Building a product or getting people to discover it?

AI has made building faster than ever.

Distribution is still the bottleneck.

We're exploring a different approach with Peddlum: sellers, creators, and buyers in one marketplace.

Question for founders:

Would you rather spend:

A) $500 on ads and hope for sales

OR

The brand-finds-creator model is broken for anyone under 50k followers.

A decade ago, brand managers had time to scout creators. Today there are 10,000 creators per niche, and brand managers don't scout they hire agencies that work with the same 50 mega-accounts. The middle tier (5k 50k followers, where most engagement actually lives) gets ignored entirely.

If you're a creator in this gap your audience is real, your engagement is real, but your sponsorship inbox is mostly fake casting calls and ghosted DMs Peddlum is built for you.

How it works for creators:

I keep seeing the same tension with people selling digital products (templates, courses, UI kits, SaaS).

Platforms like Gumroad take ~10% but leave all the marketing on you. So you keep most of the money but spend your life making content, chasing affiliates, and praying the algorithm likes you that week.

The other extreme: pay agencies or influencer platforms a fortune to get UGC made, with no real attribution on whether it converted.

I've been building toward a middle path a marketplace where sellers keep 90%, but creators can opt into running UGC campaigns (TikTok/IG/YouTube) for your product, paid per task or per conversion, with affiliate-style tracking baked in. One wallet, one dashboard.

Selling digital products in 2026 has a hidden cost most marketplaces don't tell you about the marketing tax.

Platform fee (10 15%) + ad spend (CAC often higher than product price) + creator outreach (mostly ghosted) + affiliate tool subscriptions (separate platform, separate attribution). By the time you reach a buyer, half your sale is gone before you calculate it.

I built Peddlum to fix this. It's a digital marketplace where the creator marketing layer is built into the platform itself not a separate tool you have to plug in.

How it works for sellers:

Something I've noticed while talking to digital product sellers and creators:

A seller might use:

• Gumroad to sell

• Impact or ShareASale for affiliates

• Aspire or manual outreach for creators

• Discord/Telegram for communication

• Stripe for payouts

Meanwhile, creators are juggling: