Influencer Marketing for Mobile Apps 101: 2026 Edition

we go to a creator. Um they create semi-advertising video of our app um and that basically would drive the new installs. So in traditional sense I would see that in the organic if my tracking is not set up. It is it is essentially yes it's it's whole organic. Um, and the videos must be native. Like they must feel native because people will obviously recognize that it's that it sells you like And I think there is a like I think the whole cornerstone is Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of ROI1. I'm Roman from Tangent and today my guest is Nikita. Hi Nikita.
Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. Nikita has a very interesting career. He was working in Unity, then he started

publishing apps and now he's working in creators economy. What's the right name of what you do now?
Quilly. Yeah. Quilly. Simple as that. Yeah.
Yeah. But maybe tell us quickly what what what does Quilly do and why did you switch from mobile publishing? If you switch completely, I'm not sure. Oh, this is good questions Rowan. Thanks. Thanks. So, uh first and foremost, yes, my background has been quite diverse. Uh mostly performance marketing uh like games uh game platforms uh unity ads as you rightfully mentioned. Uh then like over a year ago I switched over to uh apps studio business where we launched like five apps and made around like 2 million close to 2 million in total lifetime revenue for the portfolio of the apps and you know it all worked quite well until it stopped. uh and you know we kind of encounter it the issue that as from my understanding more and

more teams encounter uh as we speak uh essentially you know the cost of paid acquisition goes up u and in case your LTV doesn't uh then it becomes uh quite a u yeah it be the situation becomes quite complex right in a way that you have to figure it out like the traffic sources that's uh that allow you to basically get the money back, right? And made some some on top of that. So, uh this is basically how Krill started. Uh so, Krill is essentially a platform that allows you to find source, negotiate with creators at scale and it was essentially my internal tool. So, I think I built this thing for myself once we realized that we are we are not able to scale through performance marketing which is a common traffic source. So we went all in into influencer marketing and realized that this is also like a quite a nasty channel in a way that you need to find these people, you need to

uh reach them, you need to negotiate with them, you need to pay to them. Also tracking, right? I'm I'm certain you know it really really well. Obviously that tracking sucks in influencer marketing, right? So it's really hard to understand what actually moved to the needle if we talk about creators simply because like distribution of links is hard uh there. So yeah there are a lot of challenges and right now we are solving at least few of them hopefully um and yeah that's how it all started. Sweet. Um we prepared some uh slides Nikita Nikita had the content we provided the design. So ask Nikita to start sharing the screen. While he's sharing, we already like covered some of the stuff that we'll talk about, but um I have a question. You were doing non-gaming apps and you were doing Ray.
Mhm.

Sorry, what was the question?
Uh were you doing non-gaming apps?
Yes. Yes, it was a subscription based apps targeting personal development niche. uh you know personality assessment tests uh compatibility analysis like things like that. So mostly targeting females. So yeah I didn't do games because I guess I knew this market too well you know in order to uh put my own savings into this uh very very competitive
um and you need to have a huge huge capital in order to make the end speed. Yeah, we just finished with another episode that is like actually focusing on uh apps not games in 2026. So this is actually why and you were doing that even in uh when did you start? 2020
to 2023 even. Yeah.
Ah okay. So ahead of the trend. Okay. Gotcha man. Uh but yeah please continue just to go through the slides and I'll just ask questions.
Yeah. So right we already covered a few of them so I don't really want to spend

too much time on this. I think kind of the biggest uh issue that I think most of us encounter and myself personally is that you know uh paid ads like everyone does paid ads um like every company has their performance marketing department um and the cost of this is like growing like 20 40% year-over-year like for example in our case I can tell you that when we started our CPM in the US was maybe like three two free dollars something like this in 2023 In 2024, at the end of it, the CPM was already $40, right? So, the cost increased almost 10x, right? Like 8x. And obviously, it's really hard to increase your LTV 8x for sure, right? Because it's not that many products actually where you can start 8x cheaper and then you can increase the price 8x and then people continue to buy it, right? So in our case of course we quite fast reached out our kind of

optimum pricing model and then we just realized that okay we just can't scale and as you can see here from the slide like you see the uh cap uh of applian basically increased like 4x during just uh in the past two years and almost 2x just in during 2025. Uh and of course this all happens because they essentially uh they're extremely effective in terms of uh growing their margins but of course if ad network uh gets the margin it means that uh advertiser uh pays for that right with their margin. So um that's just like one of the examples then effectively if you're playing on the performance marketing space you are kind of you're designed to lose. It's just a matter of time when um this is was some of the ideas that we kind of came across and then we just started to work with influencers and yeah we realized that it's completely completely different and

