Hire creators with 5-10K followers, found via the Gmail in their bio

Zack Hargett… really interesting time where it does not matter, generally speaking, how many followers you have. On short form video, it just matters if you make great content. And so we were trying everything in the beginning. I have some interesting stories. I don't know if I should share them, but maybe we can circle back to those early days. I mean, it is like a true grind and it feels good to be part of that game, but we were trying everything we could.

Zack HargettAnd then I would say we worked with easily 30 content creators of various types in the early days, I would say in the first two months. And really, three of them ended up making a huge difference. One of them in particular ran the main Coconote.app account and generated hundreds of millions of views. And I think I can speak for Brett on this. We're very lucky to have worked with him and started working with him very early on because he was a key part of our growth.

Jacob EitingI know you guys don't want to say it, but that was Mr. Beast.

Zack HargettIt was an absolute grind in the beginning, because you're just trying to find the channel that works and then you just want to ... Exploit may not be the right word, but you want to double down and you really want to spam more or less that channel until you reach the limit.

Zack HargettWe were reaching out all the above, David. So we were reaching out to creators through if they had an email in their bio. Funny observation here. If you reach out to a content creator, I have my opinions on influencers that we can circle back to, but if you reach out to a content creator and their email is, it's @sunsetagency.com or something, any agency sounding, you're too late. Those agencies exist to eliminate the alpha that you are trying to create. So they are almost always going to take more than they give in terms of the value that they provide to the company. There are always exceptions, 100%. But generally speaking, that's been my observation.

Jacob EitingThere's probably a lot of mid-tier creators too who were like, "Here, oh, I have an agency," and they get it and it's actually value destructive for them.

Zack HargettTotally. Yeah, absolutely. If they have a Gmail in their bio and they have 5k, 10k followers, good engagement, that's great. That's a really nice sweet spot. And these numbers are very flexible. But we know whenever social media switched over from a follower graph to an interest graph and with a for you page and algorithmic distribution, the number of followers you have matters less and less. The quality of the content you create matters a ton.

Zack HargettSo at Scout, my last startup, the Product Studio, our first TikTok got eight million views. We'd never posted to the account before, but we got eight million views. It drove 150,000 signups over a two-day period. I think at that time, this was 2021, if we were an app, not a website, I think we would've been number one in the App Store. And so I learned the value of great content posted on TikTok at that time. And so we knew that, that would be …