Co-Founder, Nichefire | Predictive Cultural Insights | I help businesses identify and predict the behavioral, political, systemic trends impacting your business and customers.

Trends aren’t culture.
They’re symptoms of it.

Culture is the shared beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and rituals that shape how people make decisions. When those systems shift, trends follow.

I work with CPG and retail teams to understand culture at the behavioral level, so they can see change forming before it becomes obvious, viral, or expensive to miss.

At Nichefire, we focus less on what’s trending and more on:
– The environments shaping behavior
– The beliefs driving choice
– The cultural conditions that create momentum

My focus areas:
– Fast vs. slow culture (and why most teams mix them up)
– Cultural risk and misinterpretation
– Turning understanding into action, not presentations

If you’re more interested in why people decide than what’s spiking, we’re aligned.

2025. From scout team to starter.

But let me finish the story most people don't know.

Scout team didn't just prepare me. It earned me a starting spot for 2.5 years at right tackle. We won championships. Changed the trajectory of Cincinnati football forever. The Bearcats are still building on what we started.

Scout team was never the destination. It was the preparation.

Same thing happened with Nichefire in 2025.

Started at the bottom. Literally. Uber orders. Home office. Smartphone as my only tool. Delivering food to pay bills while building a company nobody believed in.

No marketing budget. No VC backing. Just conviction and a stubborn belief that culture was predictive if you could decode it fast enough.

Last year I learned something about content too.

Demo videos? Flopped.
Short form educational clips? Crickets.
Everything I saw working for everyone else? Didn't work for me.

What actually hit?

Stories about my journey. My family. My transparent failures while building this company.

That was 2025. We earned our starting spot.

Cultural intelligence growth. Strategic leadership opportunities. Fortune 500 partnerships. Connecting cities. Field to stage moments. All built on family foundation. 40 years strong.

Now it's 2026. And we're not just starting anymore.

We're getting off the bench and into the game.

Championship mode.

For too long I hid behind the ex-athlete stigma. But blocking defensive ends became blocking brands from cultural missteps. Reading defenses became reading culture before it trends.

I became an expert in my field. If I can make that transition, you can make yours too.

Expect more stories this year. More structure. And a lot more technical depth. Because scout team is over. Starter reps are done.

It's game time 💯

What did 2025 teach you that you're carrying into this year?

P.S. Shoutout to Vitalii Dodonov and Stanley (Your Content Coach) for helping bring this idea to life 🔥

🔥Khalil El-Amin

Turning cultural signals into executive decisions

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Only 24% of market research professionals actually use customer feedback in their decisions.


That means 76% of insights? Dead on arrival.

Early in my journey building Nichefire, I lived this stat. 

Landed a meeting with a dream client. The kind of opportunity you lose sleep over.

They wanted research on how inflation was impacting the Hispanic community's food buying habits. Which turned into a bigger project on inflation's impact across the food industry in North America.

I was hungry to prove myself. 
So I over-delivered. 
Combed through every data point.
Built out every angle. 
Put together a 75-page deck😩

Sent it off. And I'm pretty sure that thing never saw the light of day.

Felt like I was moving my lips but no words were coming out.

All that work. All those insights. Dead on arrival.

The research wasn't the problem. The translation was. And the noise I created trying to show everything at once.

Took that same research to my advisor Bernardo Ellis. He gave me a formula that changed how I present insights forever:

Identify what you're trying to show. Show the proof. Then storytell.

Repeat.

That's it. No 75-page doorstopper. Just clarity, evidence, and narrative. Over and over.

We turned that research into a webinar that actually landed. Content I still reference today.

In social intelligence, this happens all the time. 

We do the work. 
We get proud of the work. 
We dump everything into a deck to prove we're thorough.

And it dies in someone's inbox.

Too much noise. Too much proving. Not enough showing.

If you're sitting on insights that aren't moving, this might be why. The research isn't your problem. The delivery is.

Keep it simple. That's what my middle school teacher Mrs. Voose taught me. Easy to forget those early lessons. 💯

Where do insights die in your org, detection, interpretation, or activation?

Novembuwary hit different this year.

That weird space from Thanksgiving through New Years where everything blurs together. Deals to close. Money to raise. Investors going dark. Clients pushing timelines. Everything hitting the fan while everyone else is posting Christmas party photos.

