Alfie Dickens - Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AI

From Stadium Ops to Cal AI's $60M Peak This is my first ever job, I was a stadium OPS guy. Just kind of like fixing chairs. Speaker 2 Two years before this conversation, this guy was fixing chairs at a soccer stadium in Minnesota. His name is Alfie Dickens. He reached out to the founder of Cal AI near the very beginning. So at the time it was an app nobody had really heard of yet. And he talked his way into a two week trial, helping with their marketing. And over the next two years, ended up building the entire influencer machine behind Cal AI, which at its peak was doing $60 million a year. Speaker 1 We reached out to about two 220,000 influences. Speaker 2 The strategy behind that was an insane amount of brute force. 25 assistants on their team, each sending around 100 cold emails a day. So roughly 2000 a day and over time more than 200,000 creators. Speaker 3 Reached out to. Speaker 2 Just to sign a couple thousand of them. Alfie says that if you reach out to 1000 influencers, you might sign 10, sometimes 1. So what really matters is what you do with the creators who actually do say yes. And the deal he'd put in front of them was pretty genius. Speaker 1 Let's maybe just put a minimum view clause on it of 800,000 because you can easily get a million. Speaker 2 Every creator swears they can get you 1,000,000 views so instead of pushing back he just agree with them and then just set a paid floor a couple 100,000 views below the number they just bragged about. Speaker 1 If they hit it, great. Speaker 2 It was a good deal the whole time. If they don't then he's still covered. And that's just one piece of how the whole Cali I influencer media machine actually ran in this episode. A few things he gets into that I haven't heard him say anywhere else. Why his best converting videos barely mention the app, plus the 15 second rule behind them? Why Cal AI's influencer videos got more profitable overtime, not less, which is the opposite of what you'd expect with saturation. And the one kind of creator he'd tell you to stop paying for it even though on paper it looks like the perfect fit. This is probably the most honest breakdown of how an influencer marketing powerhouse for an app at the scale of Cal AI actually runs. This is the. Speaker 4 Super Wall Podcast I'm Joseph Choi, founder of Consumer Club, a Discord where top consumer app founders trade alpha and what's working now in growth. I've been talking to members doing a million ARR and they tell me they've been using these two tools. Superwall has its free AI tool trained on 422 profitable paywall experiments across thousands of successful apps. You upload a screenshot of your paywall and it gives you an experiment idea to make more revenue with the same number of users at paywallexperiment.com. And if your app's doing at least 100 KMRR. We host vetted dinners in SF in New York to hang out and network with other top app founders. You can apply with the type form in the description. Also, these app founders have been telling me they use Rourke. I met Daniel, the founder of Rourke at a dinner and I got genuinely really excited when he told me about Rourke Max, which is out now and has honestly changed the game for coding mobile apps. It's AI that one shots full native iOS apps with swift code, camera sensors, haptics, payments, the whole stack. And as you vibe code with Rourke, you can install prototypes directly onto your iPhone with one click and then publish to the App Store in two clicks. If you've been waiting for AI coding that actually does native iOS apps, well, this is it. I got you guys a discount. You can use the code superwall or. Speaker 3 Or use the link below. I think in this conversation I'm just looking forward to learning more about the inner workings of Cal AI and how you guys did growth. What was your role at Cal AI? Speaker 1 I actually joined probably a month or two into when they got started and I joined on the marketing team. I think when I joined we had about 20 to 20 to 30 creators and then we grew and signed well over. I mean, we were working with 200 Plus at one time, once posting, you know, 4 videos a month, so a lot of posts each day. And I helped grow the influencer marketing program up from scratch. Basically it's. Speaker 3 Pretty, pretty wild. I feel like Kelly eyes just the the growth story is just legendary these days. Like people talk a lot about it. So it's it'll be very interesting to see from the mind of the guy that actually did it. So you joined like a month. And so I think like when Zach has talked about the stuff on podcasts a little bit, like he's kind of described how he like spun it up and like initially did some of the outreach to influencers and stuff. I mean, for two years basically you scaled it from like the initial 20 creators to like hundreds. And what was the revenue of Kalii at the at the end? Speaker 1 At the peak it was like 60 million a year, 60 million. Speaker 3 A year, yeah. And then you guys got acquired. So what did you do before joining Cal AI? This is my. Speaker 1 First ever job? So my first ever job or full time job was working at Cal AI. I was doing part time work at Minnesota United Stadium. I was a stadium OPS guy. I'm just kind of like fixing chairs and then part time as well. I was working for a couple of influencers trying to get them brand deals. So just working on Commission. I didn't really have like a full full time income or anything like that. And one of the influencers that I worked for, Jake, the founder of Cali, I reached out to and was like, you know, we want to work with your influence. And then we just got chatting and he, he loved soccer or football, as I call it, But, and we were talking about that and we got along really well. And I was kind of asking about Cali. I and it was very new at this time. I'd never heard of it. And most people hadn't really heard