Army Veteran Curtez Riggs Built a Market Big Brands Now Chase

Curtez Riggs founded the Military Influencer Conference in 2016, and by its 10th anniversary event in Tampa this September, the brands paying for the event were following his audience in growing numbers. What none of those brands can learn yet is how big the market actually is.

Riggs, a retired Army first sergeant, has considered changing the company's name. He has floated dropping one letter — the R — to turn the Military Influencer Conference into the Military Influence Conference. The edit would shift emphasis from the individual creator to the action itself.

He still pushes back on the influencer label. "In the military, leadership is the process of influencing others," Riggs said on the closing day of the Tampa event. In his framing, influence is a leadership discipline the military teaches, not a social media job title.

His audience has moved in the opposite direction. More of the service members, veterans and military spouses who come through MIC are building audiences of their own. The brands that pay for the conference are following them there.

Why are veterans entering the creator economy?

About 200,000 service members leave the military every year. The federal transition system exists to route them into jobs. Riggs said a growing share are going around it.

"They're turning to the internet and the creator economy, and they're learning how to build small businesses for themselves with no pathway to get them through that," he said.

That quote carries the mechanism of the story. Veterans are skipping the institutional pipeline and teaching themselves entrepreneurship online, without structured support for the shift.

How large is the military creator market?

Nobody knows. When asked how many military-connected creators exist, MIC's leadership said there is no figure.

That absence defines the commercial stakes. Brands are spending to reach this audience at MIC events, yet no participant can state the market's size, growth rate or total reach.

What does the name debate reveal?

The tension between "influencer" and "influence" mirrors the tension inside the community itself. Riggs built a business on the creator label while personally resisting it, and his proposed rename reflects a preference for the leadership tradition over the platform economy's vocabulary.

The audience, meanwhile, keeps building followings. The uniform, as the story puts it, isn't the only thing building a following.

For now, MIC continues without a market-size estimate, and the brands funding it are betting on a demographic they cannot yet measure — roughly 200,000 potential new creators arriving each year as service members transition out.