Jared Goetz explains how to find and scale with independent creators: start by paying many creators on commission or CPM to find the few who actually drive sales. Once you identify top performers, move them to retainers and manager roles where they recruit other creators, building a self-sustaining network.
If someone wanted to go and scale their distribution with creators, what is the path to do that? TikTok shop, you might have 100 creators posting about your product. 90 of them suck, generate no sales and no views, but 10 of them are studs and made you a ton of money. And then what these e-com companies are doing is they're giving them retainers on top of the commissions that they're earning and giving them more training. And sometimes they're getting promoted into like manager positions where then they're sourcing more creators and managing them. It's too risky for you to allocate your creator budget to a small handful of creators because if they all flop and just took that out, you have to like cast your net super wide, perform performance basis. Say, hey, we're going to pay CPM only. We're gonna get a ton of creators to post about us. And so you're gonna be testing all these different things, seeing what styles work, seeing which creators are good. Then you can give them a retainer on top of their CPM or on top of their commissions.
How to track independant creators' performance for the products you're selling
