This App Hit 2M Users with Creators Who Had 0 Followers (Here's How)

Join me as I chat with Cody Schneider where we dive deep into how brands can leverage short-form content creators instead of traditional influencers to achieve better marketing ROI. He breaks down the economics of creator partnerships ($900/month for daily content across platforms vs. $2,000 for a single influencer post) and demonstrates how the for-you-page algorithm allows creators with zero followers to potentially reach massive audiences. The strategy works particularly well for mobile apps, e-commerce products, and services with straightforward value propositions. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:26 - Why Short-Form Marketing? 02:55 - Creator vs. Influencer Marketing Explained 04:41 - Micro-Creator Strategy Overview 11:43 - Case study of Focus Tree app using creator marketing 16:04 - How to Find and Work with Creators 19:49 - The Drawbacks of this Strategy 20:27 - Tools for Managing and Tracking Campaign Performance 22:56 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions Key Points: • Creator marketing is more cost-effective than traditional influencer marketing, especially for mobile apps and B2C products • For-you-page algorithms have changed how content reaches audiences, making follower count less important than content quality • Working with multiple creators (5-10) creates a compound learning effect where successful formats can be shared across the team • This strategy works best for products with simple value propositions that can be purchased impulsively on mobile devices The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND CODY ON SOCIAL Cody’s startup: https://www.graphed.com X/Twitter: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@codyschneiderx

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  I had heard stories of people making millions of dollars a year getting creators to create short form content on TikTok and Instagram. But I didn't know how they were doing it. I had Cody Schneider come and teach us how to actually make this happen. He shared all the tools you need to use, how to manage it, why creators with zero followers are better than creators with 100,000 followers. If you stick to the end of this episode, you will understand how to make the most of TikTok, Instagram reels, short form, everything in between, specifically valuable for people who want to build a mobile app, e-commerce, you name it.

• 0:40Greg Isenberg?

  Enjoy the episode and like for the algorithm and comment for my soul.

• 0:55Greg Isenberg?

  Cody, by the end of this episode, what are people going to take out of it?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Totally. You're going to walk away from this, understanding how for you page content has changed the relationships between brands and influencers or creators. What's the difference between an influencer and a creator? And then how to basically execute on influencer, or sorry, on creator marketing? And actually like measure the ROI and like why it makes sense to do this in comparison to just going and doing like paid ads on a channel. So.

• 1:26Greg Isenberg?

  And today we're going to talk about short form specifically, right? Cause we've talked about long form on the pod together, but today we're going to talk about short form, right?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Today, we're going to talk about short form, how it fits into your marketing strategy and how this can be used for, you know, like the apps that you're building with, that you're vibe coding. And what types of companies that this works well for? And what type of, what types of companies this doesn't work well for? So.

• 1:49Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Let's get into it. I will say I am somewhat skeptical of short form versus long form. I'm just, I mean, as you know, I love.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  You're biased though, baby. You're biased.

• 1:59Greg Isenberg?

  I know. So I hope that by the end of this, I'm going to be Mr. Short Form. So let's see.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I think it can work again, there are certain types of companies that this is best for. This is best for like social app, or sorry, like B to C applications, right? So like mobile apps, this is best for like products that have one killer feature that they're doing. So think about like something like an incogni, right? Where it's like data brokers are selling your emails, right? Something like that. This company like, you know, basically blocks the sale of your, their data. That, that type of thing where it's like simple, it, it's, it's, it's way better. What this isn't good for is something where there's like a learning curve.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  And that needs to have like more of a, you know, a, a long form, uh, like, uh, kind of upskill on how to use the product. If that makes sense, so yeah, but cool. To start, let's just talk about like creators versus influencer marketing. I talked to so many boomers and Gen X that are like followers, man. Like they don't have anything. Why are we working with them? And it kills me because that's not how the internet works anymore whatsoever. So social has evolved. Tik Tok changed everything. It basically took it from a who you follow and your social graph is how you get served content to what you're interested in. It's going to understand you better than yourself. And it's basically just going to give you this like, you know, unlimited drip feed of brain rot.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That's going to keep you on platform as much as possible. So why do they do this? And that is the answer is because it keeps you on platform longer than when it's just social graph content. So people can say, yeah, I miss the old Instagram where it's like, I just would see my friends post. Newsflash, they are there to make money. They need to make, the only way they make money is by selling your attention. And to keep your attention the best right now is by basically showing you content from this for you page algorithm that is most likely to keep you present, most likely to keep you on, on, on this. And all of them are doing this now, right? Like if you look at Twitter, if you look at Instagram reels, if you look at LinkedIn, if you looked at YouTube,

