Nicole (Nico) Santos works in retail and e-commerce, with experience spanning operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales. Santos is now building a company focused on commerce and merchant problems, and writes about customer-first business, collaboration and the role of relationships in commerce.
Nicole (Nico) Santos works across retail and e-commerce and is now building a company focused on commerce and merchant problems.
In LinkedIn posts, Santos describes a career spanning retail operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales, beginning with seven years at Nordstrom.
The work centers on customer needs, trust, collaboration and building commerce with merchants and founders—not just for them.
Santos also writes about social commerce, creator partnerships and community, and has spoken at a Social Commerce News summit.
The supplied material does not identify a signature book, show or earlier named business; targeted research into those areas would help answer broader name-search questions.
Santos connects a long retail career to a relationship-led view of commerce.
A post reflecting on 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom explains how serving customers and working across departments shaped priorities such as putting the customer first and taking ownership.
More recent posts apply that perspective to current questions: understanding merchants’ problems, building alongside founders, and creating communities that extend beyond a transaction.
The strongest reason to follow Santos is this bridge between hands-on retail experience and an emerging view of social commerce and merchant technology.
Not every post is analysis of commerce: some mainly celebrate professional relationships or promote an industry event.
Those posts show the importance Santos places on connection and participation, but provide less detail about the company being built or its product.
Nicole (Nico) Santos writes about commerce as a relationship business.
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Across nine retained LinkedIn posts, Santos argues that understanding merchants, their teams, their customers and the problems making their jobs harder matters more than reach; that AI can speed work up but cannot replace trust; and that products and ecosystems should be built alongside founders rather than handed to them. Santos traces that view to seven years at Nordstrom and a career since in operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales, and is now building a company with pilot partners, framing good collaboration as an ecosystem rather than a one-off deal.
Relationships, not reach, are what actually sell
Santos's most repeated argument is that commerce runs on relationships rather than audience size.
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The version Santos uses is "relationship led selling": understanding the merchant, their team, their customers and the problems slowing those teams down.
Speed is treated as a tool, not an answer — AI can make a person faster, but it cannot replace trust.
The same idea recurs when Santos asks what community looks like once the purchase has been made, and when reflecting that industries and technology change while the people you meet stay with you.
Recounting a meeting with a brand Santos calls a favourite in the industry and a top-10 name in the Shopify ecosystem, and which will be among the first pilots for the new venture, Santos writes: "Understanding the merchant, their team, their customers, and the problems making their jobs harder will always matter. AI can make us faster, but it can't replace trust."
The thread is consistent across the set rather than a recent turn. In an earlier post about Anjulei Aurelio, COO of We're Not Really Strangers, Santos writes that industries evolve and technology changes, but the friendships built along the way can last for years — the same argument aimed at people rather than platforms.
Santos argues that the companies serving entrepreneurs should treat founders as collaborators instead of a market to sell into.
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Citing a Shopify statistic that 54% of businesses on the platform are run by women, Santos turns the number into a design question rather than a celebration: what if the industry spent less time building for founders and more time building alongside them — listening, collaborating, bringing different perspectives to the table?
The stated conclusion is that the best ideas are built through connection, not in isolation.
Santos credits women founders and the men who have mentored, championed and invested in women-led businesses.
After a conversation with Jennifer Villalba, which Santos frames around the two being first-generation Latina Americans, the takeaway is described as "the importance of building for the right reasons. Not just chasing revenue, but solving real-world problems, creating meaningful impact, and making a difference in people's lives."
Customer-first craft is learned on the retail floor
Santos locates their operating principles in an early retail career rather than in technology.
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Marking 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom, Santos describes seven years there learning from people in retail, working with brands, serving customers and selling across departments, and names the lessons that stuck: put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious, create with excellence. A later path through operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales is presented as the reason for a wider view of commerce — the retail grounding is the origin story the other arguments rest on.
"The lessons from those early years have stayed with me and continue to shape how I work and build today: put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious and create with excellence," Santos writes, closing the post with an open invitation to send a direct message about current e-commerce and retail work.
Santos argues the opportunity in commerce is larger than the sale: ecosystems in which brands, partners and consumers participate in something together.
