Know what you're actually buying: UGC buys a swing, ads buy reach, influencers buy trust

I ran the marketing and operations for Cal AI that took us from nothing to #1 app in Health & Fitness in 18 months. In that time we signed hundreds of influencer partnerships, tested every niche imaginable, and built a system that ran most of it without us. When scaling a consumer app to any level, distribution is the #1 bottleneck you’ll encounter. And I’m going to help you fix this once and for all in the next 5 minutes. By the end of this you'll know: The systems that let four people manage hundreds of influencers on autopilot How to identity scalable creators vs duds The 3-to-5 rule for testing niches without burning through your budget Why your campaign briefs are killing performance and creator relationships How the influencer marketing pricing curve screws you at both ends, and show you the gap in the middle where the money is What you're actually buying with each marketing channel (most operators get this wrong and overpay for years) It's everything I'd tell a founder who asked me, "how do I scale my app?" Let's get into it. 1. Know what you're actually buying I've written about the three distribution channels (UGC, paid ads, and influencers) and how to evaluate which one fits best for your business and niche. Here’s the short version: With UGC, you're buying content and swings at the algorithm. Cheap videos used as a volume play, hoping a few go viral. With paid ads, you're buying distribution. Predictable, scalable, and you get exactly what you pay for…nothing more. With influencers, you're buying trust. The audience relationship already exists, and you're essentially renting it for the duration of your creator deal. The majority of failed influencer programs die because the operator behind it had no rhyme or reason for the decisions they made. These are some of the most common mistakes I see being made with brands who try influencer marketing: Paying for follower count instead of views Going after the biggest name instead of influencers with the right audience that will convert Forcing a scripted "ad" instead of organic-feeling videos that slots seamlessly into the creators natural content Running the channel in the wrong niche (i.e. B2B or Saas products don’t feel like a natural promo for most influencers) Never building a system for onboarding, deliverables and creator analysis Influencer marketing worked for Cal AI because: The health and fitness niche already embraced the before-and-after/transformation content format and could easily go viral We could sign fitness influencers to reasonable creator deals because everyone and their mom is trying to make a name for themselves (creator availability outpaced demand) The app felt like an actual product these influencers would use in their day-to-day lives. We partnered with the right influencers who had real trust built with their audiences, which helped us scale faster than anyone else. And the main reason we could consistently find creators who converted for Cal AI is thanks to the 20-second Influencer Test. 2. The 20-second test that makes or breaks influencer deals Too many operators spend hours analyzing whether a creator will convert by obsessing over followers, engagement rates, and audience demographics. If you need hours to figure out if an influencer would work for your brand, I can tell you right now they won't. After evaluating over 10,000 creators for Cal AI, these are the are only three questions you need to answer: Question 1: What do their views look like? Looking at average views for all their videos is a good indicator of sponsored post performance. And I am more interested in their baseline view metrics than the random few videos that popped off. I've seen creators with millions of followers who get 10,000 views a video, and creators with 15,000 followers who get millions of views a video. You're paying for the video, so the only number that matters is what a video actually does once it hits the algorithm. Question 2: What does the comment section look like? The sign of a healthy, engaged audience that will listen and buy anything that an influencer puts in front of them can be seen by simply looking through their comment section. If people are posting actual comments, asking questions, arguing with other followers, basically anything other than a bunch of emojis, then you're on the right track. Question 3: Could you imagine being friends with this person? How well does this influencer talk to the camera? Do they have a personality? Does the audience feel like they know them? Riche Lovelace aka daddywellness on IG is a great example of a creator who crushes these criteria. If you can't picture someone feeling like this creator is their friend, the parasocial relationship isn't there. And the parasocial relationship is the entire product. If the answer to any of these questions is no, move onto the next creator. If you're still deliberating after 20 seconds, that's your answer too. 3. You get screwed at both ends of the deal pricing curve Here's something nobody tells you about influencer pricing: the market is broken at both ends of the spectrum, but for opposite reasons. The top of the market is overpriced because big brands can't attribute. When a big brand signs a massive creator, they have no idea how much revenue