• 4:14Speaker 01

  they're all for you page content where there's this discovery mechanism that's in it. So as a, as a, um, as like a brands that's thinking about this as a marketing channel, you need to focus on. Really like the creators are the value that exists like somebody that understands your niche and how to get like views and traction within the category that you're in is going is the most valuable part of this. I don't really care in influence like and we can just break down the numbers, right, Greg? So like, but say I go and like this influencer has, we'll say a hundred thousand followers, right? And here's this creator and I'm not even they

• 4:55Speaker 01

  don't even have they have zero followers. I start working with them, right? But I'm gonna break down like why this works. So the influencer, say I go and I pay them, you know, they're they're gonna charge me whatever we'll say two grand for a post, right? Or something ridiculous. And the idea traditionally is that like, oh, I would be tapping into the trust of their audience. People like and all of our data supports this. People do not make purchasing decisions largely off of like influencers. They make them off of creators that are consistently talking about these things. Influencers only work if you're at like a massive scale, like you're like a Kim Kardashian or something like that. But there's a reason that they're going and making their own products to sell

• 5:39Speaker 01

  to their their audiences that they cultivated because they know how valuable the audience is right like for those brand deals. So the breakdown here, say I pay them 2000. In contrast, I'm and we'll say that the posts that's for like one post. And you know, it's a it's a one out of 10 that a post gathers some virality, right? Like we know you play this game like with YouTube like or in all the other content that you do. Out of all, you know, out of all the content that I publish, one of them will will outperform. It'll be the outlier to the rest of them. And so if I'm only getting one at bat, and I know that it's one out of 10, right? There's only a 10% chance that that thing actually like is an outlier from a content standpoint. And so maybe this thing gets, you know, and

• 6:24Speaker 01

  this is not like unrealistic, only 30,000 views, right? In contrast, if I go work with a creator and the payment for that creator, right? So we're gonna just like break this down. So the followers is 10,000, cost is 2000, and post views is 30,000. In contrast, if I work with a creator, and I pay them $900 a month to do a post per day.

• 6:53Greg Isenberg?

  Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built idea browser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products

• 7:36Greg Isenberg?

  that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more, almost like a chat GPT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, idea browser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  On TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, so across all the channels. And I know that 10% of those 30 posts, right, so 30 times point one, is are going to just outperform the rest of them. It's a greater likelihood that I get a better return on that $900 than I get on this 2,000. And the only reason that this works is because it's for you page content, right? It's because the algorithm is just going to show content that's most likely to keep the person on the platform. They don't care where it's coming from. Because that's how a creator with zero followers, right, can actually like do this. And as a brand, this is like what people do. This is what you should be doing,

• 8:45Speaker 01

  is you go find creators within your niche that are already posting content in your category. You reach out to them and you're like, hey, I'll pay you 900 a month to post a video per day across all the channels. They're going to create a brand new account, right? So imagine it's like at example company like Alley, right? And like whoever the creator's like name is.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  They're, what you're going to see is they're going to figure out a format that outperforms the rest. And then they double down on that format over and over and over again, basically remixing it. And from this, what ends up happening is I'll go, like, one of these videos will pop. And say, one of those videos goes and it gets me 100,000 views, right? So when we break down the CPM, which is the cost per thousand views, this is this old marketing metric, right? The cost per thousand views ends up being way cheaper for the creator-led marketing than it does for the influencer-led marketing, even though the influencer has more followers.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And so this is the arbitrage that exists between creators and influencers. The other thing we have to think about here, though, is if I just took that same money, that 900, and I took that to Facebook, and I paid that $900, right? The average CPM on Facebook is about $6, depending on which category you're in. So of that 900, right, I would only get 150,000 impressions. Okay? So as long as the creator has a couple of these that hit, and we'll say maybe in aggregate, they do 500,000 impressions, right? So I'm paying $900 for 500,000 impressions, so the cost per thousand impressions is going

• 10:33Speaker 01

  to be $1.80, so we'll say $2, right? So I'm getting a CPM by working with these creators. I'm getting a CPM that's cheaper than what I could pay on Facebook. And this is the real, like, arbitrage that's here. This is why people are, like, obsessed over this, are doing this, etc., like, you know, you go down the list. And the other piece of this is, you don't work with just one creator, you work with, like, five to 10 of them. And there's this compound learning effect that happens. So if I have a video going, a video a day going out from five, you know, 10 different creators. That means that I have 10 different videos that are dropping. And of those 10 videos, one is going to hit, one is going to be an outlier.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Like it's like, just, you know, based on the math. I take that learning and I share that with all my other creators. And then it creates this growth flywheel where there's like more surface area for learning on this, like of, of, of, like what content types are most likely going to create a, a basically reach for the, for the product. And so that's kind of the like theory behind it. Now we'll get into the actual like pro, like application, but before we do that, questions I can try to answer.