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Vendors, merchants and consumers are described as all looking for more meaningful connection, and the question Santos keeps returning to is what building community beyond the business deal, or beyond the moment a purchase is made, actually looks like. The same instinct shows in Santos's industry-event posts, which gather founders, brands, retailers, platforms and technology leaders around creator commerce and partnerships, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, AI and live shopping, and treat Utah as a fast-growing hub for consumer brands and creator-led businesses.
After a conversation with Haley Kelly, co-founder of Yeco, about community, Santos asks "what does it look like to build community beyond the business deal or the moment a purchase is made?" and answers that "the opportunity feels bigger than transactions. It's about creating ecosystems where brands, partners, and consumers can participate in something together."
The current chapter is being built in public, with pilot partners
Santos writes openly about a new season of building and about who is coming along with it.
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The posts are first-person progress updates: a return to the entrepreneurial world, a named brand as an early pilot, a stated partnership with Yeco and its team, a keynote slot promoted to a local audience.
They typically close with an invitation to connect directly.
This is a signal of stage and openness rather than a documented commercial offer — no sponsorship, paid-post format or rate card appears anywhere in the reviewed posts.
"It feels good to be back in the entrepreneurial world, building again and feeling aligned with what I'm meant to be doing," Santos writes, crediting Autumn Davis with the lesson "if you want to do hard things, surround yourself with great people."
It answers where Santos's view of commerce comes from.
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Every later post about merchants, trust and relationships builds on this retail-floor origin, so this is the natural first stop for a newcomer.
Santos marks 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom, describing the first seven years of a career there as time spent learning from people in retail, working with brands, serving customers and selling across departments at what the post calls the number one store in the company in Orange County.
The post then traces a path through operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales, which Santos credits for a wider view of commerce, and names the lessons carried forward: put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious, create with excellence.
It closes with an open invitation to send a direct message about current e-commerce and retail work.
For brands planning a campaign
For a social commerce software brief, this is the post to quote when proposing a collaboration framed around retail operations and customer experience rather than platform tactics alone. It also signals that Santos is comfortable being approached directly, which shortens the first-contact step.
It is the only post in the set that names an in-progress project and its first customer.
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A reader who wants to know what Santos is doing right now, rather than what shaped them, should open this one.
Santos describes meeting with an unnamed brand described as a favourite in the industry and a top ten brand in the Shopify ecosystem, and states that the brand will be among the first pilots for something Santos is launching.
The post links that moment to a stated belief in relationship-led selling: understanding the merchant, their team, their customers and the problems making their jobs harder.
It ends with the line that AI can make people faster but cannot replace trust, and a question about building an ecosystem that solves hard problems for merchants and their teams.
For brands planning a campaign
Santos is at a pre-launch or early-pilot stage, so a partnership is more likely to be accepted as a design-partner or early-pilot arrangement than as a standard sponsorship. Messages that pair AI-enabled speed with a trust argument match the framing already in use.
This is the clearest statement of the product philosophy behind the company Santos is building, and it explains why so many other posts are about listening and collaboration rather than features.
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Citing a Shopify figure that 54% of businesses on its platform are run by women, Santos connects the statistic to years spent in retail and tech and to building a company, and notes having worked alongside women founders as well as men who have mentored, championed and invested in women-led businesses.
The post turns that into a design question: what if the industry spent less time building for founders and more time building alongside them, listening, collaborating and bringing different perspectives to the table.
The conclusion is that the best ideas are built through connection rather than in isolation.
For brands planning a campaign
An approach that treats the creator as a co-designer of the collaboration, with room to shape the brief, fits this stated philosophy better than a fully specified deliverable. Audiences of women-led and founder-run merchants are a live concern in the work, which is useful for partnership positioning.
It shows the commercial direction: ecosystems and partnerships rather than one-off deals.
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A reader evaluating campaign fit should see how Santos talks about partnership before deciding whether the fit is transactional or longer-term.
After a conversation with Haley Kelly, co-founder of Yeco, Santos writes that the recurring theme was community, with vendors, merchants and consumers all looking for more meaningful connection.
