Nathan McCallum on Creator Marketing, Trust and Building a Brand People Actually Buy From

Creator marketing is one of the fastest growing channels, but so many brands are using outdated strategies that just don’t work anymore.

Nathan McCallum has over 750K followers on Instagram, 180K subscribers on Youtube and has been doing this long before “creator” was a job title. He’s built an audience, a coaching business, a clothing brand and long-term brand partnerships by doing things his own way.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Nathan to find out what brands get wrong with creators, why trust beats follower count, building a founder-led brand, AI, online negativity and the expensive lesson he learned behind the scenes of Furore.

Key moments:

0:00 - Why Nathan moved away from one-off brand deals and started prioritising long-term partnerships

14:49 - Why Nathan doesn’t obsess over every platform change, and what he focuses on instead of chasing the algorithm

19:34 - Nathan’s advice for creating content people want to watch

24:53 - Why Nathan never tried to fit the typical fitness influencer mould, and how that became part of what makes his content work

27:21 - How Nathan deals with negativity online without turning the comment section into a fight

31:09 - The behind-the-scenes reality of building Furore, (including what went wrong…)

37:41 - How Nathan makes Furore feel like a real extension of him, rather than another creator brand that disappears after one launch

39:04 - The biggest lessons Nathan would give anyone building a brand from scratch