that deal drives. The brand is doing so much volume that no single video moves the needle that much. So they take a shot in the dark, anchor a random price against what they'd pay Meta for the same reach, and usually overpay. Those inflated deals set the asking price for every other big creator in the market. The bottom of the market is overpriced because nobody knows what they're doing. When it comes to small creators, they usually only get DMs from inexperienced brands. And most small brands have never run a successful influencer deal. So when a creator with 5,000 followers quotes $2,000 for a post that'll likely get 3-4k views, the brand pays it because they don't know any better. Multiply that across the whole bottom of the market and tiny creators end up with prices that make zero economic sense. The money is in the middle. Mid-sized creators are what kept our dashboards up and to the right at Cal AI. This category of influencers are too expensive for the brands that don't know what they're doing, and too small to be worth a giant brand's time. That's where the entire Cal AI playbook lived. One more pricing rule, and it's non-negotiable: pay flat rates, never per view. A flat fee means the video can go mega-viral and you don't pay a cent more. That asymmetric upside is the whole reason organic content beats paid ads and traditional spray-and-pray UGC when done the right way. The second you pay per view, you've converted your influencer program into expensive Meta ads. 4. You're hiring the audience, not the influencer This is the lesson that cost us the most money to learn, so pay attention. We once paid a mukbang creator a serious check. Their videos hit huge views and always showcased tons of food, so on paper it made perfect sense for a calorie-tracking app. Spoiler: it barely converted. Because people watching someone eat 8,000 calories for entertainment do not want to count their calories. We made the same mistake with UFC fighters. Fighters track their weight obsessively, they cut for every fight, and the product fit seemed obvious. But we only realized after losing thousands in deals that the audience watching UFC fights are drinking beer and eating pizza on the couch. Comedy creators, same story. Yes they get massive viral reach, but when those videos go viral, it's a different audience every time. They might have a strong following, but they don’t have trust built up to start promoting a health and fitness app that clearly feels like a paid promotion. On the other hand, one of our best performers ever was a TikTok dancer girl. She never talked to the camera, had no previous fitness content, and every instinct I had said it would flop. What I didn’t factor in was that her audience had followed her for years without ever getting to know her personally, and the Cal AI video was the first time she let them into her actual life. They finally got to meet her through her Cal AI videos, and we reaped the rewards of a teenage Tiktok cult following. So how do you test a niche without lighting money on fire? The simple rule we followed was the 3-5 test method. Test a niche three to five times with different creators and different angles. At any sign of life, keep pushing. But if you get crickets across every attempt, kill the niche and move on. 5. Let creators cook The creator brief is where most influencer programs quietly sabotage the entire marketing channel. Operators send creators a 10-page brand deck with mandatory talking points or strict word-for-word scripts. Then put the influencer through three rounds of revisions and multiple approval checkpoints. The brands are then confused and angry when the content performs like an ad (hint: because they turned it into one). Think about what you're actually paying for. This person built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people by being good at making content. The moment you over-engineer their video, you've removed the only thing that made the deal worth doing. Our briefs were deliberately minimal. Here's the product Here's what it does Here's the one thing you can't say for legal reasons, aaaaand go. I worked in management consulting for years, so this was painful for me at first. I thought everything needed to be "client ready" aka detailed decks, perfect formatting, and every detail spelled out. It took me embarrassingly long to accept that creators don't want your boring PowerPoint. They want a Google Doc they can read in two seconds, and then they want you to get out of the way. And from a logistical standpoint, a lean team of 4 co-founders couldn’t physically micromanage hundreds of creators. Heavy briefs don't just kill performance, they also kill your ability to grow past 10-20 partnerships. 