of it, I don't think at this time. And so I was like, Oh, you guys hiring, You know, I know it's a growing thing. And they were like, no, we're not really hiring. And I said, OK, well maybe you will eventually. I'll send you my, you know, resume or CV, like just keep me in mind for future because I've got some experience working with influencers. I luckily landed a two week trial and from then on got the job. So yeah, before Cali I I'd finished school and was doing part time work as a stadium OPS guy and just working on Commission with a couple of influencers. Speaker 3 It's kind of like the case study in our space and like you would think you know, the person who's able to scale the creator, your program. The Golden Moment: Scaling Influencer ROI Profitably Maybe they've done some like crazy marketing agency before, scaled a bunch of other creators. But like you kind of just started from scratch. So like, did you just have your own theories for how to scale it or where you just go with your gut like along the different stages of scale? Like, how did you actually like? Where did you get? Speaker 2 The the knowledge I guess. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think what helped was working with Jake and Zach. Jake and Zach had like a game plan and we really just tried to stick to it. You know, we had Kelly Eye's Golden Moment, which was the picture taking feature. So you take a picture, show the app that way, and we just tried to find influences that could seamlessly get that into their videos. And if they could do that, that meant that they could showcase the app without really pushing it. So that was kind of like our goal, but starting from scratch. We just reached out to a lot of influence. So we had some marketing assistants that did it and then they would basically book a call with me once it got handed off and I wrote like a script that I would kind of say on every single call, I just would try and get to know the creator because it's all about building relationships really. So I'd get to know them and then talk to them about a deal and kind of, you know, say, we don't really want this to be like a super heavy ad. We just want you to seamlessly get the app in and creators love the sound of that because the worst thing they can do is be handed a script and, and you'd be like, all right, you have to say this word for word. None of them want that. So we kind of sold it on the on the sense of look, you guys keep doing what you're doing and just try and sneak our app in there and that's kind of how we grew. Speaker 3 Would you say that the relationships with creators are like basically the secret sauce of Cali eyes? Influencer marketing success or I mean, it sounds like there's also like the essential ingredients like which were you have the the cap, like the scan feature and naturally that will just look good on camera on on UGC. So it makes for good hooks. And then like if you get creators to make videos that at least have that, then there there's sort of like a baseline level of virality potential. But then on top of that, was there anything else? Like I'm curious what you think the secret sauce was. It seems like relationships might be 1 of. Speaker 1 Them I'd say kind of everything you've mentioned really, the seamless integrations, the the golden moment of Calais I, which was just that you can now track calories with a picture. We were, we were the first app to do that. And I think that's like a viral moment in itself. And then, yeah, building the relationships with the influencers is super important because they're, you know, if they're bought into the program, they're willing to promote it in many different ways if you ask them to. You know, some months we would try different things, like having a dedicated video and the creators that you have good relationships would try that with you. There's still creators that we worked with two years ago that I speak to every day or every so often. And, and we're like basically friends at this point, which is great. And I think it does make a big difference. Speaker 3 It seems like to scale with influencer marketing as much as you guys did, you need to be very conscious of ROI and a lot of influencers kind of have a lot of optionality. Like they could promote supplement, especially in the fitness niche. They they can promote supplements or clothing brands or their own workout programs or you know, whatever, like other products and services they could promote. So like the minimum view clause is like a thing that, you know, some of you guys have talked about and like making sure that you actually get a certain number of views in order for the creator to get paid. Was that like a unusual thing for most of the creators that you talk to? Like it was kind of a new concept as you brought it up. Speaker 1 Honestly, I think it's become normalized now. Like a lot of people talk about minimum view clauses. Before we did it, I didn't really hear anyone talk about them. And I think Zach on all of his podcasts and stuff like that, has talked about it a lot. And he's kind of showing the world what I mean, minimum view clauses and how it works. But really it was just like minimizing risk for us creators always would say, I can easily get 1,000,000 views. I can easily get 2 million views. And we can look at the numbers that they get and it's like, it's actually only if the video is performing really, really well that you're going to get this amount of views. What we would love to do, let's maybe just put a minimum view clause on it of 800,000 because you can easily get a million. We just add that for our safety. Really. We wouldn't say that necessarily, but we would just be like, oh, all right, perfect. We'll just add a minimum view clause and you'll hit 1,000,000 views easily. So you don't even need to worry about the minimum view clause. And it was like a safety net for us that we knew the deal was going to