Tiffany Zhong, Gen Z Whisperer and Zebra IQ CEO, on the 5 Cs: Creators, Community, Content, Commerce and Culture

When I talk about moguls, I'm talking about how today's creators are going to be tomorrow's Fortune 500 founders. That's my take. In the next 5-10 years, we're going to see these creators building billion-dollar media companies and billion-dollar e-commerce & direct-to-consumer brands. They already have the distribution; they already have the community; they just need to build.

As a creator, you don't even need that many followers. I tell creators that they need to care more about how many super fans they have versus how many followers they have. You could have 50 million followers and not be able to sell out 5,000 sweaters.

If you can make people laugh, if you can get people invested into you as a personality [and] you as a person, you will be able to build a community and sell them whatever you want to sell. There's not really a trick to it; it's just you have to actually care about people who follow you [and] people who reply to you. You need to engage with your fans.

Don't think too much about monetizing your audience if you're still an early creator ... You want to make sure that you're just always providing value to your audience. That's what you need to think about. Every piece of content you put out there—is it providing value to my audience?

I see creators, once they hit a million followers or even 500k, they just stop replying to their fans. They stop liking their fans' comments. That is probably the dumbest mistake one can do, because if you're not replying to them, they're gonna go find other creators who will reply to them, and they're going to become super fans of those creators. They don't owe you anything.

I learn best when I'm thrown into an environment, a real-world environment, where I get to actually apply things to real experiences, try things out, build things with my own hands, and make mistakes as opposed to learning by sitting in a classroom.