Break my heart – built a marketing SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Break my heart – built a marketing SaaS

3 pointsjsinkwitz2 comments

My team and I have created an influencer marketing platform for small businesses (and startups), which you can try out for free (no credit card required). Please enjoy at https://intellifluence.com and let me know what other features you want to see.

How does Intellifluence work?

1. Discover influencers for your brand's products. 2. Interact with them. 3. Get product to the influencer for purposes of a review. 4. Do a happy dance when the review goes live and you're getting a new stream of converting traffic.

I'd love to hear what HN thinks we're missing in our MVP. We're cautiously excited about it, and are looking to layer on a lot more functionality over time.

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How many influencers do you have on your platform / what kind of variety?

The reason I'm asking is I've been on calls with probably 20+ PR agencies and a similar number of brands doing influencer marketing in the past 6 months, and their #1 issue right now is they can't get the right people. Most of the existing influencer platforms have the same influencers, or just not a big enough variety. If you want to advertise a new bikini on a swimwear model; you're fine. Want to launch a new soft drink? They're struggling with the existing platforms.

We're trying to solve this, we're not quite launching yet (probably in the next few weeks), but we're trying to solve this. We currently have just over 1.4M Instagram users along with their email contact information.

PS: Your pricing is way too low. By a factor of 10-50x probably.

I love you for saying price is too low. I agree that it is too low for our final form, but for a MVP?

Currently we have ~3800 influencers, which are a mix of Instagrammers, Youtubers, LinkedIn users, Facebookers, Twitter-heads and good old fashioned bloggers.

The reason I decided to do this startup is because I was getting paid $250k/yr as a stealth CMO and we were going heavy into influencer marketing -- but the game was somewhat rigged. Agencies only seemed to care about celebrity influence and ignored the power of peer influence, so my business partner and I delved in and determined that by focusing on building out a potential peer influence database we could actually create something that small businesses could easily use.

In terms of "right" influencers, that's a huge discussion that I could chat with you about for days; we do have the ability to filter on KW and network, but we want to do so much more, like use a bit of machine learning over time to determine the influencer's ability to drive traffic/conversions, etc.

Ping me when you launch; I'm eager to see. Getting a few million Instagram users and a few million Twitter users (and their emails) is not nontrivial I realize, so you've clearly put some time into it.

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