Youtube Celebrity Surfer Ben Gravy Becomes Tech CEO

You know Ben Gravy as the guy who straps a foam board to his feet and drops into 20-foot bombs the rest of us only watch on Youtube. So when we sat down to build him something it had to fit his persona. The result: an app that maps the obscure, off-the-grid destinations for surfing Ben has built his whole brand around, then layers in live wave forecasting so he knows whether the spot is firing before he ever points the van that direction. We found some NOAA Weather API’s and integrated Google Maps. Navigation, Yelp styled local vibes report and surf prediction in one place, built for a guy whose job is finding waves nobody else is on.

Here's the part that matters for the pitch: we built the whole thing on Emergent. No engineering team, no six-month roadmap, Ben can now ship, tweak, and ship again like he's running his own software company. That's the story we're taking into the campaign. The surfer famous for riding novelty foam boards into giant waves is now his own tech CEO, kinda.

Meet Tuck. The idea was simple and, full credit, lifted from a Chris Koerner video: send a parent one short, fresh bedtime story every night to read to their kid. No app to babysit, no library to scroll. It shows up, you read it, everyone's asleep by 8:15.

Total cost to build it: $100.

Then we did the part most people skip. We put real money behind a small ad test to see if strangers would actually pay for it. After $300 in spend, the math didn't pencil, we couldn't get customer acquisition cost down to anything that works at scale. So we're reworking the offer and the funnel before we spend another dollar.

Here's why this is the story and not a footnote: a lot of companies would have spent six months and a six-figure budget to learn what we learned for $400 in three weeks. Tuck isn't dead, it's getting retooled. But we'd rather find out fast and cheap than fall in love slow and expensive. Never refuse the muse, but never marry a bad customer acquisition cost either.

The bigger swing this month is freddyleads.com.

It started with a real request: a private equity firm came to us needing 100 physicians to publicly endorse a product. We could have white-knuckled that one campaign by hand and moved on. Instead we built the machine that does it on repeat.

Freddy Leads gets executive voices behind a brand across LinkedIn, X, in-person events, podcasts, really any channel that moves the needle. The flow:

The economics are clean: we take 15% on self-managed campaigns, and 20% if you want us to run it for you. Our first campaign is going live right now, and this is the kind of product that compounds.

Our whole bet is that content is top-of-funnel for a brand, a dealership, or a person. Two of our creators prove it from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Ravi Wadan — @raviwadan, Instagram, 186K followers, 2,000+ posts, co-founder of DriveMatch. Ravi runs one of the most practical finance-education accounts out there, and cars are his secret weapon. He breaks down the real math behind leases, financing traps, and EV incentives without ever talking down to anyone. Recent hits include a Tesla 0% APR breakdown and a viral "stop financing cars" reel. His audience is exactly who you want: financially curious 25–40 year olds actively making car and money decisions.

Javuan Banks — @javuanbanks, TikTok, 833.9K followers, 41.8M total likes. Javuan is a working car salesman at Premier Autos in Dallas who turned dealership life into one of TikTok's most consistently viral formats. He plays the whole cast — the perfect-credit customer who walks in at closing, the self-employed buyer trying to qualify for a Hellcat — and it racks up millions of views because it's true. He's not performing a character; he's living it. As Javuan puts it, comedy is what gets him the views, the followers, and the buyers. He's driving real floor traffic, and brands can plug right into that pipeline.

For about eleven years, JP Morgan was Tesla's loudest bear on Wall Street. Their auto analyst spent a decade telling clients to sell — through earnings beats, record highs, all of it. His final price target, reiterated this April, was $145, implying roughly 60% downside. Elon Musk's public response to that bearishness was, memorably, one word: "lol."

Then SpaceX filed for what's lining up to be the biggest IPO in history, a raise in the neighborhood of $75 billion at a valuation near $1.75 trillion, listing as early as this week. JP Morgan grabbed a seat in the underwriting syndicate (Goldman has the lead spot, but Jamie Dimon reportedly secured a personal audience with Musk to talk SpaceX).

And then, on June 5, right in the middle of that courtship — JP Morgan abruptly upgraded Tesla and lifted its price target from $145 to $475. That's a 227% jump. An eleven-year bear thesis, reversed, just as the bank angles for the most lucrative IPO mandate on the planet, from the same man who runs Tesla.

The official reason? A new analyst and a fresh story about autonomy and robotics. The timing? You do that math.

Last one, and it matters if you're a dealer. CarEdge is launching a new credential for dealers who earn an A rating on the Dealer Transparency Index, a way to publicly badge the stores that actually treat buyers straight.

In a market where shoppers are skeptical, "we're transparent" is worth nothing. A third party verifying itis worth a lot. If you're an A-rated store, this is real top-of-funnel trust you can put on every page and every walk-around. If you're not there yet, you know what to fix.

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