The post asks what building community beyond the business deal or the moment of purchase looks like, and argues the opportunity is bigger than transactions: creating ecosystems where brands, partners and consumers participate in something together.
Santos states being grateful to be partnering with Yeco and its team.
For brands planning a campaign
Co-marketing and ecosystem-style partnerships, where both sides bring a community rather than a single placement, are the natural shape here. Note that the post states a working partnership with Yeco, so a brief should account for existing commitments rather than assume an open calendar.
It is the only dated item in the set and the best evidence of Santos's industry presence and working vocabulary.
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A newcomer can use it to judge which conversations Santos is already part of.
Santos announces that the Social Commerce News summit is coming to Salt Lake City and describes having spoken at the summit's New York City edition the previous July, alongside founders, brands, retailers, platforms and technology leaders.
The post lists the subjects it recommends to prospective attendees: creator commerce and partnerships, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, AI, live shopping and the next wave of consumer engagement, and frames Utah as a fast-growing hub for consumer brands, creator-led businesses and e-commerce innovation.
It gives a date of September 16, 2026 at the Young Living Global Headquarters in Salt Lake City, notes that brands attend free by application, and directs interested people to a named contact.
For brands planning a campaign
Event-linked thought leadership is a credible option, and a collaboration could be timed to a social commerce gathering rather than to a product launch. The topic list also identifies the vocabulary Santos already uses in public, which is useful when drafting a joint session or article.
It explains the test Santos applies to the people and companies they work with.
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A reader who wants to know what kind of partner Santos would want should read this before forming a proposal.
Writing after meeting Jennifer Villalba, Santos notes the two connected as first-generation Latina Americans and centres the conversation on what it means to lead with intention rather than ambition.
The stated takeaway is the importance of building for the right reasons: not chasing revenue alone but solving real-world problems, creating impact and making a difference.
Santos praises Villalba for bringing people together in the customer experience community and for amplifying other people's voices.
For brands planning a campaign
A proposal that leads with a concrete customer problem and a measurable outcome will read better than one that leads with reach or revenue targets. The post also shows a connection into customer experience communities, which matters if the brief touches support, retention or merchant success.
Named people and conversations as the content format itself6
Relationship-led selling and community beyond the transaction3
Early-stage building, pilots and partner recruitment3
Social and creator commerce as a running industry beat2
Building alongside founders, not just for them2
Customer-first retail craft from a Nordstrom grounding1
Relationship-led selling and community beyond the transaction
Santos keeps returning to relationships as the mechanism that makes commerce work: understanding the merchant, their team, their customers and the problems slowing them down.
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A recent post describes catching up with a top-10 Shopify ecosystem brand and calls the approach "relationship led selling," with the line that AI can make work faster but cannot replace trust. Elsewhere Santos asks what it looks like to build community past the business deal or the moment a purchase is made, describing ecosystems where brands, partners and consumers participate in something together.
First-person recounting of a specific meeting, followed by an open question that frames the theme.
For brands planning a campaign
Strongest fit for merchant-facing or community-led partnership briefs where the pitch is about trust, retention and ecosystems rather than reach. A collaboration is likely to be framed as a conversation about a merchant problem, not a product demo.
Customer-first retail craft from a Nordstrom grounding
Santos marks 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom and describes seven years of learning there, working with brands, serving customers and selling across departments at what the post calls the number-one store in the company in Orange County.
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The post traces a career since then through operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales, and names the lessons that stuck: put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious, create with excellence.
Career retrospective anchored to one concrete memory and a short list of operating principles.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful for retail and e-commerce advisory content, service design or training-flavoured collaborations, and for briefs that need someone who can speak to store-level customer experience as well as technology.
Social and creator commerce as a running industry beat
Santos posts about the social commerce circuit, including speaking at a Social Commerce News summit in New York and promoting the Salt Lake City edition at Young Living's headquarters on September 16, 2026.
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The Salt Lake post points attendees toward creator commerce and partnerships, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, AI and live shopping, calling social commerce a roughly $100B industry and Utah a fast-growing hub for consumer brands and creator-led businesses. A separate post covers a Social Commerce News LA session on the creator economy and Korean beauty trends.
Event participation and recap posts, with named speakers and a direct route to attendance.
