Short-form videos have rewritten the rules for capturing an audience’s attention. Brands that once relied on traditional paid social media now compete for milliseconds of attention. Meanwhile, an economy has been growing in the background where creators clip and post content on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and X for a fraction of the cost. The problem was the infrastructure. Nicolai Amirzadeh found no reliable way to run that market at scale, so he built one. 

The gap in the creator economy

Clipping, or turning long-form content into short vertical clips, emerged as its own hustle alongside the rise of TikTok and Reels. Fan-made clips of streamers, shows, and content creators routinely outperformed creators’ official content. Major entertainment companies took notice, and so did consumer and technology brands, who saw their paid social costs climb. 

However, the industry was running on informal arrangements in the DMs, private transfers, and no real way to track views across platforms. Fake and bot-inflated views were rampant on social platforms, leaving brand teams with huge budgets nowhere credible to post clips. The upside of paid clipper distribution was obvious, but the operational layer to support it did not yet exist. 

Building on his first lessons

Amirzadeh is 22, entirely self-taught, and has been creating on the consumer internet since he was 11. His first real project was a website for a non-profit run by his mother’s friend. He had barely written code at the time, but said he could do it anyway, and taught himself over three weeks. That hard-working, curious mentality became his approach for everything. 

At 15, he built and captained a competitive esports team that reached the first division of the Norwegian Counter-Strike and League of Legends leagues, which were featured on national television. He later spent two years teaching coding to fourth graders, became CTO of a company acquired by the venture firm where he worked, and founded Servergen, the first Discord marketing agency, where his team helped build over 1,100 communities. 

When he decided to stop advising and start building something himself, he brought over a decade of skills into Clip Tech. 

The platform he designed

As co-founder, COO, and head of product at Clip Tech, Amirzadeh is the architect behind every layer of the platform. He designed the creator-facing Discord experience, the client dashboard, multi-platform view tracking, and payout systems. He also built the proprietary fraud-detection system that protects every campaign, which has already blocked fraudulent payouts tied to roughly 900 million fake views. 

Amirzadeh shares that Clip Tech has grown to more than 45,000 clippers and 120,000 editors across a global network, with more than 800 campaigns run, 450,000 clips posted, and 8.1 billion verified views. He adds that during a flagship FIFA World Cup soundtrack campaign, a single audio track reached more than 80 million verified views. 

What comes next

In May of 2026, Amirzadeh was invited to judge at HackTech, one of the US’s major hackathons, evaluating projects on technical execution, product viability, and product-market fit. It is a public signal of a builder whose work has been appreciated well beyond the clipping world. 

His goal for Clip Tech is to make paid clipper distribution standard and programmable as paid search or paid social. It’s a good fit for any brand that wants to reach a younger audience through short-form videos. The more personal goal is to put real income into the hands of people who post the clips. For a self-taught builder who learned by doing things for himself, that has been a great honor.