Michael Brandt invented a new kind of energy shot. To turn a novel idea into a best-selling brand, he needed creators and trust at a scale no human team could track by hand. This is how Ketone-IQ runs their program on Archive.

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About Ketone-IQ

Ketone-IQ is the fastest-growing energy shot in the country. Where most energy drinks run on caffeine, Ketone-IQ delivers 10 grams of ketones, an efficient fuel the brain and body already make and use when you push to your limits. CEO and co-founder Michael Brandt studied engineering at Stanford, where he and his co-founder bonded over human performance optimization: if you treat the body like a system, what do you put in to drive a better output? Ketones were the answer they could not buy off a shelf, so they built a way to drink them.

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The brand has grown fast. Ketone-IQ now outsells 5-hour Energy at many major national retailers, runs a booming direct-to-consumer business, and is stocked nationwide in Target, Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Equinox, Lifetime Fitness, and Sprouts. Brandt frames the opportunity against an $85 billion energy market that is still mostly bought in the moment of need, at the convenience store, the gym, the grocery aisle.

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“We're always trying to sail off the edge of the map, figure out where the map is, and then expand the boundaries of the map.” — Michael Brandt

Because the product is genuinely new, it needs education and trust, and that is why creators sit at the center of the strategy. As Brandt describes it, the brand cannot just throw ads onto the internet telling people to buy a ketone. It inverts that: a community of high-trust creators who explain the product in their own voice is what takes Ketone-IQ from a biohacker curiosity to a player in the broader energy market. The creators who fit are high performers: athletes, founders, doctors, and lawyers, people for whom the cost of a bad day is high, and who are also natural storytellers.

The Challenge

Working with creators is a powerful growth lever, but it runs into a hard limit: you cannot track thousands of them by hand. Every creator tells the brand's story a little differently, and the team wants to learn from the best versions and gently course-correct the ones that miss. Before Archive, doing that meant living in other people's feeds.

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“Early days for us, it's screenshots, it's spreadsheets, it's just manually looking at people's feeds, making sure that we catch people's stories before they disappear. You honestly run into just laws of physics where you cannot track that many people if it's all manual.”

If even a hundred creators is close to a full-time tracking job, a program reaching thousands or tens of thousands simply breaks under manual effort. Ketone-IQ needed the upside of creators, the trust, the creativity, the reach, without hiring dozens of people to chase it.

The Solution

Archive became the central system Ketone-IQ runs its creator program on. At its foundation is Archive's Social Listening feed, an automatically tagged record of everyone posting about the brand. It's sortable by the segments that matter to the team, such as women athletes or male biohackers, so the program starts from organized data instead of scattered screenshots.

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That record is not limited to the posts that tag the brand. The team uses Archive Radar to automatically scan Instagram and TikTok and find Ketone-IQ content from creators who never tagged the company at all. It surfaces the reviews, comparisons, and offhand mentions that would otherwise stay invisible: roughly 6.7 million views of untagged content across 82 Instagram and around 200 TikTok posts, a whole layer of conversation the team can now see, learn from, and turn into new creator relationships.

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On top of that context engine, two of Archive's AI capabilities stand out for Brandt. The first is AI Filters, which give the brand's creators the ability to adhere to compliance at scale. When Ketone-IQ ran a partnership campaign around a Strava running challenge with thousands of creators posting, the goal was to get everyone building on the same brand message. AI Filters, Archive's AI classifier, checks each post and flags which creators are inside the brand guidelines and which are drifting, so the team can proactively coach a partner back on track. As Brandt frames it, that is a win for everyone: better output, a renewed partnership, and a creator who succeeds.

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The second is staying close to the conversation without watching every video. Archive's Deep Research generates a report by actually watching the thousands of videos posted about the brand, tagged or not, and summarizing what is happening: sentiment, how a new flavor is landing, even a hackathon or ultramarathon where people were using Ketone-IQ that the team never knew about. For a busy CEO, that is the difference between guessing and knowing.

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“It's watching all the videos for me, so I can see what's going on across the whole map. The level of fidelity I get from Archive Deep Research is orders of magnitude beyond a generic AI tool. I can't imagine not being able to use that.”

The Results

Archive Radar surfaced roughly 6.7 million views of untagged Ketone-IQ content, across 82 Instagram and around 200 TikTok posts, that would otherwise have stayed invisible. In a recent campaign, AI Filters caught about 1,500 non-compliant paid creator posts, missing disclosures and off-brand claims, and pushed them to Slack through the Archive API so the team could act fast. And Deep Research now delivers a weekly brand-sentiment pulse straight to the CEO, replacing hours of watching creator content by hand. All of it runs without the manual screenshots and spreadsheets the program started on.

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“When starting a creator program, I always recommend setting up Archive first. If you're serious about social media and building a community around your brand, it's table stakes. You need to know what's going on inside your community, and they specialize in it.”