be really good and it's a profitable CPM. And then the influences told us themselves that they could hit more than those views, so they can't really back down. Then we would make the minimum view clauses realistic. Like I would look at their pages and if they said they could hit 1,000,000 views, I'd probably be like, uh, you know, I'd rather put the minimum view close at 700,000 just so we know you're at, you're going to hit it every month without fail. And it's not stressful for you. And then usually people like, Oh yeah, that's a good idea. Let's let's make it make sure we can do it every month consistently. Speaker 3 That's very good negotiation, but it just makes sense because I feel like creators have big egos, like when your face is on camera all all day and like everyone's, you know, blazing you all the time. Like when you hit a viral video, like you just kind of feel like, you know, I deserve I deserve to get paid. But you just ask them like how, like, how many views can you get? And then it becomes like a, oh, I'm proud to tell you like, oh, this, this is what I could, this is what I could do. But then you kind of undershoot it actually where you're like, it still feels like a good deal to both sides because ideally the minimum view clause would be a million. But if you guys internally know your numbers are, you know, 700800K would be profitable as well, then you can kind of undershoot. I'm curious also like did the, did the ROI calculation change over time, like as you scaled to more creators? Because I feel like one of the biggest barriers to getting into influencer marketing is people have this perception that it's going to be really expensive. And then they're also worried about like, if I invest a lot into this, will it scale as I as I get more and more influencers? Speaker 1 I do think the influencer marketing has changed over the two years or nearly, yeah, 2 1/2 years that we've been doing it because it's become a lot more popular and everyone has agents now. So agents drive up the prices a little bit. Going back to your question about ROI, I would say at the start, because Cal AI wasn't really too known, we would probably shoot for like a lower CPM and, and we need a lot more views to get conversions because people hadn't heard about it. And you know, the rule of marketing is you usually see it 7 times before you actually buy it or spend money on it. We kind of took that into the case where we were like, OK, we need to keep the CPM really low because we just want to show as many people as we can in the app, and if they're seeing it for the first time, they're probably not going to buy it. But over time, everyone kind of started to hear about Calais. And that meant that we probably could spend a little bit more on deals because people had heard about it. And when they see it, they're like, oh, that's Calais. This person's also using it because they've seen it before. I'll go and get it now. And so I think over time it became a little bit more profitable and so we could spend a little bit more as well. Speaker 3 It's a little bit counterintuitive because I think you'd expect that if you do 1 influencer and then they make a few videos, they do well, you've now reached a certain percentage of the people. And if they didn't buy the first time, then they're not going to buy again if they get spammed like another creator who's promoting the same app. But then what you are alluding to is like the seven, the seven times principle. Like there's just like marketing theory that a person needs to see a thing multiple times in order to actually be convinced to buy it, which is just like standard like marketing knowledge. Like it makes sense. But I think people have this fear that like if you if you spam someone and tell them about a product like twice, then it'll make them mad or something. But like clearly that's just not true in your guys case. Like you, you got more profitable over time by by owning the whole market. Was that the goal to just like, get every single fitness creator to be talking about Kai? Speaker 1 I think the goal was just to get as many influences as we could. And then we realized like, oh, we are kind of taking over the, you know, fitness space in terms of calorie tracking. You know, we had competitors, but they weren't doing as much influencer marketing as we were. And so, yeah, we were trying to take over for sure. And, and we ended up doing so, but I don't think it was like our necessary goal to take over the the fitness space, but because we were profitable and we could get good CPMS with these types of influences, we ended up doing so. Speaker 3 I feel like the the long term business strategy that Zach sometimes talks about still like kind of blows me away to this day, like about because it's not just I feel like a lot of app founders are very short term ROI focused and it's it's really hard to think about the second order effects of marketing like like you guys did, like you, you do a video and it might not even be profitable or maybe it's like break even or barely profitable. And then, but then once you've doubled your creators, you actually have better ROI in the future. And it kind of reminds me of also like Zach talking about just choosing markets, like you need a market that's very high, that's just extremely high Tam, like just huge markets. And it's like everybody eats food and like Cali, I therefore just has like a gigantic Tam. But then it seems like it that mindset also kind of carried over into the marketing as well, where you're like, you're not just thinking about, OK, how do I make money on this specific video? You're like thinking big picture strategically. Unlocking Virality: Best Content Angles and Niche Wins That's cool. Like, was it, did it feel like that like working with with the team? Like did you feel like you were learning and like applying business strategy? I think we had like the. Speaker 1 Strategy