• 11:44Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I would love to see some examples of like, have you seen this work?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:49Greg Isenberg?

  Like, is it just theory or does it, does it work?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  A hundred percent it works. And it, it's just like, again, like we, we've talked about this in other videos. Like you're looking for marketing arbitrage. Like if I can pay, say again, like we'll do TikTok, right? Like if the TikTok CPM is $8 to get in front of people, but I can get in front of them for $2, right? By doing creator-led marketing. Like that's a better allocation of the budget, the limited resources that I have, right? That's the whole game that we're playing here. Now the, the challenge is finding the creators that are like most likely to do this, but, or sorry, most likely to actually create people to go and sign up for the product. But the, I, we can like show an example of like one. So my friend runs this company, it's called like Focus Tree.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And this is like literally their exact strategy is they find these creators. And that are in like, uh, I don't know what you would call it, like self, uh, like they basically use this. It's like an app where it's like, you turn it on when you're studying and it like, it's like a, it's like a, don't use your phone type of app, right? Like a, like a productivity app. So this is their exact strategy. I know Lauren has like scaled from like zero to it's like 2 million users or something like that now. I don't know since the last time I talked to him like where it's at. But this is how this can be used. And again, it's all you're looking for is these outlier videos and then sharing that with your entire team, right?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  So this is just one of the like thousands of TikTok or sorry, the hundred of hundreds of TikTok usernames that are basically in this creator like ecosystem that he's using. So why does this work? The product is included within the content. You're getting it at a cheaper cost than if you were paying TikTok directly for those ads. And then you also have this learning mechanism where it's basically these creators are using the learnings from everybody else to go and create more content. The best performers, you take those, you turn those into paid ads as well. Basically turns into like a UGC content form for your company. So you find the winners, pull those out, put ad spend behind them. They're gonna, if they work organically, they're also going to work in a paid setting. So.

• 14:05Greg Isenberg?

  Also, organic always works better than paid. Just like, think about it, right? You know, people don't love to buy things from a paid ad. They much prefer to buy it from, you know, content that feels organic. And that's what this feels like. I think like an old analogy to this strategy is like, you know, buying meta ads is almost like you're buying a billboard in a busy town square. And you're hoping that people are going to look up at the billboard and then they're going to convert versus what this is, is like you're almost giving out flyers, value

• 14:43Greg Isenberg?

  add flyers around here's like the 10, you know, the 10, the 10 highest rated restaurants in this area. And like one of them is your restaurant. And it's like, oh, thanks for this like value add information, friend.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. And this is actually the best performing ads, right? Is when it feels like it's native content on the platform. And so like we, more and more, like I'm trying to make the ads look like they were edited on an iPhone, right? They were like, recorded on an iPhone, dropped into CapCut, and then like edited in CapCut on an iPhone, or edited literally in the Instagram app on the iPhone, right?

• 15:24Greg Isenberg?

  Recorded on an iPhone 5S.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And I think that that's like uncomfortable to a lot of brands, right? To use media like that, because they're like, oh, we want to do this like super sexy, like, you know, like shooting it with like a red camera. And it's like, we don't need to do that, right? Like literally, we can hire some like 20-year-old creator that's just trying to like pay for school. And this is how these creators function, right? It's like they'll have brand deals with multiple companies. So say they're working with five different companies, they're making five grand a month while they're going to college. They have to post five videos a day. That's nothing for them. That's the whole angle here. This is like why they do this, so.

• 16:04Greg Isenberg?

  So how do we, okay, I'm, I, first of all, I've never thought of, thought of this sort of delineation between creators and influencers. I haven't really thought much about this strategy. I'm bought in. I want to do it. How do I do it?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. So the process here is find, first off, you need to find people that are talking about the content that your category is in. So say you're trying to like sell something to people that are like vibe coding, like we'll do like lovable as an example. So like, here's a great example of lovable doing a strategy like this, right?

• 16:42Greg Isenberg?

