Every influencer and UGC strategy that worked for SaaS founders

Creator-led app (Flo): Flo spent a year and a half getting his expense-tracking app to $300 MRR on his own. Then a Colombian influencer found his social handles inside the app and reached out. The deal is a share of profits plus a fixed retainer; they started on a revenue share and switched because it didn't scale. The creator's first video, a simple app walkthrough, took MRR from $300 to $7.8K within a month. [source]

Copied fitness app (Israel): Once paid ads had the app at about $20K a month, he signed revenue-share deals with two big Israeli influencers, which took it to $80K a month. Each agreement sets how many pieces of content and filming days the influencer delivers per month. He waited for traction on purpose: go to big influencers without social proof and you end up giving away half the business. [source]

Niche mobile app (Lino): Lino gave equity to a fitness influencer in exchange for capital and distribution, which took the app to about $10,000 a month. He recommends this route to founders without marketing experience. [source]

Creator-partner apps: Loïc works with YouTube creators in two ways: promoters, paid in cash or affiliate revenue, and co-founders, paid in equity. A creator co-founder brought in about $10K MRR from launch and, as a power user, improves the product and the video scripts for free. [source]

Wrestling AI app: George's co-founder is one of the biggest influencers in wrestling, and influencer marketing has been the app's entire marketing strategy. When that audience was saturated, he put $500 into paid creator promos and made $13K that month. [source]

Four-app portfolio (Uray): Uray emailed hundreds of TikTok creators to pitch his product. The one who believed in it became his co-founder, and that creator's second video went viral. [source]

Push-up alarm app: Jake's deals are usually two to four videos a month with a view guarantee, at $2 to $3 per thousand views. He calls it low risk because spend is capped and a video peaks in about a day. Most videos do okay; the money comes from the rare one with one, two or five million views. [source]

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: Evan only closes creators at a cost per thousand views below what the app earns per thousand views, which is $2 to $3. He prefers a minimum view clause, such as $500 for 500,000 views, where the creator keeps posting until they hit it. One creator, paid about $800 with a 600,000-view minimum, got about a million views, 1,800 downloads and roughly $3,000 in revenue. Flat rates are only for creators who reliably get high views. [source]

Wrestling AI app: Contracts include a view guarantee priced at $2 to $5 per thousand views. If a creator averages 25,000 views a video, George offers $225 for videos with a 100,000-view guarantee. [source]

Snag: Creators who pass Benji's interviews go on a monthly retainer plus a payment per thousand views. [source]

AI content repurposing app: The founders scraped Instagram for creators in adjacent industries, went for volume, and paid out per thousand views to test whether creators were a viable channel. Some creators were paid directly and others came through an affiliate program. [source]

Two slideshow apps: After testing concepts on their own TikTok accounts, they distribute slideshow templates through Noise, a platform that hands the templates to creators and pays them per view. [source]

iPhone app: He found influencers tough to work with: they want a lot of cash and don't care how the videos perform. Instead he finds 'diamond in the rough' creators through Instagram and TikTok DMs or Fiverr and pays $50 to $100 per video. [source]

Remote-jobs website: He DMs people who already make content for fun and offers them paid work, keeping pay to $20 or less per video in 90% of cases. For his job-search videos he hires creators over 50, because viewers associate age with wisdom and credibility. [source]

Viral-content app: He hires UGC creators from Russia and Eastern Europe on work.ru, which he calls the Fiverr of Russia, at about $1 per 60-second video. That lets him post in volume without burning out. [source]

AI SEO writing SaaS (Vasco): Vasco gave up on established creators, who he found expensive and egotistical. He hires people on Upwork whose profiles include videos showing they are comfortable on camera, pays per video or per performance, and puts them on extra YouTube channels, including Portuguese and Spanish ones. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): On Posted, the creator marketplace Steven built, a creator with 552,000 followers made a video for $110 that got 30,000 views, while a creator with 768 followers made one that got 53,000. [source]

Niche mobile app (Lino): Lino now starts with micro influencers of 500 to 1,000 followers, paying $100 for 10 videos, to test hooks, formats and calls to action before spending more. [source]

First app (Kian): Kian found his formats by posting three times a day himself. Once one converted, he remade it 50 times with small variations and hired UGC creators to copy it 60 times a month. [source]