from the start and it was just to sign as many influences as we could and everyone kind of knew that was the case like we would have goals to sign 50 influences plus per month. I think a goal for a long time was like sign 100 influences in a month, which like some I think on a few months we did sign 100 influences. So it's, it's like 3 a day, which is, which is pretty cool more than, but we did have like normal business strategy. An example was like we worked with a creator did like 100,000 in profit for us. Basically we paid them like 20,000 for the month and they did 120,000 of sign ups just in that month. And then we tried to sign another creator that was in the same niche as them and they didn't do well at all. And so like diving into that and seeing why it didn't work well. And it kind of goes back to what you were saying before. And, you know, sometimes doing more in a niche means that your ROI goes down because people have already seen it. I think thankfully, the fitness niche is big enough to be able to go at different, different spaces, whereas some of the niches we found, you know, didn't. We weren't able to do that. And having one influence in that niche was enough. I mean, we didn't need to expand on that much more. Speaker 3 What were the other niches like? You guys definitely were huge in fitness, but then were there other content niches that Cal AI like applies to that you also did influencer marketing? Speaker 1 Yeah. So obviously we had fitness. We would kind of break that down into a couple of different niches. So it would be like bodybuilders, kind of like the gym bro niche. And then we would have like women's fitness and then we would have weight loss creators. So that was kind of like 4 sub niches within that fitness niche. And then later on we realized like mom influencers are big. So we kind of tried to narrow down on on what mom mom influencers would work well, but they were super hard to get. Mom influencers are very expensive because they know how well they convert. And so they were really difficult to keep a good CPM. We tested a lot of mom influences. Some of them did incredible and were profitable at like a $10 CPM and some influencers didn't do so well. And so that was a really hard niche for us to kind of breakdown. We also tried like comedy niches as well. One that comes to mind is I don't know if you ever saw that video of this guy going through the drive thru and saying like no door, no problem and just climbing through the drive thru at McDonald's. He was like blowing up. And so we signed him and made him go into McDonald's and scan, scan some fries with Cali. I as he was doing the video. We, we honestly tried like a lot of different niches. Some of them did really well. Some of them would do well for like 1 video. Some of them would do amazing. Some of them wouldn't do so well. And it could be that one video was, was good enough and we should just do one video with the person and call it good there. But it's a little bit like what like Jake Paul is doing now with, with his, his spray. It's like get W or something. The brand. Oh yeah. Speaker 3 Like the like deodorant or something like. Speaker 1 That yeah, yeah, he does like loads of random videos and different niches and it's kind of like we tried that as well. Speaker 3 Was it like low margin for that because you're getting like so many views that are like lower at that? Speaker 1 Yeah, like the CPM would be great because like some of the videos would blow up, but it's just not a hyper focused niche. You know, people that watch those videos aren't necessarily thinking about tracking their calories. One really interesting thing for us that we realized like quite early on, but maybe a bit too late, is that the, you know, like the recipe videos that people make like cool recipes or just normal cooking videos. They really didn't do well for us. And to me that was super interesting because you'd think like calorie tracking would be great. You know, food videos, like everyone watching food videos is probably also thinking about calories. A lot of them like mukbangs or anything to do with just normal meals really didn't do well. And, and we kind of realized that, you know, they might not be doing well because people just want to sit there on the couch watching these really good, good looking food videos and not have to worry about what, how many calories are in that Mac and cheese or something. And so we, we kind of cut, cut that off pretty early. Now some of the some of the like the the healthy meal videos did OK, but still didn't convert like incredibly well, which was yeah, to me that was super interesting. Speaker 3 What was the most profitable content angle? Speaker 1 To this day, probably like big creators that do kind of like day in the life vlog style content where we could just seamlessly get the app into that video. Like for example, they show their day and they have their breakfast and they just quickly scan using the app. They don't necessarily mention, you know, Cali I they just show themselves using it. And I honestly, that worked out very well, especially later on where everyone kind of knew what Kelly I was. And then the big creators started using it. For example, we had at one of the Mormon wives, Jessie, she, she posted for us and she she converts really, really well. Speaker 3 Wow. OK. So just like the big influencers that show the app in their daily routine, that seems like it's not immediately obvious like why that would be the highest converting. Do you do you have an idea of why that was like? Speaker 1 I think just like them being big influences, people copy them anyway. So if they kind of naturally show the app in their videos, and we tried to get them to do 4 videos per month, so if people see it four times in a month that they're using this app, then, you know, ideally it performs pretty well for us. Yeah, this is just Jesse using it. And we sometimes