Shan Hanif

Shan Hanif is a British entrepreneur of Pakistani heritage who built one of the UK's leading creator economy agencies from a shared house, a self-taught app, and a refusal to accept a rejection. He trained as an accountant and at 21 left his job to build NomNom, a health and fitness social media app that reached 40,000 monthly active users and ranked number 36 in the App Store before Instagram's growth made the model unviable. Rather than returning to accounting as his parents advised, he pivoted — and in 2016 founded Genflow, a brand creation and management agency for social media influencers and content creators.

Over nearly a decade, Shan scaled Genflow into a business generating over £100 million in cumulative revenue, raising $11 million from the UK Business Growth Fund during the COVID period and building offices in London, Los Angeles, and Dubai. Genflow has worked with some of the world's most prominent creators and brands — including Iman Gadzhi, Grace Beverley, Ali Abdaal, Nike, Apple, and Gymshark — helping them build and operate direct-to-consumer businesses. The company's model — meticulous operational SOPs applied at scale across creator commerce — gave Shan an unusually clear view of where consumer product opportunities existed within the creator audience base he was serving.

That view led directly to Neutonic. In November 2023, Shan co-founded the nootropic productivity drinks brand alongside personal trainer James Smith (3.4 million social media followers), podcaster Chris Williamson (Modern Wisdom, over one billion podcast downloads), and manager Luke Betts. Shan's thesis — that productivity is the next fitness, and that the creator economy's health-conscious, performance-oriented audience was ready for a functional beverage built around it — proved commercially prescient. Within 18 months of launch, Neutonic had sold three million cans, generated $10 million in revenue, and reached the top position on Amazon in both the energy drink and grocery categories.

Neutonic raised £2.7 million in its first funding round in July 2025, valuing the company at $20 million. Shan has continued to run Genflow alongside his Neutonic co-founder role, and also co-founded Creator College, an educational platform for aspiring entrepreneurs in the creator economy. His career is a case study in compounding operator leverage: each venture built on the commercial relationships, brand architecture knowledge, and distribution infrastructure of the one before it.