  Wow.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Like, .ai coding underscore dev dot app. Like they're 100%, they at least tested this.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And so, uh, but this, this is probably a different strategy where it's like an in-house team is doing this, or they're like paying a clipper or whatever, right? But we can get into the clipper versus creator thing. I don't think clipper is real. I think all the data is absolutely fucking fake, but well, uh, we can go down that rabbit hole if you want. Um, the, uh, so the angle here though, is basically you're trying to find people that are talking about this, like your category. And the only way to do this really effectively is just like going to Tik Tok and like scrolling and watching videos that are like the brain raw videos that are in your category. If you watch enough of them, you're going to get siloed into this like space. And then you're going to start seeing these recurring faces, these recurring creators on the platform.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  You go and reach out to them via DM or sometimes they have like emails in their bios and ask them, you know, hey, I want to work with you, uh, you know, 30 videos per, uh, I, I want to basically hire you on a cost per video basis, uh, you know, video per day for 900. And then that's, that's the reach out process. Same, same play here is like, I'm basically like going to work with a bunch of them. I'm going to find the best performers and then those best performers, I keep them on a retainer. I get rid of the worst and then I restart my cycle, right? So I'm just trying to add like, add up as many of these creators as I can, um, to find the, the, the, the best people. Um, and there's only so many per category. So like you, it's, it really depends on like how sophisticated the spaces. Like again, if you're talking about like some type of vibe coding app or like, say you

• 18:19Speaker 01

  build an application that's for like, um, people that do real estate investing. So you'd like, there's going to be like probably way more people talking about real estate that you can use, um, than, you know, these smaller categories. It just depends, but that's the whole strategy here is like, you're trying to find the best people that are already making content in this place. Then they go and they make an entirely new account. So a fresh account and then they're starting from zero. They're starting from zero followers. But they can go and because it's again this for you page content, they can get this reach like they never could previously. And when this is like executed well, right? You again, like get this at a cheaper cost than what you're seeing in these other places. So that's how you find the creators, you reach out to them. It's a super manual process.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  We talked about this on another episode. There's this application called Stormy AI, which helps with that actual like identification of these people. So Stormy works is you can basically like go and search for creators for by each, each category. So like Tik Tok or Instagram or like YouTube, right? And put in the, the category that you're in. It's going to find those people and then you can DM directly through this. Why Stormy is really great is it handles the, the whole reach out process as well and negotiation on the pricing, which is amazing because it's like, that's the massive time suck. But that's kind of the, the strategy here is basically to like go and find the, these people, these individuals.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  With all this said, like here's the negatives of this, right? The management of the creators is a pain. So that's like one piece. So how people typically combat that is they go and they hire, like whoever their best performer is, they make them a manager of all the other creators. So they're still having to do their videos per day, but they, they pay them more basically to manage the entire team. And they're making sure the entire team is actually delivering on what they're saying. And then the other piece is when they see a winner, an outlier from the entire team, they share that with the rest of the team. So how do you actually like track that? What are the tools to do this? Stormy is for the reach out. To actually track the success of this campaign, you can use something like shortemize, which

• 20:31Speaker 01

  is basically your creators submit their videos and then it tracks the amount of views, engagements, et cetera, from what you're doing. You can also use viral app. It's basically, it's, it's shortemize and viral app are similar and kind of what they're, what they, how they function. But it's basically tracking the success of your, your campaigns that you're running, right? And then the other tools that are really valuable for this is basically like we're trying to find outliers, right? We're trying to find the the videos that are performing better in a category than like other ones. And to do that, there's tools out there that you can

• 21:10Speaker 01

  basically use to go and find these like outlier winners. One of them is called Virilo, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it basically aggregates, scrapes and aggregates all of these TikToks and YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels and makes them searchable. So you can find outliers within the category that you're in. And then you're like, oh, this worked previously. Let's hand this off to my creator team and let them remix that for our brand. And then another one that does this as well is called Sandcastles AI. And it also is basically like this research tool that helps you find those types of viral shorts. So that's kind of the stack that you're using. It's like manual reach out

• 21:55Speaker 01

  or some type of like AI agent like Stormy. You get them into like, it's literally just like in a Discord server is how a lot of people or like a WhatsApp group is how a lot of people manage these. And then you're doing the tracking with some with a tool, again, like Viral App or viral.app or Shortemize. And then helping them find those those like viral outliers by using one of these like discovery tools. That's the whole playbook here. It's really simple. It's just like the one of these things that gets like hard to execute logistically. And that's like why a lot of people stay away from this and why like a lot of brands have trouble doing this. Because hiring somebody that understands

• 22:37Speaker 01

  what I just described is like impossible. Like it's like they're also like probably a 22 year old that's just coming out of school. That's hella flaky and like. You know, just they're they're gonna be rogue, like they're gonna be kind of difficult to work with. And so it's it's figuring out like, like, how do I I work with that person and make this make sense? So, but yeah, questions I can try to answer about that.