6. The Systems Everything I’ve already covered works because of creative testing, taste, and intuition. But none of it can scale without proper systems. When I joined Cal AI, we had two or three influencers and weren’t optimized yet for aggressive scaling. Signing a creator meant someone manually sending a contract, someone remembering to follow up, and checking view counts and comment sections multiple times a day. I rebuilt our whole system as an automated pipeline, and by the end, we were signing 10 new influencers a week and managing hundreds of active partnerships with a tiny team. These are the systems that winning apps use to scale properly: Step 1: Volume outreach. Virtual assistants running multiple outbound channels like clockwork. Step 2: Instant calls. Jump on a meeting the second a creator responds. By the end of that call it was a yes or a no, never "let me run it by the team." Step 3: One-click contracts. A yes triggered a set of automations: contract sent with the deal terms, post count, payment, and expected deliverables. No lawyer ping-pong or week of back and forth. Step 4: Auto-updating tracker. The signed contract updates on a master sheet automatically…so you can easily see every active creator, every scheduled post date, every deliverable, all in one place nobody has to maintain by hand. Step 5: Automated reminders. On post day, the creator got an automatic text: you're scheduled today, submit your video for review. Step 6: Track and renew. Every post got logged against views and comment quality, and that data decides who you renewed and who you cut. Your roster gets stronger every month on its own. Notice what's missing from that list: meetings, status reports, and project managers. Each step existed for one reason, to remove a human bottleneck between "creator says yes" and "their video is live." Build the systems once and every deal after that costs you almost nothing. That's the difference between running scalable influencer marketing and being run into the ground by it. 7. Speed is the only moat left For a long time, the smartest people in consumer apps said taste was the moat. They claimed AI can build anything now, but it can't make it look good, so UI/UX design was the last defensible edge. I believed that too, but I don't anymore. AI design has caught up. Every copycat app looks sleek now with just a few simple prompts. There are Cal AI clones trying to run our exact playbook as you’re reading this. Same features, same influencer strategy, some of them studied us closely enough to copy almost everything. But none of them have come close to our level of success, because the playbook was never the moat either. The only moat left is speed. How fast you implement How fast you test How fast you kill what's not working and double down on what is. And distribution is just speed applied to mindshare. The goal of everything in this playbook is to create one specific feeling in the market: "why do I keep hearing about this app everywhere?" That feeling is manufactured. It comes from concentration, hitting a niche from every direction at once until you're unavoidable. Now What? Nothing in here requires a Stanford degree or a million-dollar budget. Cal AI was built by four guys with obsession, some automations, and a willingness to test faster than everyone else. The apps that win the next few years are the ones that win on speed and distribution Now go make some money. P.S. If you enjoyed this article, I go deeper with more tactical insights and lessons on AI, scaling consumer apps, and business in my newsletter. It's called Operator's Notebook, and you can join for free at the link in the comments (it's free). -Jake @bucky_MT glad you found it helpful! @themustachedad 👍 @tim_gremp you got it Tim @lyuda_mekhed let's go, glad it's been helpful! @AndyTheGiant @swolematesgym nice andy @BurkhartLatam you got it Join my newsletter here: https://operatorsnotebook.beehiiv.com/ @alejandro_ff1 thanks man @TradfiBaby no problem @doclkk 2018-2024 If you like this tweet, you will love my newsletter. Join here: https://operatorsnotebook.beehiiv.com/ @ceokhalife thanks man! @BurkhartLatam 👍 @WPConvert_ai read this for rates https://x.com/jakecastilloooo/status/2069030138357112867?s=20 @MrjBond1968 glad you liked it @degenrsc thanks for the kind words @Blum_OG that was the hope @hussain__sh98 thanks Hussain @sun_choi8 hahaha appreciate it @jakkvega appreciate it Jakk @ipivto thanks IIya @Mr_Salio appreciate it Salio, glad it was helpful @everett770 you got it man @TheCyberPost1 yep always got to test everything @ArsiHoxha_ yep yep @VibeMngmnt for sure @deanfluence appreciate it dean

I've spent 6-figures paying influencers to promote Cal AI… The reality: influencer marketing is rigged. You’re about to overpay creators no matter who you sign, unless you know exactly where to look. Here's how influencer pricing works (and where the best deals are hiding): https://t.co/uaLASUDlcW There are 3 ways to buy attention & they're not created equal. UGC: you're paying for content & a swing at the algorithm, praying for virality. Paid ads: you're paying for targeted distribution. Influencers: you’re paying for the trust that the creator has with their audience. https://t.co/EgJHK1Td85 Know this: when researching creators to sign, follower count is irrelevant. I've seen creators with 500k followers pull 10k views a video, & some with 15k followers pull millions. Relatability + trust + seamless product integration = conversions But here’s the problem… Brands often get overcharged on BOTH ends of the creator spectrum. When a huge brand pays a huge A-list celebrity, they can't measure what revenue he actually drove. So they overpay to feel safe, and that inflated price becomes the rate everyone copies. https://t.co/SOGsnM6aF2 For small creators, they rarely get inbounds, so they’re eager to sign deals. But the only brands reaching out are the ones with zero knowledge on industry standards. A creator quotes "$2,000 for 2,000 views," the brand has no clue, and pays it. Now that price is "normal" too. So the big influencers are overpriced because of murky attribution. And the small guys are overpriced because nobody around them knows what a view is worth. Both ends of the market are broken, just for opposite reasons. Mid-tier creators are the sweet spot for influencer marketing strategies that scale. Too expensive for the clueless small brands, & too small to be worth a massive company’s time. This level of influence is the perfect mix of trust and bang-for-your-buck. Here’s the takeaway: 1. Followers are a vanity number. You pay for trust and views 2. The biggest creators overcharge (murky attribution) 3. The smallest ones overcharge too (clueless buyers) 4. Mid-tier is where the math works This is the $2M/month formula I ran for Cal AI. https://t.co/chdNARVa07 If you enjoyed this breakdown... I go deeper with more tactical insights and lessons on AI, scaling consumer apps, and business in my newsletter. It's called Operator's Notebook, and you join 300+ weekly readers at the link in the comments (it's free). https://t.co/Ir3ngDeMIr Check out my newsletter here: https://operatorsnotebook.beehiiv.com/ @real_doved thanks Doved @ziya_malik99652 thanks man @thearslaniqbal it's a big game of murky math If you like this tweet, you will love my newsletter. Join here: https://operatorsnotebook.beehiiv.com/ @panda_hritik you're onto something there @bucky_MT glad this helped @All4nDev the product should feel native to the influencer or it can come across as salesy @antraymond_ glad it helped @thekevinqi lol @EndrewBiz true @Mr_Salio thanks salio @mikemiller thanks Mike @joshxvillarin just depends on your goals and how fast you want to scale and the product @lukcombinator yep haha @alejandro_ff1 thanks man! @themustachedad 💪 @Cryptolissima glad to hear it @joshjfish glad it was helpful Josh @markfenner yes @vojtajina you're welcome

Influencer marketing is often times a terrible growth channel for brands. This is usually the case because influencer marketing can be expensive, a gamble and naturally has murky attribution. On top of that, the work doesn't compound like paid ads or mass organic content strategies. And the majority of operators who try it, lose money before they figure out why. But for a small set of brands, it's the best channel they'll ever run (Cal AI being one of them). We weren’t smarter than anybody, and we didn’t just “get lucky” with the deals we signed. The most important decision in our entire influencer strategy wasn't about any specific creator…it was about whether we should be running influencer marketing at all. Our success can be traced back to four specific conditions that we determined to be true before we spent a dollar on any partnerships. In this article, I'll lay out the 4-step evaluation system we used to determine if it made sense to scale Cal AI with influencer marketing. If your niche checks 3 or 4 of these boxes as you read through this, influencer marketing is probably the strongest channel you can run. And if it checks 0 or 1, ignore influencers and just run paid ads. Let’s get into it. The three channels and why most operators pick wrong Before you can decide whether influencers are right for your brand, you have to first understand which channels you're choosing between: #1: UGC - You hire a creator to make videos exclusively for your brand. Pros: Fast turnaround time Cheap cost per video (you might pay $1,000 for 30 videos). Built for paid ad distribution if you find winning organic videos Cons: They typically have no existing audience. High risk and completely unpredictable. Most videos go nowhere, and you're banking on one going viral to make the whole thing profitable. #2: Paid ads - You make the creative, you pay Meta or TikTok to distribute it. Pros: Predictable and scalable You can turn it on and off like a faucet, useful for inventory, cash flow, and new launches. Every dollar in returns somewhere between $1.20 and $1.50 (if you know what you're doing). Cons: No viral upside, you only get what you pay for. Platform risk - one algorithm change or ad account ban and you stop scaling overnight You continually have to ideate and pump out more creative assets #3: Influencers. You pay a creator with an existing audience to integrate your brand or product into their content. Pros: You get “guaranteed” reach, because you're paying for the audience and the trust that the creator has built with them. You keep the asymmetric upside, because an influencer post can still go mega-viral on top of the baseline you paid for. SEO/social proof. Creator content shows up when people search your brand, which lifts conversion across every other channel. Cons: More expensive per video than UGC (sometimes $1,000+ for a single post, and much more for bigger, household names). Harder to attribute meaning you can't always cleanly tie a post to revenue the way you can with paid ads. Reputational risk - the creator's behavior off-platform can negatively impact your brand. Slower to scale, as each deal is a custom negotiation (you can't 10x spend overnight like you can with Meta). If you were to put all three on a marketing spectrum, UGC sits at one end (low cost, high risk, with asymmetric upside) and paid ads sit at the other end (high cost, lower risk, and predictable). Influencers