actually extremely poor kind of trendy thing right now. So more and more companies switched over to this and I would like just to spend some more time sharing a few insights that I was able to find. So um I think um the biggest one is that effectively a lot of app developers and game developers and app developers who just can't really uh pay can't retain uh the performance marketing channel uh they turn to creators and it's essentially a whole new subset of consumer products evolved. Uh those guys just don't do pa because they can't. Uh but at the same time they're extremely effective in terms of um in terms of making like viral videos at scale and because you get this kind of viral effect then uh you are able to uh trim down your CPMs like drastically to the like $5 per per thousand

impressions or maybe even less maybe two maybe one. I know teams personally who make even less than $1 in the US which is insane compared to paid marketing and uh there are more and more apps like this. Uh I would like to highly recommend you to check out the social growth engineers.com resource which is probably one of the best newsletters right now uh covering all these cases. Uh I would like personally to uh show only one of them and trust me there are more more and more of them. Like for example trips uh like in a few words this is just a website that allows you to buy tickets for travels cheaper than through kind of traditional sources of how you're going to do this for like booking or things like that. Um and what what they did they just hired like 70 creators uh 70 students pretty much right uh who started their own accounts like separate accounts and uh those guys basically were the ones giving them ideas on how

to make what what are the videos that needed to be made and like collectively those 70 creators created over three and a half thousand videos that generated 27 million views which is like you know just 77 CPM which is great right and um of course this is how these products that obviously due to very low margin and travel you obviously cannot really spend on paid ads unless you raised a huge huge round. So um there's only one way how you can do this and you need to be very creative in terms of uh cheap UI channels and this that's basically it. This is how we did it. So um this is just one of the examples. Again there are a lot of them. I don't really think that we need to focus more on this. Um I would love to spend more time talking maybe about um how exactly you need to build the system that will allow you to uh try to build something like this. Um

a quick question or maybe a summary. Right. So we go to a creator um they create semi-advertising video of our app um and that basically would drive the new install. So in traditional sense I would see that in the organic if my tracking is not set up. It is. It is essentially. Yes. It's it's whole organic. Um and the videos must be native like they must feel native because people will obviously recognize that it's that it sells you like And I think there is a like I think the whole cornerstone is in that you have to come up with a video idea which is both native uh entertaining because we are all here on social media just to for entertainment purposes and at the same time it must uh deliver the value of the product so fast that you

know 50 seconds is enough for you to get your attention on understand the you and understand what is the pain and how the product solves this pain. Uh because you know if the pain is not imminent, if it's not like something that you have to solve straight away, then the person will just scroll past this, right? And we'll never recall this ever again. So uh you must be on time and communicate.
Yeah. But I wonder how this works in terms of um creativity. Uh so for example I have an idea is that or maybe you have even the data what performed that better when the developer comes with ideas what should be or in the real or short I don't know or when like creators come up with ideas. Uh well

good question I think honestly the truth is somewhere in the middle. I know by by a fact that like we can go actually a little bit further. Uh and yes quick quick slide here like you know creator economy is huge and I guess it shouldn't shouldn't be a surprise for everyone uh listening to this podcast so we can just uh go forward with this but I think the biggest part here is that most of them never had a brand deal like up to 80% of creators never had a brand deal and the reason behind is that you know most creators who have deals they're big ones with agencies and so the brands can communicate well with those but with microcreators it's really hard to reach them and find them. Uh so that's why like most of them never really had anything like this and I see the biggest movement right now and the example of troops is effectively a work with small creators like really really small they can be like literally students and that can be like just a side shift for them.

Uh so um but what Krill does basically is allows this channel to happen and uh going to your question uh I guess in terms of creative concepts uh it's essential for the brand to understand what and how they want to sell. It's very unlikely that someone will understand it better than you. Of course, uh you can put on this like you can put a bet on this but my experience tends to think that you know you basically built a pro you built a network of distribution for creators but you need to have a mastermind or creative producer so to say right behind all that uh because the company knows better what performed well in the past uh they know what competitors do creators don't do this right they don't know this uh so you have all this data about compet competition uh things that worked in the past um things that worked

well for someone else. So you can basically serve all these creative ideas to your creator network and this is pretty much the biggest value that you can do. So um I would think of it as like the best teams uh I met personally are the ones that r that you know have had a really really strict requirements in terms of what they want creators to do. But at the same time you always should have some sort of uh an opportunity for the you know free expression of creativity in a way that there are there might be some ideas that you never could even think about and also for some niches and for some creators they actually know really really well how to interact with their audiences and they don't do they don't need anyone else. So I think it's a case by case but at most especially if you work with micro influencers and why they are micro right basically the good

