Entrepreneurial Spirit: Co-Founders Launch TikTok Agency
By DeHub Team — 2024-01-09
In Q2 2024 co-founders Mike Hales and Indi Cammish opened a TikTok agency in partnership with TikTok executives directly, following a year in which they topped the UK stream charts earning around £1,000 a day.
The obvious question
Why are the founders of a decentralised streaming platform building a business on the most centralised streaming platform there is?
The answer is that you cannot credibly build for creators without being one.
Mike and Indi were not observing the live-streaming economy. They were at the top of it in the UK, on the platform where it is largest, earning at a level that only happens if you understand the format properly. Our team collectively holds over half a million followers and has run a leading social media agency alongside the platform work.
That produces knowledge you cannot get from research. What actually drives a gift. Why a stream dies at a particular point. What a creator's income really looks like month to month, and how much of it depends on decisions made by a platform they have no relationship with.
What the agency is
A TikTok official partner agency, built in direct partnership with TikTok executives — not an unofficial operation. It represents live streamers, and by Q4 2024 it had grown to 1,000 exclusively signed streamers and become the UK's largest.
The uncomfortable part
DeHub's argument is that centralised platforms take too much and can change terms unilaterally. The agency's business is helping creators succeed on exactly such a platform.
We do not think that is hypocrisy, but it is a tension and it should be named rather than smoothed over.
The position is this: creators exist where the audience is, and telling them to abandon their income on principle is advice from people who are not paying their bills. What you can do is help them earn now, understand the risk they are carrying, and give them somewhere to go that does not have the same structure. The agency does the first two. DeHub is the third.
What it gave the platform
A thousand working streamers, whose actual problems shape what we build.
Institutional credibility. The partnerships across 15 countries established that quarter were considerably easier to open as the people running the UK's top agency.
A permanent reality check. It is very hard to ship a bad creator tool when a thousand creators are one message away.
Why it did not stall DeHub
Because the team had been distributed with real ownership since 2021. A company where two founders are the critical path cannot survive them building something else. That structure is why this was possible, and it is a fair test of whether the delegation was ever real.
What the agency taught us that research could not
Three things, all of which changed the product.
Income is lumpy and terrifying. A creator's monthly earnings vary enormously for reasons they cannot control or predict, and that instability shapes every decision they make about which platform to invest time in. Features that offer predictability are worth more than features that offer upside.
Support response time is a product feature. When a payout is wrong, a creator is not experiencing a bug, they are experiencing a threat to their rent. Platforms are judged on this far more than on capability.
Most creators are not technical and do not want to be. Every step that requires understanding a wallet is a step where a meaningful percentage stop, regardless of what is on the other side.