain name before figuring out if anyone wanted their product. Reminder: @Google started on google.stanford.edu and @facebook started on thefacebook.com （Your brand isn't your URL. It's your product.）

He dropped $12M on a domain, raised from Peter Thiel, claimed $5M ARR in 30 days And the whole thing just went dark - @icon - Columbia dropout - YC S20 alum - solo-founded Skio (subscription management for Shopify) - scaled it to $25M ARR, profitable - engineer background: Hulu, Pinterest The guy had a real exit under his belt. Not a hype merchant but an actual builder Then came Icon. February 2025: - launches Icon as "the world's first AI Admaker" - pitches it as ChatGPT CapCut for ads - backed by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel) - investors include execs from OpenAI, Ramp, Cognition - total raise: $9.2M April 2025: - buys icon(.)com for $12 million - 6th largest public domain sale ever - posts "I want to make the $12M I spent on icon(.)com worth it" - claims $0 to $5M ARR in 30 days - says he'll beat the $0 to $100M ARR world record in under 12 months The energy was maxed out. League of Legends ranked player. 100-hour weeks. "I'll eat dog poop if it means winning" in the job description Then came the cracks: - job postings go viral for demanding 7-day work weeks - culture described as "will drive 99.99% of people crazy. And that's by design" - users start reporting billing and cancellation issues - a founder publicly says he had to cancel his credit card to stop getting charged - ad outputs underwhelm - by August 2025, the "AI-first" product quietly adds a $1,000/mo tier with real humans doing the work The pivot nobody talked about The AI couldn't actually replace the agency, so they became one March 2026: - icon(.)com shows "Authentication Required" - product is locked - no public announcement - no employees visible on LinkedIn - Levelsio posts it to X: "Icon, the AI Admaker, just went bankrupt" - 302K views in hours The math on this is brutal: - $12M on a domain as "brand strategy" - $9.2M in venture funding - aggressive scaling before product-market fit was proven - building in the most commoditized space in AI (ad creative) - every major AI lab ships better image and video gen every quarter The domain wasn't the problem, it was spending like you've won before you've proven the product works for anyone other than your pitch deck Kennan had something most founders would kill for A real track record. Real investors. Real credibility And he burned through all of it in a year by confusing velocity with product-market fit The AI ad space is a bloodbath right now. Every tool does roughly the same thing When your moat is a domain name and vibes, you're one bad quarter from "Authentication Required" Two companies, same founder, but completely different outcomes Skio: solo-founded, lean, profitable, $25M ARR, still running Icon: $21M deployed, massive hype, commoditized product, gone in 12 months The difference wasn't talent, it was discipline

Meet Kennan Davison - Accepted to university but dropped out at age 19 to pursue entrepreneurship - Highly ranked competitive gamer, placing in the Top 200 in North America for League of Legends - Solo-founded Skio in 2021, a subscription management platform for Shopify brands that reportedly reached $15M–$25M in ARR - Founded Icon.me in late 2024, the "first AI CMO" and "AI Admaker" - Secured approximately $25 million in seed funding from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Saquon Barkley, and executives from OpenAI - Purchased Icon.com domain for $12 million in April 2025 - Demanded 7-day workweeks and bragged on social media about his team "eating glass" and working 24/7 - After raising millions, the company began offering human-led services instead of AI - The website (for which the company reportedly paid $12.5 million) now displays an "Authentication Required" page - Put his photo on the brand’s official X page and disappeared like he never existed

Icon, the AI Admaker, was our top 3 marketing channel in Q2 last year. Sad to see them go.

Icon, the AI Admaker, just went bankrupt They paid $12M for the domain Icon.com and now it's dead

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Google saw Icon Admaker gave up and decided to take their entire TAM 24 hours later

Working Behind the Scenes in Iran | Prof. Zaki Shalom in an interview with Yaki Admaker and Israel Cohen on Radio Kol Barama: “The American perception says that if we don’t prepare a new government to replace the regime, we haven’t done anything — and American intelligence agencies, and I can estimate that we [Israel] as well, are doing work behind the scenes to prepare the infrastructure.” Me: This conforms with what I’ve been hearing.