sit in the middle ground. Many brands default to one of these channels for the wrong reason: UGC because it's cheap, paid ads because they're predictable, and influencers because they're trendy. Picking the right acquisition lever for your brand comes down to whether your niche supports the channel you're trying to run. For Cal AI, the answer was obvious within weeks of research. Here's why. Test #1: Affordable CPMs because of supply and demand The first thing we noticed about the health and fitness niche was that creator rates were absurdly low compared to other categories. We could get health and fitness influencers for super cheap CPMs. Like a fraction of what creators in most other niches charge. We weren't brilliant negotiators, the market was just giving us those rates. The reason for this was simply supply and demand. Scroll TikTok or Instagram for 5 minutes and you’ll see everyone is trying to be a health and fitness influencer. But the demand from brands is shockingly small. There are really only two categories of brands competing for these creators: apparel and supplements. So when we showed up as a calorie-tracking app, we walked into a market with thousands of creators who didn't have access to brand deals, and we could offer them rates that were great for us and still felt fair to them. That's the first thing you need to evaluate with your brand: Is the supply of creators in your niche significantly higher than the demand from brands? If yes, you're going to get rates that make the economics work. If no, you're going to pay paid-ad prices for organic content, which makes no sense. Most operators never check this. They look at their own niche, see that "there are lots of influencers," and assume that means affordable. But they skip over validating demand. If you're selling pet products, you're competing with every other pet brand for the same finite set of pet creators. That doesn't work the same way health and fitness did for Cal AI. Test #2: Seamless integration with the content they already make The second thing we noticed was that the videos we wanted creators to make were the videos they were already putting out. Health and fitness creators we targeted were already posting videos about "what I eat in a day" and "how to gain weight the right way." All of these videos already showed food and involved tracking some kind of health metric. Dropping Cal AI into that content wasn't a big lift. The creator pulled out the app, scanned their meal, and kept going with the video they were already making. So rarely was there a script, awkward staged content, and any "hey guys, today's video is brought to you by..." B.S. That meant our sponsored posts didn't feel like an ad at all, because the audience was already used to consuming this style of content. This matters more than people understand. The whole reason influencer marketing works is because it sits inside the creator's normal feed and feels native to the viewer. The second it feels like an ad, you lose the trust you paid for. And in most niches, the integration is awkward and you end up asking a creator to do something they wouldn't normally do, in a format that doesn't match their other content. That's the second condition to check for: Can your product be integrated into the content creators are already making, without disrupting it? If a creator has to break their format to feature your product, you're going to underperform. But if your product slots into their existing format like it belongs there, you're likely going to crush it with that influencer. This one is mostly a product question, not a marketing question. Some products like apps, consumables, and anything visual usually integrate naturally. Things like B2B software, complex services, or anything that requires a 30-second explainer just doesn’t and should be avoided. Test #3: Viral potential built into the format The third thing about health and fitness is that the format itself has viral DNA. People love transformation stories, progress videos, the payoff of before-and-afters reveals. The genre we were inserting Cal AI into was the niche TikTok and Instagram rewards more than almost any other. The algorithm (and future customers) are hungry for it. So when a creator posted a Cal AI video, the upside on a single post was massive…not just because of anything Cal AI showed from a product standpoint, but also because of the inherent virality of the content type. Most niches don't have that luxury. SaaS demos and B2B testimonials don’t go mega viral, and most lifestyle content has a ceiling that caps the upside of any single video. And for the majority of brands, sponsored posts are the lowest-performing videos in a creator's feed. The creator's organic content gets more views than the ads they run, and that’s why sponsored content can have a bad reputation among creators (it kills their analytics for a week or two). But for Cal AI, sponsored posts were often the highest-performing videos a creator posted that month. That's the third question to ask yourself honestly: Does your niche's content format have inherent virality? If sponsored content in your category typically underperforms organic, you will have a problem scaling sooner or later. But if sponsored content in your category can actually outperform organic, influencers will fight to work with you