For brands planning a campaign
Good fit for event-adjacent thought leadership, conference programming, or creator-economy content aimed at brands and retailers. Santos can credibly place a partnership inside an existing industry conversation rather than create one from scratch.
A women-in-commerce post cites Shopify's figure that 54% of businesses on its platform are run by women, then moves to a design question: what if the industry spent less time building for founders and more time building alongside them, listening and collaborating.
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Santos describes years in retail and tech, now building an own company, and credits women founders alongside the men who have mentored, championed and invested in women-led businesses. A separate post about a conversation with Jennifer Villalba, framed around the two being first-generation Latina Americans, echoes the same theme of leading with intention rather than ambition and lifting people up.
Industry statistic used as a springboard into a first-person position, plus reflection on a named peer conversation.
For brands planning a campaign
Strong for founder-targeted B2B SaaS, community-first product narratives, or campaigns with a diversity-in-commerce angle. The collaboration would likely centre on how a tool is built with merchants rather than sold to them.
Early-stage building, pilots and partner recruitment
Santos writes about being back in the entrepreneurial world and feeling aligned with the work, and about a top-10 Shopify ecosystem brand that will be among the first pilots for what Santos is launching.
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A post about Haley Kelly of Yeco announces an active partnership and shared thinking on thoughtful collaboration. Posts close with invitations to connect by direct message.
Progress updates on a new venture, with named pilot partners and an explicit call to get in touch.
No sponsorship, paid-post format, or rate card is documented anywhere in the reviewed posts, so any commercial terms would need to be established directly.
For brands planning a campaign
Timely for early-adopter or pilot-style partnerships, since Santos is actively recruiting collaborators and testing with named brands. Treat the pilot talk as a signal of stage and openness, not as proof of a finished commercial product.
Named people and conversations as the content format itself
Much of the reviewed writing is built around a specific person and a recent conversation: Jennifer Villalba in customer experience, Haley Kelly of Yeco, Anjulei Aurelio of We're Not Really Strangers, Norman Chu and Rashmi Paul at Social Commerce News, Autumn Davis in an entrepreneurship post.
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The posts are short, first-person and reflective, usually closing on a question or a lesson rather than a promotion, and Santos states a preference for nurturing relationships as industries and technology change.
Conversation recap plus a takeaway or open question; the relationship is the subject, not a backdrop.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand partnership is most likely to surface as a conversation, introduction or shout-out to a named person, which suits co-marketing and founder-story formats better than scripted product content.
Nicole (Nico) Santos's posts document a small number of named business connections rather than a sponsorship roster.
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The clearest are Nordstrom, described as where she spent the first seven years of her career, and Yeco, which she says she is partnerng with.
Santos has appeared at Social Commerce News events in New York and Los Angeles and promotes that group's Salt Lake City summit.
Shopify shows up as a cited data point and an ecosystem reference rather than a disclosed commercial tie; she also refers to an unnamed top-10 brand "in the Shopify ecosystem" as an early pilot for what she is launching but does not name the company.
None of the reviewed posts discloses a sponsorship, affiliate arrangement, or investment.
Nordstrom
Employment
Santos writes that Nordstrom is where she "grew up in the industry," working the first seven years of her career there and selling across departments at what she describes as the company's #1 store in Orange County.
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This is a past employment relationship, not a current one; the post gives no end date.
After meeting with Yeco co-founder Haley Kelly, Santos says she is "partnering with Yeco and their team" and that they are aligned on "what thoughtful collaboration can look like."
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The post does not state contract terms, scope, duration, or whether the partnership is paid.
Santos says she spoke at the group's New York City summit in July and encourages Utah contacts to attend its Salt Lake City event on September 16, 2026, where she points readers to apply or reserve seats.
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In a separate post she describes hearing speakers at a Social Commerce News LA event. A speaking appearance and event promotion, with no sponsorship or payment disclosed.
Shopify appears as a cited data source: Santos repeats Shopify's figure that 54% of businesses on its platform are run by women, adds the #Shopify hashtag, and frames part of her own building work around who commerce technology serves.
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No commercial relationship with Shopify is disclosed.