thinking would be they are small because they're not good enough to become big or they are not good enough to become big yet right so they are in the beginning of their journey and it means that of course it's better to lead uh but if you work with like larger influencers obviously they're large for a reason they know something quite well right in terms of how to uh grow the audience. So then it might be the best to probably leave it to them.
I see. Gotcha. Makes sense. But in that case, this brief like the document that describes like what they need to do or what they don't need to do, what is a value proposition is basically a key here like for success. Like if you write it like along with the product of course, but if you write it right on point and you write it effectively, that's what determines your success, right? Uh yes, I would assume uh I I I think this is like the most important part for sure. Honestly, like from from

my experience as a performance marketer, I treat influencer marketing is pretty much is creative testing. Like you know in paid UA how you work, how it works, right? You just you create 50 videos, you put it on Facebook, you see what sticks, right? Uh you see where the spend is and then you kind of optimize toward the ones that algorithm basically favored. With creators, it's essentially the same. You have people who make videos. You have a lot of different ideas on how this videos and like the concepts on how this videos might look like. And the goal is the same. You need to you need to have a system that allows you to make 50 videos for example or like 100 videos or like 200 videos so you can see what sticks in terms of well organic reach in this regard right and then you optimize toward what works uh from that. So yes um I think creative production is vital for paid and also the same importance it has for organic uh growth with creators

for sure and you can then reuse it in paid UA so whatever works in the organic means
yes yes yes 100%. So uh if uh I I I we will definitely cover this in a minute. So uh on these slides in particular I just wanted to cover that there are different types of creators uh some of them like UGC that we all know some of them are micro that essentially are experts in their niche uh but just small ones and also there are clippers which is quite a new thing. Uh so people who are paid uh on the amount of use that they generated and you need to give them content and they just repurpose this. They just create additional hooks there uh they can repurpose it with AI. They can add memes uh all of that. Uh so just to just to generate some additional reach and then they usually post it using their own set of accounts even. So um yeah so there are quite a few companies who succeeded quite well uh last year alone

using clippers and actually this came from influencers as well. So this whole concept of clippers came from large influencers who were actually doing the precisely this imagine there is a large influencer like Andrew Tatu Ted Tate uh or somebody like this I think Andrew Tate was actually the one who kind of mastered this. So you you you make a podcast, you whatever share your expertise, whatever, and then you hire an army of people who will cut this overall video uh into small shorts and then or reals or Tik Toks and then just spread it through the network of accounts and then all of a sudden everyone speaks about Andrew Tate or Mr. Beast or whatever, right? So it was basically created by influencers to distribute their own content and to grow their audience and now it's it's pretty common like brands use it as well. So um right um you just go Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't know that we we have some some animations here. Uh but yeah um going back like on on with the whole point of how to build all this whole thing is that you basically need to create volume. So volume beats everything here I think because at the end of the day less than 1% goes viral. So you have to optimize towards this. Um and then um basically this is how you can find a viral format. Um and this is essentially the key right once it's there you can tweak what works. And you rightfully said that you can repurpose this in paid UA. Um, and I can tell you like some of our customers, they basically recruit creators for both things, right? For the organic growth, but at the same time, you get some sort of the kind of free validation of your content through organic because you're not paying to uh YouTube or Facebook or um Tik Tok for that reach and then you're repurposing in paid. Um, sometimes it works the other way around as well. If you have a great performing

creative and paid, it makes sense to also put it on your your you know company account or or give it to creators so they can tweak it. Um so yeah, repurposing I think is very important because uh at the end of the day you're you want to create as much content as possible for the cheapest price possible. So um obviously you have to optimize towards this. So the math here is like relatively simple and straightforward. Um so how you can do this like everyone can do this like tangent can do this if they want to. Uh you can just go and find uh creators um on any social media. Um it works better with students of course because uh they are okay for a side geek and they don't ask don't ask too much. So the idea is that you're paying like 10 20 max $30 per one video. It's it basically corresponds with the amount of

what you would spend on creative in your first phase of creative testing. Usually you would spend not more than like 30 40 bucks on creative if you speak about if you talk about paid ads. Then uh you hire like 30 50 creators. So that basically brings you to 10 15k budget a month which is just peanuts again compared to paid advertising but uh in return it will bring you like from 900 to 1500 videos a month which is a lot of tests right if you ask me that's that's a lot of ideas that you can test for that for the budget relatively cheap u then you can expect around maybe 1% of them will go viral which is like and what is viral viral in my opinion which is is just an uplift compared to medium views that you could expect which should be outstanding like 50x or like 100x and then u if you do this then your CPM has to go down and it go down quite fast for example in with our apps business we

