# Ryan To

Ryan To is a creator and marketer who teaches companies how to grow through social content. Their work focuses on B2B marketing, short-form content, and using creator-led campaigns to reach customers.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/ryan-to/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanto01
- Topics: startup, b2b-marketing, content-marketing, content-strategy, creator-marketing, event-marketing, influencer-marketing
- Based on 17 dated posts, latest 2026-09-28

## Summary

Ryan To is useful for B2B brands wanting concrete breakdowns of social content, creator-led campaigns, and organic-to-paid testing.

- Best for: B2B software or marketing teams seeking strategy and content planning around creator-led campaigns.
- Not for: Consumer direct-response campaigns needing guaranteed sales, verified audience conversion, or a standard endorsement package.
- Check first: Confirm with Ryan To available scope, deliverables, channels, measurement, rates, disclosure terms, and recent audience data.

### Takeaways

- Give the viewer value first, and keep product out of early growth.
- Organic content is testing ground; paid media is the amplifier.
- Events earn sharing through status and curation, not banners and giveaways.

## Main ideas

- **Give the viewer value first, and keep the product out of early growth**: Ryan To argues that early-stage accounts grow through pull marketing, not push marketing. In their account of scaling a startup's socials, the method starts with defining an Ideal Viewer Personal — age, interests, pain points, and desired results — then building content pillars around those needs. Value can be aspirational or entertaining, not just educational. They also recommend writing in 'you' statements instead of brand-centric 'I' statements, and developing a distinct personal voice rather than copying someone else's trend. They say no post mentioned the product during the initial growth phase.
- **Organic is the testing ground, paid is the amplifier**: Ryan To argues that brands often split organic and paid into separate teams when they should run them as one loop. Their sequence: publish native short-form content tied to current trends and consumer behaviour, use organic signals such as retention, shares, and comments to identify winning formats and posts, then put money behind those winners. Organic earns the right to paid spend rather than running on a parallel track.
- **Teach by breaking down specific campaigns, not with general advice**: A consistent method across Ryan To's posts is the teardown: name a company, list its moves, and point to concrete artifacts and the people behind them. This makes marketing something readers can reverse-engineer and reuse, not just a set of abstract principles. The posts offer an argued outside view of other companies' campaigns, rather than first-party data.
- **Events earn sharing through status and curation, not banners and giveaways**: Ryan To argues that most B2B events fail to produce shareable content because they rely on oversized company banners, corporate merch bags, and transactional incentives such as giveaways or free trials. What works instead, in their view, is giving attendees a moment they want to be associated with — social status — and creating visuals that look worth posting on their own, not just branded for the company. Curation and the guest list do what signage cannot.
- **Founder-creators beat sponsored influencers for B2B reach**: Ryan To predicts a new category of marketing creator: founders who build in public. They argue these people have real authority with e-commerce founders, marketers, and aspiring brand owners, and that audiences are not yet saturated with their sponsored content. A product shown as part of a company's actual decisions reads as an operating choice rather than an ad slot. In a related claim tied to their move to Clay, they say B2B content is moving quickly onto Instagram and YouTube, and the companies that win treat media as a core business rather than a channel.
- **Influencer marketing is consolidating into a cheaper operator-led route**: Ryan To revisits their prediction from a year earlier that influencer marketing is dead, pointing to Accenture's acquisition of the Whalar Group as a sign of consolidation. They argue that scrappy e-commerce and consumer software operators use a different playbook to reach very low customer acquisition costs, and that this route will be more sustainable for brands and produce more millionaires than becoming an influencer. The post names the shift but does not lay out the playbook's steps.
- **The output has changed: less published content, more work behind the scenes**: In a short post, Ryan To says they stopped making content in the previous format, describing a move from Los Angeles to San Francisco, completion of an incubator, and ongoing behind-the-scenes projects with e-commerce and consumer software companies. They say future posts will stay within marketing, advertising, and AI. Alongside the earlier teaching posts and growth figures, this is the clearest signal of their current work.

## Work to read

- [How Ryan To grew a startup social account from 0 to 125k followers in 10 months](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_socialmedia-startups-creators-activity-7299854349621477377-Wkaw)
- [Joining Clay to build B2B creator go-to-market](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_excited-to-announce-ill-be-joining-clay-activity-7503852233848061952-TBzl)
- [Ramp's $300M raise as a B2B marketing case study](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_ramp-just-raised-300m-and-is-a-case-study-activity-7407464689049395200-3fPK)
- [E.L.F. Beauty's organic-to-paid loop](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_this-beauty-brand-brought-in-13b-in-revenue-activity-7420510722855661569-LS91)
- [Turning B2B events into shareable content](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_if-youre-a-tech-company-attacking-event-activity-7506026400018145281-w1fh)
- [Build-in-public founders as a new creator category](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanto01_i-think-were-going-to-see-a-new-category-activity-7505667877014818816-GxvF)
- [Why Ryan To stopped making content](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZLsVp4PAdC/)

## Brand relationships

- **Clay** (employment)
- **Stan Store** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Gamma** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Air** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Shopify** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Ramp** (mention)
- **E.L.F. Beauty** (mention)
- **Motion (Creative Analytics)** (mention)
- **Sweat Equity Podcast** (mention)

## Partnerships

Ryan To's posts show partnership work centered on creator-led B2B go-to-market, especially on Instagram and YouTube. They say they joined Clay to work on creator-led initiatives and name Stan Store, Gamma, Air, and Shopify among technology companies they have partnered with. A separate post says they have been working behind the scenes with e-commerce and consumer SaaS companies. Their posts do not include an official sponsorship policy, rate card, deliverable menu, usage or disclosure terms, or an inquiry page, so buyers should define scope directly. They also argue that traditional influencer marketing is being replaced by founder-led, build-in-public content, which matters for a buyer planning a creator campaign.

## Alternatives

- Will Shonn: Choose Will Shonn if the software company’s campaign is specifically about TikTok Shop growth for consumer brands. The post describes auditing TikTok accounts, running an e-commerce brand, and treating TikTok Shop as a system for discovery, content, live selling, and customer feedback. That makes the example more useful for a buyer evaluating social-commerce operations than Ryan To’s broader B2B marketing analysis.
- Shahbaz Akbar: Choose Shahbaz Akbar when the campaign needs a clear explanation of how TikTok Shop content can move a shopper from attention to purchase. One post contrasts demand-capture e-commerce with discovery-led shopping; another groups content into problem-solution, demonstration, and creator-review formats. Those examples give a brand a more focused starting point for a TikTok Shop content plan than Ryan To’s broader platform and B2B campaign commentary.
- Riley Cronin: Choose Riley Cronin if the buyer is a consumer brand seeking a creator-community model that can supply organic videos and help identify ad creative. The post lays out recruiting creators, briefing and coaching them, assessing content, and testing strong videos as ads. That is more operationally specific than Ryan To’s posts for a campaign centered on building a creator program rather than explaining B2B marketing to e-commerce founders.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/