• 22:58Greg Isenberg?

  There's gonna be some pain. There's gonna be some pain managing some of these creators, but if you can suffer through the pain, there will be some gain likely. If you could find the right creators, find the right formats, manage them appropriately, don't lose them, track, you know, track all this stuff and then also keep up to date with like what new formats are coming out.

• 23:23Greg Isenberg?

  I think that you mentioned in the beginning, which is this is particularly valuable for people in like consumer mobile, mobile apps. I mean, the example you used was a mobile, I think a mobile app. This whole generation of like Cal AI, the Quitter app, you know, the whole like app mafia gang.

• 23:43Greg Isenberg?

  You know, these people making kids, you know, young people making millions of dollars a year through mobile apps. I think a big reason why is they understand this strategy and they understand how to manage these people. So I'd be curious your thoughts on that specifically.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  I think the thing that I, you know, I think about with this is like, it has to be an impulse purchase decision that can happen on a mobile device, right? So like this works for as well for like e-commerce products where it's like at a price point that's like, say $29 or something like that, right? I mean, that same strategy can be used for TikTok shop. You go find TikTok shop creators, you pay them on a per video basis and then also give them an affiliate commission of everything that they drive. The reason this works is like, if I can on my phone, go and search this thing and start using it like that, that, and there's no like transition to like a web application or anything like that, right? And there's no learning curve, like it drops me into it and I'm like instantly, I I understand like the value of this,

• 24:40Speaker 01

  like that there's that killer feature instantly on my phone, which again could be a physical product that's being sent. That is where this like fits into the marketing stack. So that's one piece. The other side, though, is that like, if say you are a web application or like you're an API provider, which is like a friend's company that's doing this, that's like this is working for, which is hilarious. It builds top of funnel branded search. Which creates this like discovery flywheel. And also, like, you're basically just creating more surface area. I talk about like digital gravity, right? Which is like this, like, how do I create as much surface area for my brand within my category? And like layer on all of these strategies? This is a thing that can be layered on for like a traditional, like, even like B to B

• 25:24Speaker 01

  or B to SMB type company. Because i- if you think about TikTok or like Instagram, like, they're touching so many people. Like, their, their daily actives in the US is insane, right? There's a hundred percent chance they're probably touching a certain percentage of your target customers. So if you can create content that's gonna be like naturally displayed in front of those people from across these count, these accounts, like, you're gonna own more and more mental real estate within that category, right? Which is naturally going to increase branded search. And we see this, right? A video goes viral on TikTok or something like that. And branded search volume sees a spike. Like, and how we're tracking that branded search volume is in Google Search Console, you can say, hey, can, the query contains whatever my brand name is, right?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  So when you run these campaigns, what you'll see is that you will see like an increase in branded search. They see this in particular in e-comm. It's actually wild. They like, they go, you do this, you go viral on TikTok, right? And then the branded search on Amazon increases. Like, absolutely wild, right? Like, there's like a lift in the, in, in basically the branded search that's like directly like on a platform that's not even related. And so that, that is like this other piece of this. It's, it's hard to quantify like the value and the ROI there. But if you're just like, yo, I'm just trying to have an entire industry know that I exist. This is how this marketing strategy can be layered with something else. Like, again, I'm talking about like, you have to learn how to use the web application to actually like have it be valuable.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  This is like, uh, uh, something, uh, that can be layered along with, say, like, the YouTube creator strategy that we talked about previously, that you're getting like that very top of funnel, like, kind of like brand awareness. And then you have the very bottom funnel, like, oh, I'm gonna get these people to like convert. And I would layer, I would like, I would think about layering these things and starting, okay, I start with the YouTube strategy and then I like layer on the creator strategy on top of that, so.

• 27:19Greg Isenberg?

  I love it. Cody, thanks for once again spilling the sauce. You are a G. Appreciate you. I'll include where to find Cody and his company, Graft, in the show notes for people to go and follow. Thanks again, Cody, and I'll see you next time. Happy to do it, G. Thanks for having me.