Simple app: He found one repeatable TikTok format and ran it on several accounts, including his girlfriend's, before recruiting low-cost UGC creators to produce it. He DM'd about 50 people a day to find them, and growth cost about $3K a month at first for himself and a few creators. [source]

Simple app (Max): Max makes daily founder-led videos and advises against hiring UGC creators until you know the exact direction and angles that work. [source]

Sports app: Influencer marketing first brought about 20 downloads a day, but trial-to-paid conversion was terrible and the app sat at $1–2K MRR. The founders stopped all marketing for four months to rebuild it, then relaunched during the NBA playoffs with influencers and viral formats. One video got 600,000 views and took ARR from $8K to $38K in three days. [source]

Mobile app (two founders): All of their early revenue came from organic viral content. Their playbook says to fix what is broken in the funnel before scaling through influencers or paid ads, and they only recently added UGC and influencers, with very good results so far. [source]

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: Evan searches his niche on Instagram and TikTok, scrolls the videos, and sends every creator the same message, starting with 'paid promo?'. Creators who reply get a phone call, where he closes the deal. [source]

Wrestling AI app: George DMs 100 creators a day, every message starting with 'paid promo'. He says influencers get hundreds or thousands of DMs a day and skip any whose first two words don't grab them. [source]

Push-up alarm app: Jake sent a huge number of DMs early on, to creators who already post day-in-the-life content where the alarm fits naturally, and warns that replies are rare at the start. He also uses a mass email tool for influencer outreach. [source]

Weight-cut app: He scrolls his TikTok For You page and Instagram Reels and DMs the creators he finds to ask for a partnership. Most of the creators he messaged said yes. [source]

Stoppr: The founder uses a site that scrapes TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to find influencers who have already promoted other apps, then feeds their emails into an AI outreach tool. He worked mainly with French influencers, because no one in France was solving the problem. [source]

Two UGC-driven apps: She matches creators to the format, good talkers for talking-head videos and expressive faces for reaction videos, through inbound application forms and VAs who message micro influencers. Each creator is interviewed, then takes a course with video modules, a content bank and a quiz per module; more than half go viral within two weeks. At her peak she managed around 200 active creators, with Discord chats, feedback calls, a referral system and dashboards. [source]

Symmetry: The team published almost 80,000 videos across more than 500 accounts in a year, for almost 8 billion views. Mauro gives creators nearly half of revenue, so they keep making content and stay with Symmetry for a long time. [source]

Snag: Benji reaches out to creators and interviews them to filter for virality; about 10 of every 100 pass. He warns that managing UGC creators long term brings churn and operational headaches. [source]

One-product brand: His content machine runs on a large team of creators and reposters making videos that look native to the platform and follow trending sounds, built to provoke a strong emotional reaction. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): Before he could afford creators, Mal's girlfriend, now his wife, recorded reaction videos. His first influencer hire flopped. To scale he hired another UGC creator and gave them 14 days to find a format; one video reached about 20,000 views, and with two accounts the app made $1.5K in July and $2.4K in August. [source]

Creator-partner apps: He searches YouTube by keyword and looks at which creators competitors use, then keeps only creators whose views are over 10% of their followers, who get at least 100 comments a video, and who have done at least three brand deals. A creator with only one-off brand deals, he says, means the brand didn't make money. [source]

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: Evan calls engagement quality arguably the most important factor: high-quality comments mean a great audience. [source]

Creator-led app (Flo): Flo looks for a match in lifestyle, tone and audience, plus charisma and a real connection with viewers, such as replying to comments. He also says to look beyond the US, since emerging markets offer big opportunities. [source]

Coding game: The best way the team found to choose influencers is to ask existing customers who they watch. To scale, it targets gaming creators rather than coding ones, because the product feels like a game. [source]

Weight-cut app: He started with small creators getting 1,000 to 10,000 views a video and moved up to creators with 20,000+. For a niche app, he says, small creators have highly engaged audiences. [source]

Remote-jobs website: Creators get a sheet of precisely instructed formats and do zero research. He checks every instruction for room for confusion and makes it 'stupid simple', which is how he keeps pay at $20 a video. [source]