Six weeks of pure chaos disguised as "the holidays."

But this morning? First working Monday of 2026. And I'm grateful as hell to be tired.

Because here's what I've learned after almost 10 years of building Nichefire :

The exhaustion means you have something worth grinding for.

I used to hate Mondays. Now I look forward to them. Not because I'm some productivity robot. But because waking up with something to chase is the whole point.

Every Monday means:
- The grind is paying off
- There's a team counting on me
- We have goals worth losing sleep over

We've got big-ass goals at Nichefire this year. 

The kind that scare me a little. The kind that require the whole squad operating at a different level.

And I'm more excited than exhausted. More grateful than tired.

To everyone who survived Novembuwary with me. Who pushed deals across the line while juggling family dinners and holiday chaos. Who showed up when showing up was the last thing you wanted to do.

Happy New Year. 💯

Hope you got some rest. Hope you're safe. Hope you're ready.

Because it's Monday. And we've got work to do.

What's the one goal you're chasing in 2025 that scares you a little?

If I had quit 6 years ago, I'd never have spotted "fibermaxxing" before the Fortune 500s did.

When I first saw that word inside Nichefire, I laughed out loud.

Two X's in the middle. Looked like internet slang for something nobody would actually do. My brain went straight to "beans beans good for your heart, the more you eat them, the more you fart." 

That old movie line from when I was a kid.

Classic meme energy. I almost scrolled past it.

But I clicked anyway.

30K comments in three months. TikTok creators sharing fiber-loaded recipes. Communities treating daily fiber intake like a competitive sport. People celebrating tortillas with 30g of fiber like they just hit a PR.

Then the real signal:

Online chatter dropped almost 90%. But fiber-related searches rose 24%.

People stopped posting. Kept acting.

That's not a meme. That's a behavioral shift hiding in plain sight.

Man, I think about how close I came to never seeing this.

Years ago I was terrified to share insights from Nichefire. 

The platform was new. 
We kept getting rejected. 
Told the problem was with us. 

I developed this bad habit of trying to answer questions before anyone even asked them. Second-guessing every signal. Being weird about the tool I was building.

If I had quit during those years of doubt, I'd never be here.

Because what we built taps into the main vein of culture. Not the surface noise. The actual environment around emerging behaviors that most people don't know are happening.

That's how a word with two X's that looks like a joke becomes an early warning system for the next macro shift!

Protein had its moment. Fiber is next.

America's relationship with sugar caught up to us. Type 2 diabetes. Metabolic syndrome. Gut issues that used to stay private. Now there's a mainstream forum to talk about it openly.

Food and beverage brands paying attention now will win. The ones still treating this like a meme will wonder why their competitors moved faster. 💯

What signal have you spotted that looked ridiculous but turned out to be real?

I feel like a pressure cooker right now.

Since November I've been absorbing. New decks. New materials. New ways to position what we do. Learning how to talk about cultural intelligence in ways that actually land.

And I can't get the words out.

That's the part nobody tells you about building something for 10 years. There are seasons where you KNOW you're sitting on something powerful. You can feel it in your chest. You want to scream it from the mountaintops.

But the words aren't there yet.

Worked through the holidays. No real break. Just grinding on positioning and messaging while everyone else was posting vacation photos. Came back to 2026 and it's already showing me what this year is gonna be.

Challenge after challenge after challenge.

That's what I signed up for though.

The frustrating part isn't the work. It's the gap between what I'm learning and what I can articulate. Like my brain is three steps ahead of my mouth. I'm seeing patterns in cultural intelligence that I know are valuable. I just haven't found the winning formula to explain them yet.

Some days that gap makes me feel defeated. Like I'm failing at the one thing I'm supposed to be good at.

But here's what keeps me going:

I've been here before. Eight years of "no's" before the Fortune 500s started calling. Three years unpaid before we could pay ourselves. Every breakthrough came after a season of feeling stuck.

The pressure cooker eventually releases.

So tomorrow I'll wake up and do this shit again. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Because that's what delusionally obsessed founders do. We refuse to quit even when we can't find the words.

The formula is coming. I can feel it building. 💯

Anyone else sitting on insights you can't quite articulate yet?

