How to Work with Creators/Influencers (a different way)

Hey all - I see a lot of posts here (and even more on Reddit + founder forums) about working with influencers and creators. Why? Well, they control attention, and we all need it!

I used to run creators at adidas (there it’s anyone from an artist to an athlete to an influencer). After that I was at TikTok (where creators = the product - without them, the algo has nothing to match).

So I think about creators a lot! Even more now with @Meet-Ting as we try to find, build and get audience to stick.

Here are a few ways I think about creators outside of pure transactions, maybe useful to reframe how you work with them too:

Founding creators

At Ting we identified a handful of creators (top LinkedIn voices, 'KOLs' in their fields like sales, marketing, branding, freelancing) who we knew we wanted to work with long-term and who mapped closely to our ICP hypothesis.

We offered them fractional equity - so they had skin in the game and we stayed capital efficient.

It wasn’t just “here’s equity.” We presented creds (our Google backing, investment, team) and a vision. That helped them see upside and de-risk the trade-off of posting about us instead of another company and losing out on cash in the present.

R&D for storytelling

I said this on a podcast recently and the host liked it, so now I’m leaning into it: you can also consider creator calls as R&D for storytelling.

When you’re early-stage, talking to creators about your product is fascinating - because they immediately think about how to tell the story to their audience. That teaches you a ton about:

a) how to communicate clearly

b) what actually catches attention

Remember: to be a creator, you need command of audience + algorithm. That’s an elevated POV most startups don’t have in-house.

Audience

Obvious one, but worth saying: don’t chase views and impressions, chase quality views.

Look at the makeup of their following, engagement, activity. Do their followers trust them? Or is it a passive audience?

One of our creators posted about Ting and you could see the immediate trust convert directly into signups. That doesn’t happen unless you spend time reviewing their history deeply. Are they bot comments, real people, constantly a lot of engagement, is it hit or miss, do views/comments look on the up or down generally?

The real deal

If you pick the right creator for your product/audience, chances are they’re also a potential customer.

If they’re not using your product, it’s just a transaction. That can work (!) - but it’s better when they test and understand it first.

The content comes out stronger, plus they’ll give feedback and feature requests. Suddenly the “branding deal” turns into a product improvement conversation, so you can walk away feeling like you got an even sweeter deal.