Nicole (Nico) Santos publishes short, first-person posts on LinkedIn about commerce as a relationship business.
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The argument is consistent: understanding merchants, their teams and their customers matters more than reach, AI can speed work up but cannot replace trust, and community should outlast the transaction.
The easiest way in is the run of posts built around a single named conversation — Jennifer Villalba on customer experience, Haley Kelly of Yeco on community, Anjulei Aurelio of We're Not Really Strangers on relationships that outlast industries — followed by the industry-event posts on social commerce, creator commerce, TikTok Shop and live shopping, and the career reflection marking 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom, which grounds the rest.
The most current posts describe building again with pilot partners and invite direct messages, so they read as progress updates rather than a product pitch.
Nothing in the reviewed posts shows a paid format, rate card or sponsorship arrangement, so any commercial terms would have to be established directly.
Works the same creator and social commerce beat and asks the same organising question: how brands should structure themselves around creators rather than around teams.
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Gutfreund's post on fragmentation describes how one company mistook its own paid campaign for organic enthusiasm, which is the same failure of understanding that Santos attributes to reach-first selling. Both publish around the Social Commerce News events and both write for brands and retailers rather than consumers.
Gutfreund reports: a national opportunity figure, named executives, quotes from LTK's president and a WPP Media executive, and a Forbes piece behind it.
Santos writes short personal accounts of a single meeting and closes on an open question.
If you want data and industry sources, read Gutfreund; if you want the merchant-relationship view in first person, read Santos.
Also writes about creator commerce and live shopping, and lands on a similar conclusion from the opposite direction: that as more of the commerce machine is automated, human taste, trust and entertainment become more valuable.
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Wang's point that entertainment, marketing, creators and e-commerce are ceasing to be separate parts of the funnel matches Santos's argument that ecosystems, not transactions, are the opportunity.
Wang writes as an operator who led TikTok LIVE UK, using China GMV statistics, Meituan digital-host results and UK LIVE growth to argue about where the market is going. Santos writes from the brand and merchant relationship side with no platform data, which makes Wang the better source for market structure and Santos the better source for the people doing the selling.
Treats relationships and customer outcomes as the actual work rather than job titles or renewals, and posts community and event recaps from the same Utah business scene Santos speaks in.
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Munk's account of reshaping customer success from reactive support to guiding customer journeys overlaps with Santos's insistence that understanding a merchant, their team and their problems is what matters.
Munk's frame is the customer success function — how CS and account management differ, what proactive engagement looks like — and the reviewed posts date to late 2024.
Santos's frame is commerce and creator partnerships, with more recent posts about events and a new venture.
Read Munk for post-sale customer work, Santos for pre-sale partnership and ecosystem building.
The available evidence supports a LinkedIn-first placement aimed at commerce, retail and e-commerce professionals, and it gives a buyer one measured audience figure rather than a demographic profile.
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Santos's posts cover creator commerce and TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, live shopping, Shopify merchants, social-commerce summits and partnership conversations, and they consistently frame commercial decisions around relationships, community and merchant problems.
That is content appeal — the topics and register a commerce audience engages with — not proof of who is actually in the audience.
No platform demographic export, audience survey or post-level performance data was supplied, so geography, age, gender, employer, job function and seniority are unverified for this audience.
The one measurable audience number is the LinkedIn follower count captured on 9 October 2026, which shows reach on a single professional network and says nothing about engagement, composition or how those followers are distributed geographically.
For a B2B SaaS company selling into social commerce, the practical next step is to request recent results on comparable topics and formats — social commerce, creator and affiliate partnerships, retail technology — together with any audience survey or platform analytics covering the buyer's target market, and to base the campaign decision on those numbers rather than on follower count alone.
LinkedIn followers
16,692
Creator's LinkedIn profile follower count as recorded in the supplied research packet (profile: linkedin.com/in/nicotsantos) · 2026-10-09
The reviewed material documents partnership activity in a business-development sense rather than a published creator-sponsorship program.
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Santos writes about partnering with Yeco and its team, about a brand in the Shopify ecosystem becoming one of the first pilots for what Santos is launching, and about speaking at a Social Commerce News summit in New York while promoting the Salt Lake City edition.