MLK Day. Most founders are off. I'm fighting the urge to jump out of my skin.

Not because I don't believe in rest. But because Q3 and Q4 put us in the best position we've ever been in. High-stakes projects. Fortune 500 conversations. Signals we're tracking that I'm dying to share with prospects.

The guilt of not running is real.

Every hour that's not revenue-generating feels like a betrayal. Like I'm letting the team down. Like someone else is outworking me while I'm watching Cocomelon with my kids.

But here's what I've had to teach myself:

Family time is an indefinite no.

Not a "let me just check this one email" no. Not a "I'll be present in a minute" no. An actual, non-negotiable no.

Because when I don't protect that boundary, I return to work scattered. Trying to do everything at once. Anxious and unfocused. The rest that was supposed to recharge me just creates chaos.

Coming up for air isn't the reward for grinding. It's the strategy that makes the grind sustainable.

Dr. King said "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."

Sometimes moving forward means sitting still long enough to remember why you're running in the first place.

First few weeks of the year hit different. Uncertainty everywhere. Markets shifting. Everyone trying to figure out what 2026 is going to be.

Maybe a day to breathe isn't weakness. Maybe it's the play. 💯

What helps you come up for air when the grind is calling?

Jingles are back and the internet is auditioning!!!!!

After Dr Pepper turned TikTok creator Romeo Bingham’s viral “Good & Nice” jingle into a national spot during the College Football Playoff National Championship, creators started making brand jingles for everything and brands started paying attention. 

In this 30-minute LinkedIn Live, Nichefire × Vidlo break down what this moment signals about culture and behavior (especially the playful “make-a-song-out-of-anything” energy that’s long been familiar inside Black remix culture), and then show a practical way brands can activate it without being cringe or chaotic.

You’ll see:

Nichefire: how we validate whether this is a fast spike or a durable behavior shift using multi-signal cultural data (discourse + intent + influence).

Vidlo: how to run a UGC Jingle Challenge that collects submissions, permissions, and finalist selection in a way your marketing + legal teams can actually use.

A simple playbook to brief creative, pick winners, and turn the best hooks into paid/credited partnerships.

Featuring Chynna Morgan + 🔥Khalil El-Amin.

Chynna Morgan, Kenneth Groom and 5 other attendees

From TikTok to TV: The UGC Jingle Playbook (Nichefire × Vidlo)

“Clean label.”
 “Ultra-processed.”
 “Real food.”

These words are everywhere right now, but most people still walk into the grocery store wondering what they actually mean.

So we’re kicking off a new LinkedIn Live mini-series: 

Future Food, Real Kitchens 

a set of short, practical conversations about what’s changing in food culture and how it shows up in real life, not just headlines.

Episode 1:

 Clean Label vs Ultra-Processed -  what “real food” means now

I’ll be joined by GourmetBetty, who brings a deeply practical, culturally grounded perspective from real kitchens (with a Cuban / multicultural lens). 

I’ll bring the trend framing and cultural signal-checking powered by Nichefire.

What we’ll cover in 15–20 minutes:
 • How people are actually defining “clean” food today
 • Where ultra-processed foods cause the most confusion (and where they don’t)
 • Simple label-reading rules you can use immediately
 • A few realistic pantry swaps that still taste like home

No extremes. No food shaming. No medical claims.
 
Just clarity, context, and practical takeaways.

📅 Wed, Feb 11
⏰ 6:00 PM ET
📍 LinkedIn Live

If you’ve ever thought “I want to eat better, but I don’t want this to become my full-time job”  this one’s for you.

Drop “CHECKLIST” in the comments and we’ll share the label-reading guide after the Live.

Betty Rodriguez-Hakes, 🔥Khalil El-Amin

Douae ANDALOUSSI, Betty Rodriguez-Hakes and 4 other attendees

Healthy Meals in Real Kitchens

Food culture is loud right now—“clean label,” “ultra‑processed,” “seed oils,” “back to grandma cooking”… but what does any of it mean when you’re standing in a grocery aisle or trying to get dinner on the table?

Join GourmetBetty (powered by Nichefire) for quick, culturally grounded conversations on what’s changing in food culture—and how to turn that into practical, realistic kitchen moves.

happy black history month! 
aka, a black perspective month

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