were able to achieve uh 0.6 $6 CPM in the US uh for unknown apps which was pretty damn good. Uh I think the usual CPM that you can think of is like from three to $5 something like this. Uh of course it comes with uh there are you know upsides of course because it's cheap. Downsides are obvious. The most obvious one is that it's hard to track. Uh and the funnel is actually not perfect, right? Because people it's hard to distribute links then it means like the links are not there then it means that a customer needs to go and find your brand uh type it in their browser uh find it. So yeah, there are a lot of different ways how your customer can actually miss the whole brand uh placement entirely and never find you. Um so I would say the funnel is couple x worse compared to

paid where you have like a streamlined click, install, purchase, post back. Uh but at the same time you get it so cheap then it kind of uh you know the econom like the economy works. uh this other way around. And the last thing of course is repurpose as we just said like uh because you are basically buying all these videos and you're like buying the license of distributing all these videos. You can put it on paid you can uh change the way how they looks using uh video AI tooling. Um so there are lots of different ways on how you can what you can do with the best videos uh how you can extend their life. So yeah, in terms of metrics, uh I think uh if we talk about like micro influencers in particular, then their audience matters a lot. Um and I would say that um this is probably the key component. So you always you always need to check what is their age what uh what are the locations uh where they based

and uh I always check uh what is the iOS percentage across the audience because it also represents the payability right if there are more people on iPhones watching this videos then probably they have you know more free cash for subscription or something like this so uh this is also a good sign that this audience is actually good uh again outliers so it's very important to see are there any videos that this creator made that bit uh the median. So essentially median views is your enemy. So we always take a look at the median views. So never take a look at the followers by the way. Like creator will always try to sell you followers. You will always need to buy median views like never. So so
same same on same on YouTube. uh like looking at some of the channels with thousand subscribers but the views are like
below 100 and it's like ah come on.
Yes, exactly. So it's everywhere. So you

need to always you need to buy all these median views essentially for the last like three months or something because you also don't really you shouldn't be you shouldn't care about how great the this creator was one year ago or like two years ago. It doesn't really matter, right? if they post uh today uh you shouldn't be working with them. So um think of medium views, look at the outliers because it means uh that that particular creator actually knew something and did something great because uh some of their videos went viral in the past. Uh look at the consistency. I think this is a really good sign that most people don't think about like how many posts per week uh this creator does. um and how many videos they posted already in dur during their lifetime. So if you see for example that someone makes a one video per day for one year straight with no exclusions, you know, with no um misses, it means that this person is probably a hardworking one, right? and it treats

this job uh fairly and it means that probably collaboration with them will be okay because it's just a hardworking person and this is what what hardworking people do they just do the job. So and of course last but not least uh real engagement rate uh if you see like you know the median views are small and there is a huge amount of likes and comments and shares when it's weird. So uh it's always good to check whether or not uh those those this data is real because honestly honestly social media platforms understand it quite well. They see if creator whatever bots like fake likes or like fake followers or fake comments and usually they uh de prioritize them in the order or even penaltize them, right? So uh it means that those creators unlikely to go viral anytime soon if they're using like fake uh followers or like fake comments on something like this. So uh we saw it

quite many times. So my recommendation here is just pass on.
Would you do all that like manually or there is a like a dashboard with aggregated view of source metrics that you just mentioned? Well, uh, yeah. So, uh, um, I would say like the easiest way is to go manually, of course. I mean, the easiest the cheapest, right? Not the easiest. Uh, but of course, if you work with creators for at least at some scale, of course, there are a lot of tools that allow to do you to do to do the job for you. So, um, some of them provide more detailed overview. So for example, Tik Tok uh itself they have like Tik Tok one uh platform like a marketplace of creators which doesn't really work too well but at the same time uh the data that they provide is straight uh tier one data because this is Tik Tok's data right so my recommendation is always check uh the data through that uh or if you're using

any influencer marketing tool uh I wouldn't want to say that you know we have engagement rates at Krilly of course we do but at the same time Yeah, there are other tools on the market that provide you with this information and I highly recommend to my only recommendation here is just never trust the dashboard. try to uh compile the data at least from two sources because what we also found unfortunately that there are offerings on the market that provide your data but this data has nothing to do with the actual data and the question is like how this data actually how it was how it happened right and what we found is that yeah there are tools uh that unfortunately serve you you know AI generated data which has nothing to do with the real data So our like how we do this at Quilly for example is because we have an AI agent that can basically comes to each and every creator and ask for a question then we try to pull the data

