Hire the biggest creator in your niche as a salaried team member with equity

KobyYeah. I think that this current generation is actually just like completely sleeping on Facebook. You get so much reach on, um, Instagram and Facebook right now. Basically to make a really long story short, we went and we hunted down the number one influencer in sobriety. Uh his name is Eric, he's uh Mr. Impulsive. He does, by himself, anywhere between 50 to 100 million views a month.

KobyAnd, um, yeah, when our app was basically we didn't even have any revenue, we went and we got him to come and be our VP of Sobriety. So he's like member of our team, you can check out all of his stuff. Uh he creates really crazy contents, um, that just goes like mega viral. His biggest accounts are on Facebook and then TikTok.

KobyAnd, uh, yeah, so we started with Eric, um, and basically we do a combination of stuff with Eric and then we do, um, couple other smaller influencers, and we run a bunch of ads. But yeah, this is the TLDR of like uh the the GTM strategy.

JosephThat's awesome. That's really interesting. You say his his biggest platforms are Facebook and TikTok, but not Instagram. Like it looks like he's posting a ton of Facebook Reels and they're like a lot of them are getting a lot a lot of views.

KobyEric is a beast, man. He pushes out so much content, and then occasionally he has stuff that just goes like mega viral, and he links us in all of his stuff basically. And then when something like really pops off, we get like, I think somewhere between like 50 to 100K link clicks, um, every single month, just from Eric.

KobyBut yeah, so I've I've spent probably anywhere between like $10 to $20 million in the last 10 years on influencer marketing. The thing that people get wrong is that if you just go to an influencer and you're like trying to negotiate like a dollar per post, you don't get the best deal.

KobyPeople treat influencers like they're not humans, for lack of a better word, but they're just humans that care about things, that uh job is to like promote your product. And if you're able to like get them onto your team, and like give them like salary and equity, and get them like hyped about a mission, and be like, "This isn't just like some silly app that's paywall, CAC-arbitraging its way to like make a million dollars, but like this is like actually helping people, and like you can feel good about like the work that you put out into the universe," all of that matters to influencers. And if This is the same for influencers, anyone, but if you're only paying for like dollar for performance, you're missing out on just a lot of optimization.

JosephYeah. How do you structure these deals with influencers? Uh it sounds like the negotiation and the human-to-human part is really important, where you're getting people who are genuinely interested in your product, and then is there like an interesting way you structure these deals?

KobyThis person is like complaining about us. He's like, "I've been on this planet for 60 years and I can say for 40 of those I have been dependent on alcohol. With Sam's help, I'm 7 days sober."

KobyWe see this like over and over again. And then I don't know, I'll tie this back into UGC. We have Eric in our Slack channel, not just like outside and be like, "Hey, here's money. Thanks for posting about us." He's like in our Slack channel and we're just like constantly dropping this stuff, and he can see all this feedback, and he can be like, "Woah, holy shit. Like I'm just out here slinging memes, but like these memes that I'm slinging are resulting in people that are like aren't killing themselves anymore." And he can feel very good about that, and it's it's really, really powerful, not just for like the influencers, but just team building in general.

JosephThat's awesome. This is so cool. Was there anything surprising to see which features people found the most helpful between like the social things, the AI part, and like some of the other features that you put in?