Pay StudyTok creators with 5K-100K followers for 3-video deals

HostSo then, how did you do influencer marketing? Can you just walk through that strategy?

Julian AlvarezYeah. I mean, we didn't really know what we were doing at the beginning or how it worked, but I think it was just basically finding influencers that were in our niche, like the study space, StudyTok, and trying to get them to post videos. I think the like more advanced strategy that we ended up getting to that after a couple iterations is target micro to mid-tier influencers, like in the 5k to 100k followers range, because the ROI and the CPMs at that time I think are a lot better versus like if you get really big influencers, they're

Julian Alvareza lot more expensive. You know, they don't always work out well, so you're kind of gambling. But with the micro-influencers, it was like better guarantee that you would get a better ROI. The downside is that it's a lot more effort cuz you're reaching out to a lot more people. There's a lot in the process around, "Hey, try to do like a three or multi-video deal in order to get like lower cost per video." And on top of that, like how do we best equip content and a sort of like plan to an influencer that sort of educates them on the pain points, on viral hooks that have gone well,

Julian Alvarezbut also give them the creative freedom to express themselves? I think there was a a lot that we experimented with in finding the ideal balance between guiding and giving the best material possible to the influencers while also creating enough space for them to be creative and create things in the content style that best fits their own page.

Host… with micro-influencers and you there's this concept of the brief, like you can't just have them make whatever video they want, you kind of looking at good formats that have gone viral already within the niche. How did you actually think about that balance? I'm curious like what that strategy was between giving the influencer complete creative freedom versus saying, "Here's actually how to make a video that'll convert her to actual users."

Julian AlvarezYeah, there's a delicate balance. I think we had more of a benefit in that many of these influencers tend to be students themselves, so like they get it. They get the pain points. But, at the same time, they may not because they may know them, but they may not be consciously aware of them or how to talk about them. So you want to provide like examples of videos that have performed really well or examples of viral hooks that they could potentially use, and of course, like give them feedback wherever feedback is warranted in order to to make it good.

Julian AlvarezBut it is hard cuz you have to train your own content intuition to know what works well, and this is a skill that neither my co-founder and I had. So, I think like we had to sort of make content ourselves and really study content in order to develop good enough intuition that would allow us to basically better guide and better vet the quality of any influencers we work with.

Julian Alvarez… amazing. She makes really good content. She's in medical school, which is like in our niche of like the biggest power user, and the quality of content she makes is just incredible. She like perfectly touched on the pain points in these videos, like had really good storytelling narrative, showed the product in a really compelling way, and yeah, she had maybe like three videos that got over a million views, this being one of them. It was insane.

Julian AlvarezThe first time we ever went like 10x viral was from one of her videos. It was pretty nuts. I can't remember exactly, but we went from 2k MRR to like almost 15k MRR within like a week or 2, and that video alone, I think we estimate made us like close to 20k or so. So, you know, we feel like we won the lottery. I'll never forget that first viral moment. It was pretty surreal.

HostNow you have the winning lottery numbers, right? Because you're the one who kind of like strategized to make this video. Well, you know, you outsourced the creativity a little bit to the creator, but you now have the data of like this type of video just made us 20k in revenue. So, are you then able to put in those same lottery numbers over and over and just kind of repeat the strategy? Or is there some more nuance there?

Julian AlvarezWell, that was the big question. Like, great, we hit a home run, can we do it again, and can we create a repeatable strategy around this? That was the big question at the time. And we were able to get a couple other like viral videos, specifically from this creator, Agogo. But after some time, like we weren't able to replicate it, and we weren't able to like get similar success with other creators. We tried very hard. Maybe we just didn't know what the fuck we were doing or we took the wrong approach. After some time, like we were burning more money than we were making on these influencer videos, you know, we had to switch our approach.

HostIs there anything you would have done differently if you knew that repeating the same influencer strategy wouldn't work the way that you wanted it to?

Julian AlvarezI think one thing we didn't try as much is like minimum view clauses, right? That would have mitigated the risk. And I think, overall, I feel like we could have done a much better job of seeing what worked or analyzing what worked, and replicating that in a more strategic way. I don't know if it would have come from like just better briefs or better guidance, but there's definitely a lot of things that we didn't try, but it it felt expensive to keep on trying influencer marketing.

HostSo the influencers were making some money and some downloads, but just not enough to justify the cost?