Performance-Optimized Influencer Marketing at Scale
tl;dr: 1stCollab is the fastest way to test, optimize, and scale your influencer program. Instantly source thousands of creators, and let our platform handle everything — outreach, negotiations, contracting, payments, and taxes — all while maximizing ROI.
Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KI3LN-xqdM
Ask: Introduce leon@1stcollab.com to companies interested in influencer marketing!
The Problem
We’ve spoken with hundreds of startups running influencer programs, and nearly all hit the same roadblocks:
- Low response rates. They reach out to about 10-20 influencers and don’t get any responses.
- Time-consuming processes. Even if some creators reply, sourcing, negotiating, contracting, and paying them quickly turns into a full-time job (or an agency retainer).
- Scaling is hard. Early success is exciting, but optimizing and expanding campaigns takes costly tools, headcount, and process.
What 1stCollab does
1stCollab helps you test out and scale your influencer marketing program to hundreds of creators with an hour of setup work. We do this by automating the exact same influencer process that the world’s best marketing teams run.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Instantly source thousands of influencers
Free to try out! We’ve indexed all of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube so you’ll quickly be able to find relevant creators using our search and recommendation tools.
Step 2: We take care of outreach, negotiations, contracting and payments.
We handle everything to bring the right creators on board at the right price. You’ll see the full negotiation history and campaign pipeline. Our pricing engine predicts ROI using real-time engagement signals and proprietary data from hundreds of thousands of deals.
Step 3: (Optional) Review content
Creators submit concepts and draft videos for your approval. All revisions stay organized in one place. Once you give the green light, we take care of payouts and collect performance data.
Step 4: Analyze your metrics
As creators are going live, we’ll report out on real time engagement and link click metrics. We’ll cut things by ad groups as well so you can experiment with different briefs and creator populations to understand what works well.
Some of our campaigns
We’ve helped hundreds of startups start their influencer campaigns and scale up to some of the largest campaigns on social media. Some interesting case studies to check out include Framer, Locket, Gamma and SnapCalorie!
How to get started
Start sourcing creators for free or schedule some time with Leon so we can discuss campaign strategy and we can share with you best practices
Already running influencer campaigns? A/B test us against your current program — we’re confident we can improve your performance and efficiency!
1stCollab — Run an influencer marketing campaign in less than 30 minutes 🎉
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
After working on creator-related products for three years at Pinterest—and talking with dozens of creators about the challenges they faced—Varun and Leon began brainstorming different ways creators could better monetize the enormous value they delivered to their audiences and to brands. After testing a number of concepts, they became excited by the idea of building better discovery experiences to help brands find creators for their campaigns. A mutual friend connected them with Carina, who was independently building something similar. Andrew had also previously worked with Varun and Leon on discovery at Pinterest, and joined the team as well. Soon after, 1stCollab was born!
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
We’re focused on solving a two-sided marketplace problem, for brands and creators. For brands, their biggest pain point with influencer marketing is discovering and sourcing creators. Platforms that exist today not only cost >$30k each year, but have very limited discovery capabilities. For instance, Grin.co, one of the top two influencer marketing platforms today, does not surface any Instagram influencers as part of their sourcing tools. We’re going to be the first influencer marketing platform that prioritizes discovery and create the best discovery experience for brands by growing a network of authenticated creators and surfacing those creators through industry leading discovery algorithms and experiences. For creators, 99% of creators don’t get brand deals today, because creators don’t have a way to actively apply to relevant campaigns. By creating an open platform that has a broad set of brands, we can help creators apply to campaigns by showcasing those brands and their campaigns to relevant creators. Creators know their audience and content the best, and through encouraging creator participation, we can facilitate better matchmaking between brands and creators than any platform out there.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
From working at social media companies, we know that users engage at much higher rates with sponsored creator content than organic ads. But the market for sponsored influencer content is being held back, because it’s hard to run influencer marketing campaigns and the tools out there today don’t make it much easier. 1stCollab will simplify and automate influencer marketing the same way that Facebook and Google transformed the digital ads market. If we’re successful, we’ll enable a new category of ad spend—helping more brands to leverage influencer marketing and shift more of their budgets towards it. That’s money that goes directly to creators, enabling orders of magnitude more people to make a living as full-time creators. We have the opportunity to make content creation a genuinely feasible career for many, many talented folks out there—and we’re excited to make it happen.
