Leo Schlott

In 2 years, every company will have a creator program. Here's how to build one with no big budget, step by step, from picking your first creators to scaling what works.

Can't scroll tiktok in peace anymore without breaking down why a video worked. Worst part is if i like the idea, it goes straight to my mktg team Sorry team for the saturday pings

making creator content got easy. managing creators didn't the hard part now is running the program: > which creators are worth keeping? > which deal does each one get? > which deals do you end? > what does a customer from each creator actually cost you? that's where most creator programs break which of these eats most of your week?

STOP LETTING META CARRY YOUR ENTIRE BRAND. If Meta is your only source of customers, you don't have a marketing strategy. You have a dependency. Had a call yesterday I couldn't stop thinking about. So I'm writing about it. The founder shared his screen to show me his dashboard. Revenue chart. Beautiful. Up and to the right. Then he scrolled down to where it comes from. Meta. Almost all of it. "So what happens if Meta has a bad week?" He laughed. Then he stopped laughing. "It did. Two months ago. We almost didn't make payroll." He changed nothing about the product. Nothing about the team. Meta just had a bad week, and his whole business felt it. If one platform brings you all your customers, you don't have a growth engine. You have a landlord. And landlords raise the rent. So I asked him what I now ask every brand I talk to: "If you turned off Meta tomorrow, who would still bring you a customer?" Silence. Here's what I've learned from working with brands that grow with creators. ONE PIPE IS A RISK, NOT A STRATEGY Every extra channel bringing people in makes your ads work less alone. There's a simple number some brands watch for this. Take your total revenue and divide it by your total marketing spend. (People call it MER, marketing efficiency ratio. You don't need the name. You need the habit.) If ad spend stays the same and total revenue goes up because creators, email and word of mouth are pulling their weight, that number gets better. Same budget. More business. Less fear when the algorithm sneezes. One honest warning: creators, content and the people running them cost money too. Count them. A prettier ratio doesn't mean anything if you're quietly spending more somewhere else. YOUR FEED DESERVES THE SAME RESPECT AS YOUR AD ACCOUNT Nobody runs three ads for six months and expects them to keep working. But that's exactly how most brands treat organic. Same three formats. Same angle. Post and pray. The brands I see winning flip it: Every week they test new hooks, new faces, new formats. Founder talking to camera. A customer unboxing. Behind the scenes of something going wrong. A product shown in a way nobody expected. They track what gets shared, saved and talked about. Likes are the least useful part. And when a post takes off, it goes straight into the ad account. Organic stops being "posting to stay active." It becomes your free testing ground for paid. THE CHANNEL THAT WALKS AND TALKS This is where most of my days go, so I'll be honest. The brands that sleep well at night aren't the ones with the best ads. They're the ones with a lot of people talking about them. Creators who actually use the product. Customers who'd recommend it anyway. Affiliates who earn something for bringing the next one. One founder told me: "We used to make all our content in-house. Now we have dozens of people making it for us, each one in their own voice, to their own audience." That's the shift. One good creator relationship gets you: – Content on their channels – Content for your own feed – Ads that run with their face and their handle, which usually feel a lot less like an ad – Testimonials for your site and your emails But here's what most brands skip: They send free product, get a post, and have no idea if it sold anything. So they decide "creators don't work for us." They didn't fail at creators. They failed at knowing who drove the sale. Give every creator their own link or code. Know who brings real customers, not just views. Pay more to the ones who perform. Kill the "one post and goodbye" deals and build ongoing relationships. You don't need a hundred creators. Start with five or ten who genuinely fit. Give them a clear brief, let them use their own voice, and watch closely who converts. And don't forget the creators you already have: your customers. Make it easy and rewarding for them to bring a friend. That's the cheapest acquisition channel you'll ever own. I spend my days building creator, affiliate and referral programs at Fuul. Every program that works has the same thing at its core: you know exactly who's bringing you customers, and they get rewarded for it. YOU ALREADY PAID FOR THIS CUSTOMER. ACT LIKE IT. This one hurts when you say it out loud. Brands pay real money to get someone to buy. Then they barely talk to them again. Email is how the second purchase happens without paying for it again. – A welcome flow that tells your story, so it's more than a discount code – Abandoned cart and browse reminders – Post-purchase tips that help people actually use what they bought – Early access for your best customers – Emails people open because they're useful or fun, not because there's a sale The goal is simple: the next purchase shouldn't need another ad. And one more thing people miss: the people opening every email are perfect candidates for your referral or creator program. They already love you. Ask them. GO WHERE YOUR COMPETITORS AREN'T LOOKING Depending on your product, that could be: – Search and SEO, for people already looking for what you sell – YouTube, for anything that needs explaining – Pinterest, for anything visual – Brand collabs with companies that share your customer – Niche communities where your buyers already hang out – Podcasts and newsletters in your space – Your own community, a group or a space where your best customers talk to each other and to you Don't launch all of them. Pick one or two. Give them an owner, a small budget and enough time to learn. A channel you test for two weeks isn't a channel. It's a guess. YOUR MONDAY MORNING CHECKLIST If most of your revenue comes from Meta, start here: 1) Open your numbers and answer one question: how much of my revenue would disappear if Meta stopped tomorrow? 2) Look at your last 20 organic posts. Are you testing, or just filling the feed? 3) Plan one week of content with at least three formats you've never tried. 4) Reach out to five creators or customers who already love you. Give each one their own link. 5) Check that your welcome and post-purchase emails are actually live. 6) Watch the whole picture: total revenue vs. total spend, new vs. returning customers, and who's actually bringing people in. Last-click data will lie to you about creators and email. That founder from the call? He didn't turn off Meta. He just stopped letting it carry everything alone. Meta should be one part of your growth engine. Not the whole thing. Brands: if Meta stopped tomorrow, who would still bring you a customer?

