Show a creator five app mock-ups for their audience and let them choose

Connor Burd… clearly he's built like a successful, you know, influencer audience with it, so performs well on his channel. Oh, I was going to say, yeah, like I definitely think I've learned a lot about like the influencer space through working with Casper on this, and it's something that I think like all these I see so many indie developers on like Twitter and whatever, Reddit and all that, talking about like launching these apps and building these apps.

Connor BurdAnd I definitely think that like these indie developers need to just start like spam DMing influencers. I reached out to Casper before I was friends with him, and, you know, I had a mutual connection, and he was like, "Oh, like I have this friend. He's an influencer. Like you should talk to him." I was like, "All right, sure." And, you know, I built this app specifically around his audience. Before he was like before we had an idea of what we were going to build, like I was like, okay, this is, you know, what his audience does like is looking for. I actually came went through a list of like maybe five ideas of different apps, and I made some like Figma mock-ups for them. I was like, which one of these do you think like resonates the most with your with your audience? Because I think these all have potential to convert off of it.

Joseph ChoiMmm.

Connor BurdUm and then eventually we narrowed in on one of them, and we said, "All right, we're going to build this one." And I definitely think that's like what indie devs should be doing, because there's so many influencers out there who are like trying to figure out how they can build something that has value rather than just doing brand deals. And I like this was super appealing to I think most influencers.

Joseph ChoiYeah. Do you know what his monetization was like before partnering with you on this app? Was he just doing like link-in-bio brand deals, basically?

Joseph Choi… figuring out how to get noticed, cuz if they have, you know, 2.7 million followers, they probably get a lot of inbound. So, how do you think that you uh stood out when you initially reached out to Casper? Cuz uh you said that you kind of created a bunch of Figma mockups and asked like, "Hey, which one do you think you would want to do?" Is is there anything else that you feel like made you stand out and then like how did that conversation go?

Connor BurdYeah. So, for Casper, we had a mutual connection, so I didn't actually build out those Figma mockups uh until we had already had like our first kind of FaceTime call. I think it was on FaceTime. And but for these other influencers that I've reached out to, like I'd say if you can find an email address, that's easily the best. Um if they don't have an agency and they're managing their own emails, I think I've seen like much better response rates from those people. Um like recently Well, like it was funny, I emailed them in maybe April, and just like a week ago, one of these influencers responded like, "Hey, like, you know, just remembered about this email." Hopped on a call with them, like I explained to them like, "Oh, this is, you know, this is your account. This is what I think we could build." And they seem super interested in it, so now like that's …

Connor BurdSo, I would say email is much better. Like there's no reason to message these guys. They have notifications off. They get like a million notifications a month. There's absolutely no reason to to try to DM these larger creators.