directly from creator. So if creator responses then we just tell him hey please send us screenshots from your Tik Tok studio about your audience for example and of our agent can read this and this is how we can basically validate the data because I think the the best data is the actual data that was sent to you like in real time pretty much from the creator directly. Of course there are edge cases then creator can I don't know uh fake the screenshots yeah through the photoshop but to be honest I have never seen any
things like this in my whole kind of experience I think for creator it just doesn't make too much sense to be honest u because you know anyway if their audience doesn't fit then it will be just like oneoff collaboration and uh it's just hard right it's it's for any creator it's better to have a brand with whom they have already in the relationship uh established relationship and because every time you need to do

this whole kind of sale communication process and trust me for many creators it's just like extremely painful like this whole communication thing is just hard uh they just want to make videos you know we they don't want to talk with managers uh go through compliance you know sign agreements uh all of that so um yeah as per my experience u I have never seen any creators doing this. Uh but of course I can agree that there could be cases but again right if you're talking about scale it's probably less so of a of an issue.
Gotcha. Thanks.
Right. Yeah. So speaking about uh pricing um I think um yeah so I think as we spoke about it like median is our enemy. So we are trying to make videos that will be better than the median. Um so uh usually try to pay uh more for beating this median. So what

how we structure this with our creators for example is we always offer bonuses if the video will meet a certain threshold in terms of views because once we because it basically incentivizes creator to focus on every video like every video must must beat the median and then uh this bonus is usually much better than the actual fixed fee that we are paying. So my recommendation here is try to pay less for the fixed fee and more for the actual performance of the video.
Median based on the creators account stats or median based on whatever
median. Yes. Median based on the last last three months of uh creator performance. Yeah. So we so we just all the all the time we took the view all the views for the past three months and we take the median number from this and we try to beat this particular number. So um yeah that's basically how it goes. So 1% uh of those videos as as mentioned

uh can go viral and uh it's okay and once you will have like those first tests with those first creators some of them will work some of them won't it's okay and with whom who actually worked uh my recommendation is try to sign a revenue share deal uh it's it's like I think one of the biggest mistakes that some teams do is that they try to offer the revenue share deal from the get-go like you know hey uh please promote our uh app we will give you revenue share. So this this will never work, right? Because creator doesn't know anything about your app, your funnel, your conversion rates, like all of that is unclear. But if you can go to them and say like, "Hey, we made a video with you. It create it generated like 3,000 in sales. We can give you like 50% from those sales next time if you want to. Just give us videos when you want. Like we will always pay you from all these sales attributed to you." Then uh usually once

you see once once a character can see the actual value that they can generate then usually it's a much easier conversation. So my recommendation is to try to sign revenue share deals because for you it's like essentially risk-free uh collaborations for the brand but you need to be sure that this is actually a top performer creator. So don't ask creators from from the first interaction ask them further. Um another one I what I really like especially about Christmas as we are recording this right uh at the end at the end of this year. Uh so uh buying in bulk um is really good strategy and how you can save again the costs because you know during holidays especially at the end of the year um all prices go up in advertising like prices go up in Facebook prices go up in Google and creators obviously also understand that this is the end of the year so they also put their prices up. Uh how smart

teams do is you go and buy like let's say five or 10 videos from one creator um let's say back in October and then you use these videos and use this placements all the way in November, December and January for example. So that's how you can basically buy them while they're still cheap and then you can use them uh then it's a high season something that you can't do with auction at all. Um last but not least are referral bonuses. So the best uh creator is the one who brings you their friends. Um my recommendation is always try to build like models where every creator in your network can uh introduce you to another creator and then you will sign the another creator then the percentage of the profits coming from the second creator comes also to the first one. So this is how you can incentivize creators to introduce more people and build their own kind of small pyramids uh behind them which is which is good. So

um yeah do I have any questions maybe about pricing? Um yeah I wonder about like revenue share like I'm just trying to imagine let's say I have an app with established revenue streams and then I offer a create a revenue share. So I'm I'm just saying I'm generating revenue through a lot of streams. How do I know that that's go his share is going to be like significant enough? Yeah. Yeah.
Uh so I think first first it works more with actually bigger creators because in order to create a significant money coming from the revenue share by base you need to have revenue first right and the revenue is a function of the views and installs. And if you will basically look at the whole funnel it means that

at the beginning of the funnel you need to have a certain amount of views. So it works better with actually medium to large um influencers. I would I would say that's first and second of course you need to prepare from a technical standpoint. So uh it 100% sure 100% you need to have a web funnel for this for example. So if you if you so if you if you work with an app uh ideally you should have some sort of web on boarding because you need to create a personal promo code for that particular creator with their name or something with a significant discount and you know promo codes on Google and Apple they just don't really work well right and in most cases you need to have it u designed for that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It makes a more sense now. So it's like campaign based. It's not like totally
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's campaign based. And treat treat basically creator as a small publisher of yours, right? If they can bring you can if they can bring you audience,