Across the posts, the recurring method is relationship-led selling: understanding the merchant, their team and their customers, and treating AI as an accelerant rather than a replacement for trust.
What is not present is any public sponsorship offer, rate card, deliverable list, platform specification, or stated partnership inquiry route.
The reviewed posts contain no disclosure of a paid sponsorship and no description of how a brand would commission work.
For a buyer, that means collaboration terms are undocumented in the available evidence: the practical next step is a direct conversation rather than a form or published package.
This reflects what the reviewed material does and does not show; it is not a finding that Santos never accepts sponsorships.
A social-commerce software company selling to Shopify merchants and their partner agencies wants a short thought-leadership collaboration: a co-authored piece and one live or recorded conversation that argues partnership and community matter more than any single placement, aimed at merchant success and agency audiences.
Reasons
The pitch is already the creator's own argument. Their posts return repeatedly to relationship-led selling — understanding the merchant, their team, their customers and the problems making their jobs harder — and to the line that AI can make people faster but cannot replace trust. A tooling company that wants merchant trust as its message can hand the brief to someone who writes that way without prompting.
They write from a documented retail and operations background rather than from platform commentary alone, including seven years at Nordstrom across brands, customers and departments and later work in operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales. That grounding supports merchant-facing content better than a purely tactical account would.
Their public vocabulary matches the buyer's market. They post about creator commerce and partnerships, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, AI, live shopping, Shopify merchants and social-commerce summits, so a joint piece lands inside an existing conversation rather than needing to be introduced.
They are open to direct contact and are actively recruiting early collaborators, writing that a top-ten Shopify ecosystem brand will be among the first pilots for what they are launching and inviting people to send a direct message. A design-partner or early-collaboration framing is more realistic here than a fully specified sponsorship package.
A consumer packaged-goods brand wants a paid affiliate and TikTok Shop content sprint: a fixed number of product-led videos with tracked codes, timed to a three-week sales window, judged on conversion.
Reasons
The supplied material is short-form professional writing on one network, not shoppable video. There are no video posts, transcripts or affiliate links in the reviewed content, so there is no evidence of the format the brief depends on.
No sponsorship offer, rate card, deliverable list or platform specification appears in any reviewed post, and no paid sponsorship is disclosed. Commercial terms would have to be built from scratch in conversation, which is a poor starting point for a fixed-window sprint that needs deliverables agreed quickly.
The audience evidence does not support a conversion judgment. The only available figure is a LinkedIn follower count of 16,692 observed on 9 October 2026, with no engagement rate, no per-post performance and no demographic data. A brief judged on tracked sales cannot be assessed from reach on a single professional network.
The creator's stated method works against the brief's shape. They describe building alongside founders rather than for them, listening and collaborating, and treat partnership as community beyond the transaction. A scripted, product-first sprint with rigid deliverables asks them to work in the register their own posts argue against.
A joint session and follow-up article for a social-commerce software company, built around a merchant problem the buyer's tool is meant to solve, with the creator as co-author and interviewer rather than as a promotional voice.
Open with the merchant problem, not the product: pick one concrete task where a merchant team loses time or trust — for example onboarding a new affiliate or creator partner — and frame the session around how that work is currently done badly.
Use the retail origin as the first section. The creator's own account of seven years at Nordstrom and the lessons carried forward — put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious, create with excellence — gives the piece a firsthand spine that a product blog cannot supply.
Pair AI speed with a trust argument in the body, since that is the frame already in public use. The creator's own line is that AI can make us faster but cannot replace trust; a vendor should be prepared for that framing rather than a feature-led script.
Record one conversation with a named merchant or partner from the creator's existing network and publish it as the companion piece. Their posts are built around specific named people and recent conversations — a Yeco co-founder, customer-experience and social-commerce operators — and the relationship is usually the subject rather than a backdrop.
Time the collaboration to a social-commerce gathering. They speak at and promote Social Commerce News events, including a New York edition in July and a Salt Lake City edition at Young Living's headquarters on September 16, 2026, which gives a natural publication hook and an audience already assembled.
Position the arrangement as a pilot or design partnership in the first message. They are early in building their own company and are openly signing first pilots, so an offer to shape the brief together will read better than a delivered package; treat the in-progress project as a signal of stage and openness, not as proof of a finished product.