instead of the other way around. Test #4: The audience has parasocial trust with the creator The fourth test is the one operators get wrong most often…but arguably the most important. When you pay an influencer, you're ultimately paying for the trust the creator has built with their audience (not just likes and impressions). And you can tell the difference in 30 seconds by looking at the comment section. Pull up two creators in your niche side-by-side and just read the comments on their last five posts. One comment section is wall-to-wall fire emojis and strings of clapping hands. The other comment section reads completely differently: real insightful messages and proof that the audience listens, engages and acts on whatever this creator preaches. Those two influencers might even have the same follower count and get the same average views per video, making their analytics look identical. But one of them is a person their audience watches for entertainment and distraction, and the other one is a person their audience truly follows. And only one of them can sell a product to their audience without it getting awkward. Two creators with a million followers each can be in completely different relationships with their audiences, and the only place that shows up is in the comments. That's the fourth thing to consider: Does the average creator in your niche have a parasocial relationship with their audience, or just a passive audience? Scroll the comment sections on the top 20 creators in your space. If most of what you see are emojis, you have an entertainment niche, not a buying niche. And if most of what you see is people telling the creator how their life changed, you have a niche where influencer marketing can actually work. Save this: the 4-condition niche check Before you spend a dollar on influencer marketing, run your niche through this simple test: 1. Supply > demand. Are there many more creators in your niche than there are brands competing for them? If yes, you'll get rates that work. If not, you'll pay paid-ad prices for slower content. 2. Seamless integration. Can your product be dropped into the content creators are already making, without changing the format? If yes, you'll get native-feeling content. If not, every sponsored post will look and feel like a promotion. 3. Inherent virality. Does the dominant content format in your niche reward transformations or before-and-after structured posts? If yes, your sponsored content can outperform organic. If not, you're capped by the format's ceiling. 4. Parasocial audience. Do the creators in your niche have audiences that feel like friends, or audiences that feel like spectators? Read the comments to find out. "You changed my life" converts. Fire emojis don't. Three or four boxes checked means that influencer marketing is probably the strongest channel you can run. Two boxes checked means it can work, but you'll need a much bigger budget and longer runway to make the economics work long term. Zero or one: pick a different channel. UGC if you want asymmetric upside or paid ads if you want predictability and scalability (influencer marketing isn't going to save you). The mistake most operators make The reason most influencer programs die at zero isn't bad creator selection, bad briefs, or bad content. It's that the operator never asked whether their niche was set up for influencer marketing in the first place. They look at Cal AI, or some other brand that scaled on creator deals, and they assume the strategy is transferable to their product. They copy the playbook without checking whether the conditions that made the playbook work are present in their own market. Spoiler: they usually aren't. And I’m not afraid to say this: most brands shouldn't run influencer marketing. The math doesn't work in their niche, the product integration is awkward, and the audience trust isn't strong enough. And no marketing budget is big enough to fix a structural problem with the channel itself. The good news is the same insight works in reverse. If you're in a niche that does check the boxes (and you'd be surprised how many overlooked niches do) influencer marketing isn't just another scaling option. It's sometimes the best channel you can run, but until now you had no way of objectively comparing it to UGC creators, paid ads, or other marketing strategies. For Cal AI, the bet that mattered the most was the niche itself - NOT which creators to sign, what to put in the campaign brief, or how to track attribution. So if you're staring at an influencer program that isn't working, the first question shouldn’t be "what should we change about how we're running it." The first question you need to ask is whether you should be running it at all. Run the four tests, be honest about the answers, and don't be afraid of the answer being no. Jake

There are only 3 ways to buy distribution for an app: - UGC spray and pray - Paid ads - Influencers Each one prices differently, scales differently, and fails differently Too many operators treat them as interchangeable, then blame the channel when they go into the red You better know the why behind the one you picked before you marketing budget disappears @hunterjisaacson Facts Viral share is where the real money is made If you like this tweet, you will love my newsletter. Join here: https://operatorsnotebook.beehiiv.com/