it makes a lot of sense to pay them quite good share from that because it's a free traffic for you anyway more or less right in that regard. So, uh I would treat like larger creators is basically kind of publishers in that in that regards. Similar how you pay a publisher 50% from your revenue uh minus the marketing costs, right? I I I've seen somewhere in my feed um there was an app I totally forgot the app name and the creator's name but they created an app version specifically based on the like creator. Um so it was on an icon and blah blah blah but seems like this is how they're trying to solve the tracking for the revenue share.
Oh yeah that's that's also a way to go for sure. like if you're if you're able to uh maintain several builds which is this this is probably the the best right so you it's I would I would I would call this strategy is kind of white label

solution for that creator right so you you basically take your app whatever fitness calorie tracker for example right and you make a version for a fitness uh f fitness trainer right
and then she like she or he they can like distribute it for their audience so this is actually uh quite quite a decent strategy. It just requires additional workload in terms of maintaining those versions because for example, you know, you want to ship a feature uh to an app and then all of a sudden you have 10 apps for 10 creators and you need to shift the feature to 10 different products. You need to pass through 10 app store reviews um like you know all of that kind of multiplies. So webfunnel is probably the easiest and hard to track this like to start and like track it uh test it and probably with only the largest ones with whom you can work like that you know that their audience is so large that it will not be fully consumed in like one two three collaborations then it probably makes sense to think of

a separate even app for them but again right it's hard highly depends on the strategy of a developer so or of a brand so for some brands they just don't really want to Um you can always create some sort of a inapp experience which is dedicated to a certain creator like for example uh what we did for our apps when we partnered with creators for example we offered them uh to publish their content we basically personal development articles into our app with their um like with a mention that you know this is a article coming from that particular creator. This is the link to their Instagram and all that. So essentially the idea was that you know you bring us audience and we share you with the audience that you already have inside our app which is also a good opportunity because this is how you kind of exchange the audiences pretty much especially if you have

decent MAUs uh inside the product already. So also way that that's super cool. I mean like you can do all sort of stuff like live ops but in apps like okay that's a
winter creator ABC D
yeah think think about it right uh it's it was already it's already happens with the games right then there is a like large large celebrity and there is a
their face like of K reefs in cyberpunk uh or you know Kim Kardashian in like match free games uh whatever So there are a lot of uh examples of this and I guess what what happens right now is that you can just go more niche right also we co the development cost for apps kind of goes down it's cheaper right now to generate this like personalized apps or personalized inapp content uh for a particular creator simply because thanks to AI content creation is cheaper than

ever. Um so yeah absolutely. Um right um so um in terms of uh this whole pipeline thing uh I think it's important to say that it's a shitty funnel. So uh when we speak about creators creators are not the most responsible people on earth. Um and uh basic basically the good pipeline the good again it can be much worse than this. The good one looks pretty much like this. You need to reach out thousand people. 100 of them will reply back to you and maybe out of those hundreds you'll probably agree to something with maybe 20 of them. And uh it was surprising to me that still most influencer marketing teams do this manually which is insane. Uh but of course more and more teams try to automate this funnel. Um and in my opinion if you if you want to work with hundreds of creators there is no way on how you can do this like manually. like no way, no freaking way. So you need to

reach thousands like tens of thousands uh every month. Uh some some brands reach out to hundreds of thousands. Um so that's how your system should look like. And in terms of automation, um there are a lot of different ways on how this can be automated. Um I would just try to explain here what you need to actually do. So like how this whole system should look like. So first you need to find those creators. So either you will parse this information from the public sources or you will buy buy data sets you need or or you will just go personally in Tik Tok and find creators for different keywords. You need to find those creators somehow. Uh that's just the first step. The second step is how to reach them. And it's hard because if you send like thousands of emails um you need to uh avoid uh hitting spam filters, right? And uh that means there is a whole different uh thing in terms

of like warming up domains, using different domains, um warm up inboxes and all that. Uh then follow-ups is probably the most time-conuming thing in influencer marketing because you send a thousand you send thousand emails then you probably want to ping 900 people who never responded to you, right? So maybe some of them will actually find this email and will reply back to you. So this is also must be automated. Uh then you need to have audience insights. We touched this a little bit that most platforms give you either like generated or outdated data. You know in our case best is just to request screenshots directly. Um, and then you need to come up with a good brief. So the problem with people, especially creators, is that they don't really like to read. I mean, none of us like to read it. It seems like these days we all scroll Tik Toks. Um, so it means that your brief must be clean, concise, very, very clear. Um and for that for example we use like pre uh

pre-esigned closed projects in our in our studio so we can create consistent templates um and personalized offers because well influencer marketing is basically a wild west of pricing. there is no one-sizefits-all. Uh so uh my suggestion is to always try to build on a CPM that is built on median views. Um and try to play around with that. Um so give more of a performance fee something like this. But this also must be personal must be automated because uh there is no way you will come up with a offer per every creator manually again right. So that's scalable.
That resonates a lot with outreach for SAS like probably all points if you go really broad. Um but uh is that the idea of your tool really to to mitigate all those pains?

