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Making Selling Easier Than Buying: Aaron Day’s GTM Playbook at Amaze

Most founders burn their early runway trying to manufacture distribution from scratch. Aaron Day started with a blueprint.

Three years at Canva gave him a front-row seat to one of the more unconventional growth stories in SaaS. While competitors were stacking ad spend and chasing SEO rankings, Canva was getting embedded inside FedEx, Staples, and Office Depot — platforms with tens of millions of small business users already inside them. The partnerships paid Canva to be there. The users showed up because they were already there. “Instead of having to spend enormous amounts of money on paid media and SEO and all those other things that traditional software companies do to get brand exposure, Canva got it through partnerships that paid them.”

When Aaron launched Amaze in September 2021 — a social commerce platform enabling creators to sell directly inside YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Discord — he knew exactly what he was looking for. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, he walked through what happened next, and why the GTM story that unfolded looks nothing like what he planned.

Every Integration Target Became an Acquisition

Aaron’s early strategy was straightforward: find high-volume platforms where creators were already building audiences and integrate Amaze’s commerce engine into their ecosystems. He approached Teespring. He approached several others with strong distribution and existing creator relationships.

Every single one needed to be bought.

“Within a couple months, every company that we approached that we thought had high volume distribution capabilities at a low cost for Amaze all ended up needing to be bought.”

Post-Covid had created a specific and exploitable dynamic. These companies had ridden the pandemic wave, built real user bases and distribution infrastructure, and were now stranded without a viable forward model. The asset value was real. The operational situation was not. For Aaron, the calculus shifted fast: a partnership can be unwound; an acquisition locks in the distribution permanently.

Teespring — later rebranded as Spring — was the most consequential move. The brand had genuine recognition in the creator space and meaningful reach. The technology needed significant rebuilding. “We spent two years really working on it. Spent a lot of money to fix some of the underlying pieces of it.” Aaron was clear-eyed about the cost. The strategic logic held: Amaze needed distribution at scale, and buying it outright collapsed years of partnership dependency and renegotiation risk into a single transaction.

A smaller acquisition of a London-based company called Outfits followed the same logic at the infrastructure level — they had already completed the difficult work of checkout and catalog integration with platforms like Bolt, saving Amaze material engineering time during an early and capital-constrained build phase.

What TikTok Shop Actually Revealed

The most operationally significant insight Aaron shares has nothing to do with acquisitions. It comes from what Amaze observed as the first company in beta to integrate with TikTok Shop in North America.

Most brands think about TikTok as a content distribution platform with a commerce layer bolted on. Aaron saw something more structurally important. “Not only do I accelerate the algorithm, but I accelerate the affiliate. And that means more and more people can sell the product that I’m promoting if they like it. So what you do is you go from 1 to 100, very fast in promoting a product.”

The mechanic matters. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t reward content creation and commerce separately — it compounds them. When a creator sells, the platform simultaneously amplifies their content reach and expands the affiliate layer, enabling other creators to organically pick up and sell the same product. The distribution effect multiplies without additional spend. This is categorically different from traditional affiliate programs, where each new seller requires its own recruitment and activation.

Aaron’s conclusion is direct: “Every brand needs to become a media company. Because a media company can take advantage of affiliate acceleration.” The brands that understand this and build authentic creator communities on top of it will operate at a cost-of-distribution that conventional acquisition models cannot match.

The Consolidation Play

Amaze today has 14 million users who have launched stores, adding three to four thousand new ones daily with minimal paid acquisition driving it. The organic growth is real, but the business Aaron is building toward requires a different kind of discipline than acquisition.

He is now collapsing the portfolio — multiple acquired brands, technologies, and separate product identities — into a single unified Amaze Commerce platform. The strategic reasoning goes beyond simplicity. “SEO optimization, paid media optimization, brand partnerships — everything will become much easier now.”

This is a point worth sitting with. Running acquired brands as separate entities doesn’t just create operational complexity — it actively fragments every growth lever. Separate SEO footprints compete with each other. Separate paid media budgets dilute concentration. Separate brand identities confuse partnership conversations. Consolidation isn’t cleanup. It’s a compounding GTM event that unlocks efficiency across every channel simultaneously.

The Model Disruption Underneath

The longer arc of what Aaron is building points at something more significant than a commerce platform. His stated internal goal is to make selling easier than buying. The mechanism to get there is shifting the underlying economics of how creators monetize.

“The idea of saying, hey, promote my product on Amazon and get 3% of that changes to, hey, sell my product on my site and make 20% of that. There’s a model shift changing that we’re driving.”

The current affiliate model — built around Amazon’s infrastructure and commission structure — extracts most of the value at the platform level and leaves creators with thin margins and no relationship with the buyer. Aaron’s thesis is that the combination of frictionless selling tools, platform affiliate acceleration, and direct creator-to-audience commerce flips that equation. Creators capture more margin. Brands get distribution at lower cost. The platform sitting in the middle of that exchange — Amaze — becomes structurally embedded in how the creator economy monetizes.

For B2B founders, the through-line isn’t specific to social commerce. It’s an orientation: identify the structural gap a large behavioral shift creates, position inside it before the market names it, and build distribution through the platforms your users already inhabit rather than spending to pull them somewhere new. Aaron didn’t invent the creator economy. He built the monetization layer it was missing.