Lets talk about the usage rights brands should actually care about. And no, i dont mean cloning creators with AI. I mean the right to turn a creator's best videos into paid ads. 77% of brands already run creator content as ads. makes sense. Authentic UGC usually beats polished brand creative, and a video that's already winning organically is your best bet for paid. But most brands handle usage rights badly in one of two ways: 1) they forget about it, then try to negotiate once the video blows up. Worst moment to do it. The creator knows it's working and the price goes way up. 2)they grab full rights to everything forever and pay nothing extra. Cheap today, but your best creators stop working with you. What i recommend: - add usage rights as an option in every deal from day one - agree on the price upfront, so there's no surprise later - watch the first few weeks. the videos with the best organic numbers are the ones worth testing as ads - test them with a small budget first. organic and paid don't always perform the same - when one becomes a winning ad, pay the creator extra. A bonus, a monthly fee while it runs, a cut of what it sells If a video from a creator is making you money in ads, they should win too. That's how they keep making your best content instead of making it for your competitor. Your best ads are probably already in your creators feeds. Just make sure you are allowed to use them, and the creator is happy you did

Creators don't owe your brand loyalty. You earn it over time, with small things that say a lot: paying on time, answering when they write, treating them the same after they deliver, rewarding good results. If you want them to stay, just be good at the boring part

This is a good starting point, because looking at the creator's price and negotiating from there lets the creator set an anchor you just haggle around Working out what the video is worth to you before you look at their number helps you know where your ceiling is But where i differ a bit is the "what it's worth" part, because treating every view the same doesn't work. 2 creators with the same median can sell completely different amounts. One has an audience that trusts them and buys what they recommend, the other gets views from people scrolling past (or worse... bought views) That's why i'd use the ratio only for the first video. Pay something fair, measure what it actually sells, then reprice with real numbers instead of views. Treat the first video as price discovery

started playing with grok bot after dinner. not sure how, but it's 1am

If you're about to launch a creator or affiliate program, we made the setup a lot easier Your creators get one portal with their earnings & stats, payouts, codes, quests and the content they've published You set it up in minutes, together with your signup page, on your own domain

Big companies with big marketing budgets keep losing to teams spending a tenth of it It's not the creative. It's how they treat creators The big company runs it like a media buy: a plan, a forecast, a guaranteed result before anything goes live The small team runs it like a search: they put out 50 videos, keep the 5 that work, and put everything behind those You can't predict which video will hit. Nobody can Budget isn't the advantage. Being willing to post things that flop is

most founders try creators once, pay a few big accounts, get a spike of views, and decide it doesn't work it does work. they just ran a campaign instead of building a program i wrote down everything i've learned in 5+ years of building creator and affiliate programs: > how to get creators on board when you can't outbid anyone > which creator sizes actually bring users, and which ones just bring views > how to keep them posting after launch week > how to measure who's really driving sales, and scale it if you're a founder or marketer without a big budget, this is the playbook i'd hand you on day one

Need a good screen + cam recorder. been looking at cap.so anyone using it? or what do you recommend?

a big part of my day is talking to brands that grow with creators and one question always comes up: "which creator should we hire?" i expected the winners to have big budgets and famous creators. what i found: > the offer matters more than the creator. a great creator with a weak offer sells nothing > one viral video isn't a program. 20 average videos a week is > they run creators like a sales team: goals, payouts, a leaderboard everyone checks > they know who sold what. the rest are guessing the brands that struggle keep asking which creator to hire the ones that win ask what would make 20 creators want to post for them again next week if you run a creator program, which of these is hardest for you right now?

anyone building a nice, grokbot-style hermes client? current desktop/mobile options are far