Uh yes yes Roman absolutely right. I agree with you that this is essentially an outreach problem. Right. So uh I think the main differentiation between like cold sales outreach and outreach of creators is that it's not cold like because with creators they actually want to get a brand deal right they want to monetize their channel somehow and brand actually wants to pay in most cases. So it means that there is a kind of natural match between the creator who wants to be get paid and the brand who wants to pay. uh where whereas with sales outreach it's not like this, right? You get all these sales sales emails to your inbox and yeah, it's reverse. You're not you you don't want to receive anything, right? And and people just like spam to your inbox with like all these great tools and all that. So yes, Ky to your point basically solves all of those things right now. uh we are planning to add payments because again once you have

creators who are ready to work with you then you need to pay to them and this is another bottleneck. So we are planning to add this in the following quarter. Uh and tracking as a performance marketer I'm super interested if we will be able to solve the tracking issue for this whole market. So this is very interesting. uh I think there is a lots of how we can uh collaborate and discuss together like guys with like your experience of solving the attribution uh for games and uh issues that are there. Um so yeah it seems like it's a big big topic.
Mhm.
Right. So uh yeah in terms of tracking uh we just touched this um so there is there are like you know like upsides and downsides here. So um the biggest issue is that tracking basically kills viral potential. So how it works right you either like why are you paying to

Facebook or why are you paying to Tik Tok ads or why are you paying to Google you effectively pay them to distribute your tracking link to the customer right so you're paying them that that they will find a proper customer for your product and they will distribute a tracking link to them so when you are going directly to creators you are not paying to Tik Tok or you are not paying to YouTube right you're paying directly to creator it means that the media platform doesn't really want this to happen ideally. So, um content with heavy tracking is often punished like by platform. So, it just like doesn't really go viral. So, it and there are a lot of different uh workarounds on how to mitigate this. I don't really want to touch this. It's like a a deeper deeper topic. Uh however, uh the problem is that yeah, if you're going to going to go viral, then you probably need to uh give up on tracking. I tr I usually try to say like like to say to teams that you know this is the there is a cost to

be paid. You're either paying $40 CPM and you go to Facebook or you or you pay you know $5 CPM but then sorry there will be no tracking or it will be quite limited. So it's basically you you know there is a sacrifice that is needed to be done right uh up to you to decide. Um well promo codes this is I think probably the most common thing uh works quite well uh but as we discussed you need to have a uh webunnel uh some uh platforms allow you to have links in bio uh so uh for example Tik Tok allows this and like Instagram allows this then where you can put your tracking link for let's say like a week or like two weeks or something like this which is good but at the end of the day honestly how I see this and like most people do it they just measure incremental uplift. So you can see the increment in organic growth coming from a particular g from particular date right. Um also you see the uplift in

direct visits on your website or in search. So brand uh brand queries usually go up when you are promoting something through influencers. So yeah, I think teams that who can measure incrementality well uh yeah, they all work with influencers already that's the first thing that came to my mind like to measure the uplift.
Yeah.
So organic.
Yeah. Um yeah, I think we are pretty much there. Uh I only wanted to share like briefly like how we can go even deeper into this rabbit hole. uh on how to get you know how to get like the cheapest views possible. So what what do teams do who can get like less than $1 CPM in the states? Uh so um yeah there are quite a lot of different ways on what you can do. So one of them is Tik Tok farms. So uh like literally device farms that you

uh go buy you make a like network kind of account network from for there and then you post a content that you generate in-house through this. Another one is called like labor um arbitrage where you create content for example in the Philippines and then you hire creators in the US just for posting. So you don't need to pay to the guys from the US for the creation of the content. So it's must so it's usually way cheaper. Um also
what is an example of that? So I would imagine like the person who recorded they will have a different appearance a different voice than the person who is posting or it's faceless.
Uh uh no well it can be faceless. uh but if it's uh if it's with a personal face then think about it in the way that uh you hire a creator who creates a separate account like the reason for that is because in Tik Tok content is

