From college club to $2M business ft. Dylan Huey

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

On Creator Spotlight, we are speaking with Dylan Huey. Dylan started working as a creator as a teenager, then joined a creator club at USC as a freshman, quickly became the president of that club, growing it to 5,000 student creators across 100 colleges today.

He tells us how he transitioned from student creator to entrepreneur and built a $2 million a year business that serves creators. How it all started from this nonprofit organization on his college campus.

Dylan Huey (0:26)

The nonprofit national organization side, led by me, we have an industry executive leadership board with different creator economy leaders. We also have a creator board with top creators in the creator economy.

So, I built that universe up, and I'm scaling and growing. And as brands continue to reach out to us on our student organization side, we weren't really able to facilitate opportunities and campaigns for those brands through our college student organization, because our nonprofit was really focused on education. There was no home for these brands to be able to work with college students and college influencers, except these brands did know that we had these college students conglomerated all in one little landscape. So, we built that for-profit side, I built that for-profit side as a way to be able to support this growing interest and outreach from students who wanted, or from brands that wanted to work with these students, and giving them that home through our for-profit side was that way. And so, I worked with a top Silicon Valley law firm to make sure that both sides are separate. We obviously didn't want them to feel like they're collusion, and there's overlap, because otherwise, it is hard to justify having a non-profit.

But we did really good.

Any other agency, like any other talent management company, like any other marketing agency, our student organization works with all of them, right? We have different marketing agencies come to speak at our reach chapters. We have different talent management companies that want to work with our creators, that want to sign our creators. So our non-profit student organization is agnostic in working with different agencies, different talent management companies. And as well, in our marketing agency, when we have campaigns that are focused on college students, we don't only go through our student organization. Obviously, that's a great foot in. But we really help brands in a very 360 front. And I think it's really the epitome of our ecosystem, the ecosystem that we've been able to build is just, we talk to culture and both sides talk to culture, right? Our student organization talks to culture through students every single day who are members of our organization, while our for-profit side talks in a array of different ways, but in completely different, net new and unique ways.

SPEAKER_1 (3:12)

Yeah. Okay. So the way this is born is you come into the organization and you're trying to better serve this group of students and let's get them these opportunities. But eventually, that just becomes such a operation that you need to start a company that, again, shares the name and like shares somewhat of a mission, but needs its own separate thing.

Dylan Huey (3:34)

Yeah. Well, also at the end of the day as well, most universities don't let student organizations be a for-profit business. Yeah. Right. So when we're facilitating deals, like the first year I took over as president at USC Reach, we worked with NASCAR and I love NASCAR, but we're not able to make sure that our creators are getting paid, but these are creators with large followings. So I wanted to make sure, and that's not to the fault of NASCAR, right? We just weren't able to do that because we weren't allowed to be a for-profit organization because of the restrictions of these universities.

SPEAKER_1 (4:07)

That's like name, image, and licensing is so new in college sports. There's a bit of a similarity here where it's like you can't really touch this.

Dylan Huey (4:14)

It's interesting because name, image, likeness, and NIL overall in college sports has opened that door, but student organizations still hasn't become a place that is able to make money. Individual college students are able to be reached out to, but we have a whole network that brands want to connect with. So this was kind of my solution into making sure that we're doing it in line with what universities will allow us to do, while not stepping on universities' toes and having them get mad, but also building a system where we can make sure because we have creators in our organization who have millions and millions of followers, we can't have them go do campaigns and collaborations with brands for not charging and not charging the brand, right? These students need to make money. And I felt like we would draw a fine line by staying a student organization, a 51C3, and wanting to make sure our creators are paid out. I felt like there would be a restriction on that. So that's why we went this way to make sure that universities just wouldn't be upset about us.