The thesis
Influence has become the largest channel in commerce. The tooling to run it never caught up. Hermes exists to make influence operable and accountable like every other revenue channel.
Influence became the largest channel in commerce. Where a new brand once bought its first customers from Meta and Google, it now earns them from creators: the post, the unboxing, the affiliate code, the comment section. Discovery moved to people. Trust moved with it.
The tooling never caught up. The channel that drives the most new commerce is still run on the least infrastructure: a spreadsheet of handles, an inbox of half-finished outreach, a gifting plugin, an affiliate dashboard, screenshots pasted into a deck at the end of the quarter. Every other channel a brand runs, paid media, email, retention, has a system of record and a number attached to it. Influence has neither.
Influence became the largest channel in commerce while the tools to run it stayed a drawer of spreadsheets, inboxes and dashboards.
Three problems, one root cause
The dysfunction shows up in three places, but they share a single cause: the work and the data are scattered across tools that were never designed to talk to each other.
Fragmented relationships
The same creator is a row in a sheet, a thread in an inbox, an order in the store and a code in an affiliate tool. No one record holds the relationship.
Manual execution
Outreach, briefs, contracts, shipping and payouts are done by hand, so the operation does not scale past what one coordinator can hold in their head.
No attribution
Because nothing connects to the store, no one can prove what a partnership, a gift or a code actually returned. Influence stays a cost, not a channel.
What an operating system changes
An operating system does not add another tool to the drawer. It replaces the drawer. Hermes puts the entire operation on one record, runs the repetitive work for you, and ties every action back to revenue, so influence can finally be managed the way a brand already manages paid media and email.
- 01
One record
Every creator, across all three channels, lives on a single record with their history, content and contribution.
- 02
One engine
Sourcing, outreach, briefs, gifting, codes and payouts run as automated flows on top of that record.
- 03
One number
First-party attribution ties each post, unit and code back to orders, so every channel shows real revenue.
That is the whole thesis: influence is a revenue channel, and revenue channels need an operating system. Hermes is that system.
See Why now for why this is buildable today, then The operating system for how it works.