the only one metric that is important for the platform so it like Tik Tok doesn't really look into how large is your account for example if your video sucks it will suck on large account or on small account it doesn't really matter and same goes in the other side if you have a new account but with a really nice video that is you know very well designed polished and posted in a new account it will go up like it will get viral for sure. So uh the strategy here is to hire someone in the US who will create an account like plain seem like plain you know clear clean account and then you have someone who is creating content for that particular account in another country. Um so that's that's how it works. Uh the third uh way could be to supplement creators with some faceless accounts like slideshows like for example here in the screenshot you can see like slideshows that you that quite many uh companies also use. So uh this is the content that's very

easy to generate in house. Uh and then you give it to creators and for example they just shot they just shoot the half of the videos uh using like their own faces and this is obviously more expensive. But for the other part of the videos you just give them faceless content and they post this. Uh and the reason for that is that you have to be consistent. You have to post every day maybe even up to twi to two to three posts per day. And in order to kind of trim down the costs, yes, some of them can be just slid slideshows. Uh the fourth part is basically uh reuse of winning content and that goes how you can basically cheat uh like the algorithm uh how they understand the videos. So you change the speed you know video parameters like uh like you add different filters, different captions. So you can just reupload this. uh this can be done through Python scripts in house. So and of obviously there are SAS

for that. Uh but honestly in my opinion you can just one any engineer will build this uh a tool like this using like free open source libraries probably over the weekend so it's not as hard and last but not least localization is very important because uh most people think by default that you know we need to do content only in English but obviously English is the most competitive language out there. So same piece of content can go viral on for example French or Spanish but will never go viral on English simply because the competition on English is much much higher. So we noticed this many times that same piece of content like literally the same video or same slideshow uh on different languages perform differently. So it's probably also the easiest way how you can repurpose and also win in less crowded languages just by this. Of course, your product have to be localized for that matter. But, you

know, in nowadays it's easy, so it shouldn't be a problem. Um, yeah, I think that's pretty much it what I what I prepared for today. So, of course, we can go deeper into like uh this rabbit hole is really really deep, but I think it
it's okay. Yeah, I I really thought it's going to be like, okay, pay that much to people that have a reach and that's it. But that's definitely a lot. Um yeah, as you said at the beginning, like an alternative to the UA, I'm not sure if the same level uh of complexity, but definitely one that requires like a couple of people working or uh very u busy founder. Well, uh well, yes, for sure. For sure. I mean I think what's good here is that

uh there are a lot of ways there are a lot of things that you can actually automate uh but of course uh you need to have a really strong understanding of what is how how you want to build the system of tests around this like what is a good test what is a bad test how to uh validate the idea in the fastest way possible so I can't say that you know this is a whole replacement of paid ads. Obviously, it's just another channel that you are free to use or not to use. Uh the only one thing I just wanted to kind of highlight is that there are many companies who for many reasons just can't scale through paid these days. And for them, creator marketing seems to be one of the uh few remaining alternatives pretty much. Can't say it's easier, right? If there are a lot of things that you need to think about, it's not easy. Uh but you know, the reward can be quite satisfying. Yeah. And like especially for non-

gaming, from what I've seen, especially the guys from the US, uh it plays a role for Tik Tok if you're in the US and they go, I think the SPM prices are different. they go on Tik Tok and trying to make it like viral and try to kind of hack this game first even before doing UA or even exclusively on Tik Tok or
I I I I think this is a good this is a good idea to be honest. Uh when we before we released our latest app uh at Leora, we during the development process, we already spent almost two months just creating videos for Tik Tok and just understanding what content would sell the best the product that is yet to be built.
In my it's the same with creative creative tests again, right? we've paid before building a game for example it

makes a lot of sense for you to go and try to build a gameplay of the game and test different uh settings of the game right and see where the CPM is lower for example where you can get like the CPI cheaper and then you can based on that you can understand that okay uh I for example we all know that probably building a match free game with home decoration is probably a suicide mission in 2025 five, right? Uh in 2026 even because there's like the option is so hot. There are huge enterprises uh fighting for this audience, right? Who can pay like I don't know $200 per paying install, right? Uh for paid user for sure and there's no way you can basically compete with those guys. So I think same same works here. you try to uh understand what content works and based on that you come up with apps or websites or web stores or whatever. So I

think it basically brings us to the conclusion that in order to start a company first you need to uh you always start need to start from a content production company and then see how this can extend to other spaces. It seems that's a very good point to end this episode. I'll ask uh everyone to give us a like, hit that subscribe button. Thanks a lot, Nikita. Was super helpful.
Yeah, thank you Roman. Thank you for having me. Um yeah, wish all the best to the tent team. Thanks.
Thank you. Take care. Cheers.