Good morning. With Halloween 81 short days away, it’s time to celebrate with something spooky. Got 128 minutes to spare this week? We recommend running out of your house—ideally not at 2:17am—to see Weapons in theaters.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

“You’re as popular as your least-viewed video in a year. And those people will support you in anything you do. So I don’t need 50 million views. I need 100,000 loyal viewers and that’s it,” woodworking creator Jonathan Katz-Moses told Samir on The Colin and Samir Show (catch the full interview, out soon).

That philosophy has proven true. Katz-Moses is on track to make $10 million in revenue this year with nearly 600K YouTube subscribers and no sponsorships. 

How? Katz-Moses’s ecommerce business, KM Tools. He sells 1,000+ products—100 of which are made at his 33,000-square-foot studio in Santa Barbara, CA. His team of 15 (2 on video, the rest in the shop) helps produce and ship the goods.

But with high operational costs ($50K/month for rent, $80K/month for payroll, and $500K to start manufacturing a new product), Katz-Moses has taken on backing to fulfill more orders and continue scaling.

Enter: venture capital firm Slow Ventures, which invested $2 million in Katz-Moses’s business in exchange for an undisclosed equity stake. The deal makes Katz-Moses the first recipient of Slow’s $60 million creator fund announced earlier this year.

“His industry expertise, deep understanding of his audience, and knack for spotting whitespace in the market make him stand out from the crowd,” Slow Ventures partner Billy Parks told us. “We look for creators who act like founders, and JKM’s turning that mastery into a thriving, scalable business.” 

What’s next: Katz-Moses recently hired a product developer and has seven patents processing. With the funding from Slow, Katz-Moses wants to develop more products with other woodworking creators and invest in more educational videos.

“I’m a small creator but we’re doing big business because I’ve spent the time to talk to my audience and create that sort of loyalty and develop things of value,” Katz-Moses said.

Late last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT-5, replacing the 4o model as the default for all users. Here’s what’s different:

“This idea that GPT-5 can not only answer all these hard questions for you, but really create on demand, almost instantaneous software is going to be one of the defining elements of the GPT-5 era,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Cleo Abram.

What creators are saying:

AI creator CJ Trowbridge argued that the majority of users will not benefit from one centralized AI system over smaller, specialized models—citing a study from NVIDIA to back his case.

“[Users] are missing the way older models validated them, agreed with them, or even flattered them, even if it meant giving wrong or biased answers,” AI creator Shira Lazar said on TikTok. “For me, that tells me that people don’t just want AI for information. We want it for validation.”

Tech creator CatGPT pushed back against criticism, suggesting that we may not see how “smart” these models are until OpenAI releases the next system. 

“They’re essentially trying to measure how hard of problems can this model actually solve,” she said on TikTok.

The global influencer marketing industry will grow to almost $33 billion by the end of 2025, up 36% from last year, according to Statista.

How are creators keeping up? By increasing their rates.

Digiday reports that many creators have upped their rates by as much as 100% as their services become more in-demand. 

One creator’s advice →

“You get so much more return on investment as a brand working with an influencer than working with other types of marketing,” business creator Tess Barclay said in a video teaching newer creators how to negotiate their rates. She recommends setting your rates 50% higher than what you might expect to get from the brand.

*This is sponsored content