Choose Jamie Gutfreund when the same brief needs category-level evidence and an audience already assembled rather than a merchant-relationship narrative.
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Their reviewed posts carry a Forbes piece built on named executive interviews — LTK's Amber Venz Box, WPP Media's Patricia Marangé, Target's Pat Burke — and eMarketer figures on affiliate spending, plus a SoCom Los Angeles session that debuts an "Apples to Apples" platform market map and a method for comparing creator performance on equal terms. For a software company whose buyer is senior brand or agency leadership still running affiliate and creator work in disconnected teams, the fragmenting-organisation diagnosis is already this creator's published thesis, and the vendor inherits an established publication and a social-commerce conference rather than having to build one.
The tradeoff is voice and specificity.
This is editor-and-analyst framing about how the category is organised, not a firsthand account of working inside a merchant team: the reviewed material contains no operator story about a merchant, its staff or its customers, so a merchant-success and agency audience may find the market-structure argument a step removed from their week.
A vendor also becomes one line in a neutral market map rather than a co-author of the argument, which means less control over how the product is positioned.
Choose Yenan Wang when the same brief should be anchored in live shopping and cross-market comparison.
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Their reviewed posts draw on four years at TikTok, including leading TikTok LIVE UK and its European creator network, and use current figures: creators above one million followers at 10.66% of China's livestream-commerce GMV against 89.34% for mid-size and smaller streamers, brand-owned livestreams past half of GMV, Meituan's AI hosts running around the clock with an 82% rise in average daily transaction value, and TikTok Shop UK LIVE up 55% year on year.
The same material carries a usable argument for a tooling vendor — that entertainment, media and the storefront are collapsing into one system, so the creator is both distribution and channel.
A buyer whose merchant and agency readers are deciding what live shopping is worth in the West gets a more concrete forecast here than from a general partnership case.
The tradeoff is scope.
Livestream commerce is the centre of the reviewed work; it contains nothing about affiliate programme management, Shopify merchant onboarding or agency partnership operations — the practical ground the brief's merchant-success readers work on.
The community strand appears as a peer founder-to-founder conversation about building businesses and brands, not as a tested method for building a merchant community, so a buyer wanting to argue that partnership beats a single placement would be supplying that frame rather than borrowing it.
The two reviewed posts date from September 2026 and give no commercial, format or rate detail.
Choose Jason Munk when the brief should speak to customer-success and account-management leaders in software.
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Their reviewed posts give a practitioner account of moving from account management into customer success and rebuilding the function from reactive support into proactive engagement with success plans, customer outcomes and growth, plus a report from the Utah Customer Success Meetup at Awardco covering four breakout sessions and a regional group for staying connected. If the software company's goal is the retention-and-expansion side of merchant relationships — the work that happens after the sale — this creator already writes in that register and can convene a customer-success audience that a commerce tool would otherwise reach late.
The tradeoff is distance from the category.
The reviewed material is customer success in software, with no commerce, creator, affiliate or Shopify merchant content, so a social-commerce vendor would be asking this creator to move into a market they have not written about.
The two posts also date from late October 2024, roughly two years before the current creator material, so present themes, activity level and audience engagement cannot be judged from them.
The community shown is a professional meetup of customer-success practitioners rather than a merchant or creator ecosystem, which is a different audience from the brief's merchant-success and agency readers.
This profile rests on nine LinkedIn posts from the account at linkedin.com/in/nicotsantos, each read in full.
Most carry no outward date; the dates stated inside the posts are a Social Commerce News summit in Salt Lake City on September 16, 2026, a New York edition attended that July, and a marker of 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom.
Three other creators were compared using two retained posts each from their own accounts: Jamie Gutfreund (September 2026), Yenan Wang (September 2026) and Jason Munk (October 2024).
The account showed 16,692 LinkedIn followers on 9 October 2026.
No long-form articles, talks, video, transcripts or sponsorship terms were available, so those remain open gaps rather than conclusions.
Recent engagement
Across their last 8 LinkedIn posts, the median post got 25 reactions and 3 comments. Checked 2026-11-02.