AI content repurposing app: The team wrote a Notion document of content concepts, so creators could work from it without getting on calls. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Steven built Posted after cold-emailing creators proved painful. Founders write a project brief, set rules, pick the creators' location and add inspiration from their market research; creators submit videos for free, and the founder pays only for the ones they approve and owns the video and ad code. [source]

Push-up alarm app: The app appears early and naturally in the video, as the alarm goes off and the creator does push-ups. Viewers comment asking for the app's name, and the creator replies with it, often pinned on Instagram. [source]

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: Evan requires the app to be shown within the first 15 seconds of every video. [source]

Coding game: Boot.dev gave an 8-hour course to the large FreeCodeCamp YouTube channel. Working with influencers was a cheat code because their audiences already trust them, and it took revenue from $10K to $30K a month. [source]

Chatbase: He built free chatbots for influencers such as Paul Graham and Naval, accepting the cost, to get his domain opened by a lot of people. [source]

Creator-led app (Flo): His creator partner found his social handles inside the app and reached out first. He advises putting your handles on your app profile so influencers can discover you. [source]

StealthGPT (Joseph): Joseph listed StealthGPT on the AI directory Futurepedia. A TikTok creator named Phil found it there and made a video, which brought in the first sales. [source]

Design-led app: Influencers who make app round-up videos featured it, and the app took off after Instagram influencers shared it. One post got over 2 million views, then it went viral on Threads in Taiwan. [source]

Creator-led app (Flo): His outreach steps: follow and comment on the creator's posts beforehand, or be upfront if you haven't; connect their audience to your product; signal early that you will pay well, citing apps in the niche making $50K to $100K a month; and keep it short, ideally a personal video that mentions their name and content. [source]

Push-up alarm app: Jake pitches a win-win-win: the creator gets paid to keep making the videos they already make, the app gets downloads, and the viewer gets a solution without watching an ad. If the video would come across as an ad, he says the creator will want a lot more money. [source]

Coding game: Boot.dev gets better deals by doing a lot of the work for the influencer, such as shooting its own B-roll, to make their life as easy as possible. [source]

Wrestling AI app: When a creator says they're busy and tries to hard-close him on price, George replies, 'Okay, just hit me up when you're not busy.' [source]

Push-up alarm app: Jake keeps tracking simple: watch each video's views and match spikes in views to spikes in downloads and revenue. He accepts that he will lose money on some creators without knowing exactly which. [source]

AI SEO writing SaaS (Vasco): A welcome survey at signup asks each user which creator they came from. [source]

Symmetry: Internal dashboards track every video, account and view count. Videos are sorted into formats and sub-formats so the team can double down on winners, like an iPhone lock-screen notification format; one video in it reached 17 million views. [source]

Pep AI (peptide tracker): Before launch, the founder got niche influencers posting about the app to gauge interest, alongside a waitlist of about 300 people. One Instagram story brought in $1,000; the first full post got 50,000 views and about $4,000 that day, and over $10,000 in total. [source]

Wrestling AI app: The app opened for App Store pre-orders and the co-founder pushed it to his audience, which brought 3,000 to 4,000 pre-orders and a #18 ranking on the App Store on day one. [source]

Push-up alarm app: His first influencer video went live seven days after he started marketing. He made his first $1,000 three weeks after that video, had his first $30K month in month three and his first $50K month in month four. [source]

Postiz: Nevo checks which X accounts get high views and books paid quote reposts from them, using X's paid-promotion tag. He pays $60 to $350 per repost and gets 20 or more reposters on each article. [source]

Chatbase: When he isn't launching something new, he pays for sponsored posts on big LinkedIn pages, which he says work if they are structured well. [source]

One-product brand: Besides his own creator team, he pays large meme pages to post his content. [source]

SaaS sold through partners: He partners with 'connectors': influencers or coaches one layer above his ideal customer, who are highly trusted and reach large networks of his target users. [source]

First SaaS, no audience: Instead of building an audience, he finds who already has access to his customers, such as coaching companies, communities and influencer groups, sends them a demo and offers a distribution partnership. [source]

AI app: He advises building genuine relationships with industry marketers and influencers rather than relying only on advertising. [source]