Creator partnerships that produce customers, not just views.

Developers, data people, and technical founders have finely tuned ad-blindness and a short list of people they actually listen to. When one of those people shows your product solving a real problem, on their own terms, the audience arrives pre-qualified and the credibility is borrowed. That's a better top of funnel than any lookalike audience.

1. 01

   Sourcing by audience fit, not follower count. Who does your best customer already watch? Mid-sized creators with a specific audience routinely outperform big names with a general one, and they cost less.

2. 02

   Vetting. Engagement quality, audience geography and profile, prior sponsorships, and whether they'd plausibly use the product anyway. Views from the wrong country are just views.

3. 03

   Briefs that let creators sound like themselves. A clear problem to show, a clear call to action, and no script. Scripted creator content converts like an ad, which is to say worse.

4. 04

   Attribution before launch. Promo codes, dedicated links, and a branded-search baseline captured before the video goes up, so lift is measurable instead of vibes.

5. 05

   Scale what works. Repeat with the creators who converted, expand into their adjacent audiences, and turn the best videos into paid assets with whitelisting.

Creator campaigns rarely show up cleanly in last-click. The audience watches, searches your name a week later, and signs up from "direct." I measure the lift in branded search and direct signups against a pre-campaign baseline, alongside promo and link attribution, and report cost per signup and cost per paying customer next to paid search. Same table, same columns.

At Quadratic I built the creator channel from nothing into a program of roughly 50 partnerships, mostly YouTube, extending into short-form and newsletters. Sourcing, vetting, negotiation, briefing, and attribution, all run in-house. Every partnership was measured against a branded-search baseline captured before it ran. Across the program, creators acquired paying customers at a fraction of what paid search cost over the same period, and the best individual partnerships beat it by several multiples.