— Brands worked with at Sapphire Studios —
Thomas Ma is a Chicago-born performance marketer, UGC growth strategist, and exited founder. He co-founded Sapphire Studios, a bootstrapped and consistently profitable UGC performance agency that helped drive $100M+ in TikTok revenue, before a successful exit in 2026.
Thomas has spoken at VidCon, YPO, and TikTok Leadership on performance creative, AI workflow automation, and building creative systems at scale.
Originally from Chicago, Thomas Ma is a performance marketer, UGC growth strategist, and exited founder.
He co-founded Sapphire Studios, a bootstrapped UGC performance agency built without outside capital, debt-free, and profitable from day one. Over a decade, the agency helped drive $100M+ in TikTok revenue across 250+ brands — including Fabletics, Amazon, Nike, Walmart, and Our Place — before a successful exit in March 2026.
His work centers on helping brands lower CAC and lift LTV through rapid creative testing systems, scroll-stopping UGC, and AI-powered workflow automation.
He's spoken at VidCon, YPO, and TikTok Leadership on performance creative, AI workflows, and building operating systems for creative at scale.
Pulled from Thomas's keynote at Ecom North in Toronto: performance creative, UGC production, and the AI-powered testing stack behind it—delivered live for growth and creative leaders in the room.
Frameworks your team can run on Monday. Every talk is built around the exact systems, hooks matrices, and testing cadences that drive down CAC and build a creative stack that scales. No theory — just the step-by-step that has worked across $100M+ in revenue.
A decade of lessons from inside TikTok's creator economy. How to build a testing engine that compounds learnings and keeps CAC down as you scale.
Why AI doesn't replace the creative director — it replaces the bottleneck. A practical look at the workflows we built to ship 10× the creative volume.
How we built Sapphire Studios from zero to exit without outside capital, debt, or a single layoff. A candid story of compounding, discipline, and saying no.
A working session for your team. You leave with a briefing template, hooks matrix, testing plan, and review cadence you can run Monday morning.
Headshots, logos, brand guidelines, bios, and event requirements — email and we'll send a single zip tailored to your event.
A ready-to-read introduction for hosts and moderators. Copy it, adapt it, or read it verbatim — whatever serves the room.
Our next speaker spent a decade building one of the most influential creative agencies in the TikTok ecosystem.
From a bootstrapped shop in Chicago, he and his co-founder grew Sapphire Studios to drive over one hundred million dollars in TikTok revenue across 250 brands — names like Fabletics, Amazon, Nike, and Walmart — before exiting the business in March of this year.
His work sits at the intersection of creative intuition and AI-powered systems. He's here to talk about what actually moves the needle in performance creative — and what's coming next.
Please welcome — Thomas Ma.
Profiles & URLs.
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