UGC Handbook / Lesson 08 of 14 / Chapter III: Creators

Finding micro and mid-tier creators: the 5K-follower, Gmail-in-bio sweet spot

Zack Hargett, co-founder of Coconote, reached creators partly through the email in their bio. If that email ended in something like @sunsetagency.com, he moved on.

His words on the Sub Club podcast: "any agency sounding, you're too late."

A Gmail address and 5K to 10K followers, on the other hand, was "a really nice sweet spot." That one heuristic, plus a few others from founders who have run 10 to 40 creators at a time, is this lesson.

Hire content creators, not influencers

The first decision is not who to contact. It's what you are buying.

Coconote's answer was explicit. When host David Barnard noticed Zack's word choice, "content creator, not influencer," and asked whether the strategy was to find people who produce great content rather than people who own an audience, Zack's reply was "100%."

Why followers matter less than they used to. Zack's reasoning: once TikTok and Instagram moved from a follower graph to an interest graph with algorithmic distribution, "the number of followers you have matters less and less. The quality of the content you create matters a ton."

His previous startup's first-ever TikTok, on an account with zero history, did 8 million views.

What this looks like as a team. In a Superwall interview, the Coconote founders described their content team at its biggest, before the Quizlet acquisition, as 10 or 12 creators, all part-time contractors.

None of them, they said, would identify as an influencer. "They are first, and at their core, marketers."

Their framing for the job: it's "more akin to a talent manager and someone that's finding undiscovered talent."

So the search is for people who are good at making videos and not yet expensive. That narrows the field a lot.

The sweet spot, in four founders' numbers

Four founders on Superwall and Sub Club gave a range for where they source. The ranges differ. The reasoning is nearly identical.

The common thread is price and availability, not a magic follower count. Reed's contrast is the clearest: a creator at 50K to 100K followers "knows that they're an influencer. They know give or take their worth." Below that, you find people who are good at getting views and haven't priced it yet.

The agency signal. Zack's view is that agencies "exist to eliminate the alpha that you are trying to create," with exceptions. RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting added on the same episode that for many mid-tier creators, signing with an agency is "actually value destructive for them." Connor, whose app Payout makes about $45K a month almost entirely through creators, said in a Superwall interview he sees "much better response rates" from creators who manage their own email.

Note the qualifier on all of this: these are four founders' experiences, in student, fashion, and self-help apps, mostly on TikTok and Instagram. Treat the ranges as starting points, not laws.

So fill this in before you open a spreadsheet:

Validate with the comment section, not the follower count

Follower counts are the number everyone can see. They are also the one Zack says to discount, and the one every founder above pairs with an engagement check.

The tell is whether the audience talks. Evan Yatagari, who built the app Locked to $14K a month at 14, said in a Superwall interview that his biggest early loss was "not caring about engagement." He looked at followers and views. His fix: "always look at the influencer's comment sections," and check that people are commenting and "interacting with each other."

His negative signal: "if there are a ton of emojis, then they're most likely not a great influencer." His positive signals: comments about things in the video, people asking questions, comments with many likes, people replying to each other's comments.

Views can exist without an audience. Kieran of StudyFetch, which grew from a TikTok account to 7 million users, told Superwall the main thing his team screens for is engagement. "Even somebody that gets like 10,000 views a video, but their comment section is filled with people engaging with them, that's a great sign." His warning: "there are influencers out there that get a lot of views, but they don't really have a following behind them."

Connor's version is the simplest test: are they commenting "wow, amazing," or are the comments "more high-quality"?

Why this matters for a subscription app. You are not buying reach. You are buying the chance that a viewer trusts this person enough to install and start a trial.

A comment section full of questions is evidence of that trust. A comment section full of fire emojis is not.

Outbound beats inbound

Posting "creators wanted" and picking the best applicant feels efficient. Kieran's team runs it the other way.

StudyFetch has an outbound team whose job is "constantly sourcing creators, reaching out to them, establishing deals." His reason: "we really want to work with creators that want to work with us," people who like the product and will show it the right way.

Superwall host Joseph Choi put the math plainly: take 100 applications and pick the best one, and "mathematically, you're not getting the best talent." Kieran's team still takes inbound, but combines it with outbound to the specific creators they want.

Email over DM, for anyone with a real following. Connor's experience: larger creators "have notifications off. They get like a million notifications a month." Email got him replies, including one creator who answered months later and is now building an account with him.

His sourcing trick: on YouTube, many creators expose an email behind a "view email address" CAPTCHA. Host Joseph Choi's read on why it works: the CAPTCHA rewards manual outreach, because fewer bots crawl YouTube for email addresses.

Use every channel, then volume. The Coconote founders listed Handshake, Instagram and TikTok DMs, email outreach, and referrals. Kieran's team uses TikTok and Instagram DMs and email, and LinkedIn when they really want someone. Connor's summary: "it's going to be a volume game."

Do this this week

1. Write the profile sentence above. Range, topic, contact rule. If you can't name the topic, go back to Lesson 01's problem sentence first.
2. Build a list of 30. Search your problem keywords on TikTok and Instagram. Keep only creators inside your range who already post near your problem.
3. Score each one on comment quality using the scorecard below. Anyone scoring 0 on comments is out, regardless of followers.
4. Find the personal email. Bio first, then YouTube's "view email" link. Agency address: deprioritize, don't delete.
5. Send 10 emails a day. Short, specific to one of their videos, with what you pay per video (Lesson 10 covers the ladder). Expect a low reply rate and keep the list moving.
6. Give every creator who says yes their own tracking link before their first post. Lesson 03 covers how.