This episode of The Marketing Factor, Austin Dandridge talked with Thomas Berolzheimer -- the business and strategy mind behind Julia Berolzheimer's brand, one of the longest-running creator brands on the internet. Thomas has been operating behind the scenes since before Instagram existed, obsessing over the analytics, running the experiments, and making the structural calls that kept a 15-year-old creator brand not just alive but relevant. He's now co-founder of Coreli, an AI-powered platform that builds a fully branded creator landing page from a single Instagram handle. This one is dense with tactical gems and sharp reframes. If you work in the creator economy, run a DTC brand, or build content for a living, block out the hour.
If you know how to sell this year, don't assume you know how to sell next year
Thomas and his team are currently the #2 earner on ShopMy. They've been top five on every affiliate platform they've ever committed to. They know how to sell. And his point is that knowing how to sell in 2026 tells him nothing about how to sell in 2027.
Every year, the team goes away. They break the whole operation down. Then they rebuild it and ask if what they're doing still makes sense. Sometimes the answer is rinse and repeat. Sometimes it's blow it up. That discipline of interrogating what's working while it's still working is what keeps a 15-year brand from becoming the Titanic in the Innovator's Dilemma -- the company that sees the iceberg but can't move because it's too busy servicing yesterday's customer.
If it's not broken, break it. That's how Thomas described his operating principle. It's a hard thing to actually do.
Instagram stories changed, and most creators haven't adapted
A few years ago, the move was simple: drop 10 links a day, tag fashion. It worked. Now Instagram story views have collapsed to roughly a fifth of what they were, and the whole mechanic has changed.
The new format looks more like a mini reel. Fifteen seconds to sell one thing. Not ten links, not five -- one. Then drop the link. The call-to-action has to be subliminal because people are completely numb to direct selling now.
Thomas's favorite tactic: Julia posts a mirror selfie, intentionally links only one item and leaves the pants unlinked. Ten to twenty people inevitably comment asking where the pants are. She screenshots those comments, puts them on the next slide, then posts the link. Now it's not her selling pants. It's social proof. Everyone wants them.
That's not a hack. That's a creator who actually studies her feed like a product.
Blaming the algorithm is a waste of time
Meta is a trillion-dollar company competing against other trillion-dollar companies for every second of attention. It owes creators nothing. The algorithm isn't suppressing you -- it's just showing people what keeps them on the app longest.
Thomas's take: stop negotiating with something that isn't listening. You're also not just competing against other creators anymore. You're competing against AI-generated content that's about to flood every channel. The only productive response is to get better at making something the algorithm has a reason to push.
The sponsored post reframe nobody talks about
When a brand pays you for a post, the instinct is to think your job is to sell their product. Thomas's take is more precise. The brand is probably spending 4x their influencer budget on Meta ads. Your real job is to get more people into their Meta system so they have more people to retarget.
When you understand that, you know how to negotiate. You know what they actually want. And you know what to charge.
That's not cynical. It's just accurate. Knowing where you actually sit on someone else's chessboard is how you play it better.
The 80/20 shoot
Thomas's team shoots every day. Eighty percent of that time is pure execution -- getting the video, the photos, the carousels, checking every box on a process they've refined over 15 years. The last twenty percent is pure experimentation. No brief, no expectation, just trying something completely different.
That's how they discovered their love for backlit photography. How the Hey Jules interview series was born -- now one of their most beloved franchises. How they stay ahead of whatever the industry is about to copy.
Most creators skip the twenty percent because they're exhausted by the time they get there. By the time you hit publish on something you've worked on for six months, you're so burned out you forget to add a CTA, forget to tag your partner, forget the whole reason you made the thing. That exhaustion isn't a personal failure -- it's the structural problem every creator and brand has to solve.
Founder-led content is the actual moat
Thomas made a point that's going to become more true every month: you can never pay a model or an actor enough to be on camera the way a founder is on camera. The founder is living the product. The founder has the real stories. AI can generate a near-perfect middle-ground video, so the middle ground is dead. What survives is humans with genuine insight and specific perspective.
That's why founder-led brands are pulling ahead. You're not watching a marketing campaign -- you're watching a TV show about someone building something. People can tell the difference. And conversion follows.
You can run conversion rate optimization on broken websites all day. If the story is good enough, the buy button still works.
AI isn't replacing the editor. It's replacing the scrub.
Thomas built a Claude skill that takes raw video footage, screenshots it every second, runs it against a training set of their top-performing reels analyzed by Gemini, and pulls the clips most likely to perform -- before a human editor ever opens the file.
Nobody on his team wanted to scrub through footage. When he asked his editor what she'd do with that time back, the answer was obvious: make more and better content. That's the right question to ask about every AI workflow. What does your best person actually do when you free them from the worst part of their job?
The creators and brands winning with AI aren't replacing creativity. They're removing the friction that exhausts it.
Long-form is underrated and about to matter more
Hot take from Thomas, and he meant it: if you're building content for your business and not just trying to go viral, start a podcast, start a YouTube, start a Substack, start a blog. Short-form gets the attention, but long-form is what AI agents index, what search can find, and what builds a real body of work that a brand can be discovered through.
You can always cut long-form down into short-form. You can't do it the other way around.