would have, you know, just from like a video like this, we would sometimes get a couple of 100 promo code uses just from from this video, sometimes thousands. It's Yeah, shoot, she was really good. And that was kind of all she did. She didn't show the app again. Speaker 3 Yeah, it was just like in the 1st 2 seconds just. Speaker 1 Yeah, I suppose that's one thing I should mention as well as like we always try to get the app inside the 1st 15 seconds, probably 1 of the biggest rules for us. Speaker 3 So you think it's like it's mostly about the trust, like the reason to do influencers rather than like mass organic UGC, for example, or even like paid ads. It's like these big influencers already have trust with their audience. People are following them sort of aspirationally. It's not, it's not really about the utility of like, hey, here's what Cali I does, here's the benefits of it. It's more just like, oh, I like this person. I have a affinity towards them and I want to do what they do. I want to have a life that's similar to theirs, which is, I mean, that's what, that's what an influencer is, I guess. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think so. Like the trust is a big word for you that you use there. Like having that trust from the big face and the big name is huge. And I suppose it's like any trend really. You know, like for example, high rocks is huge at the moment and you see all of these big influences that are already in the fitness space going to do a high rocks and then everyone wants to do it. I suppose that a goal for us at Cali I was to turn Cali I into a trend. It wasn't necessarily like, oh, this is the app that fitness people use. We wanted it to be this is the app that everyone uses and it's like a trend to do so. So I'd say that's probably the one of the main goals that we had. Speaker 3 That's when you start getting the higher ROI on each on each thing. Cuz then at that point, it's not like when a viewer watches that video, they're not thinking, Oh, what is that? And they're initially curious. Maybe they look it up in the App Store, but they don't, they still don't really know what it is versus like, like, oh, I wonder if this creator is going to finally use Cali I and then they use it. And then it's like the final kind of like go ahead to like, OK, if they're using it, I guess I'll try not like an app. Speaker 1 It's it's interesting though too, like some people were very against Cal AI from the get go. Everyone complaining about AI and Cal AI not being super accurate because it's just a picture taking feature now. We never promised that it was like 100% accurate. That's not the reason that that we made the app. It's more like, and we want it to be accessible for everyone. You know, not everyone wants to log their food manually every single day. I think that's why most people give up calorie tracking. So the goal of Cali I was to provide that other option where, you know, everyone takes pictures throughout the day. If they can just take a picture of their food and and call it good there, that's a lot better than, you know, having to track like manually each day. And if people get into the habit of just even taking a picture and kind of just knowing a little bit more about what they're putting in their body and what their food is, then that that's like beneficial. Speaker 3 It's really a good app. I feel like people people see like the the scan feature and it's like, oh, it's a viral, it's a viral feature. It just looks good on social media. But it actually had a an actual purpose. It does solve the problem of calorie tracking is really tedious. And most of the existing apps out there before Cali, I just didn't have that user experience. So it was not just a viral feature, It's actually like a useful feature. And it went viral because the idea of it was actually useful. Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah, I'd like to think so, yeah. Speaker 3 You said high rocks. So I'm kind of curious to think about this for a little bit like do you see like an opportunity here? Because I've definitely seen this as well just on Instagram an and TikTok and everywhere. So people talking about high rocks, like do you think there's a business opportunity here like to make a high rocks app or to make some other kind of app like adjacent to it? Speaker 1 Yeah, it's crazy how quickly high rocks like took off. I've always tried to think like why, why it took off. And maybe that's just like the market brain inside of me. And it's more like, I feel the aspect of, you know, the men and women's high rocks is good for couples that want to try and get fit. Like, for example, if I were to say to my wife, oh, let's go and do a High Rocks because you can work together and like it's kind of like fun that way. So like they're trying to make men and women work together, which doesn't really happen in too many sports. And then like the branding of it in general seems kind of like clean and aesthetic and viral. And then, yeah, just getting a couple of big influencers to start doing it. Like I wonder if High Rocks ever paid big influencers to start doing them so that it like took off more because every. I'm sure like everyone in the space that for example, like, you know, it used to be cool to be like a dual athlete one when you run and also go to the gym at the same time. And I think they tried to kind of bring that into this. So everyone that does that usually would then try and do a high ROX because they've got the got the skill set to do so. So I wonder if yeah, people have been paid in the past to go and do a high ROX so that it goes on to everyone's For You page for a while. Speaker 3 Have there been any businesses that get created off of the back of a trend like this? Because Callie I, it didn't really ride a, an existing trend. You guys kind of like created the trends in a way. But this one, that's like when, when a founder sees a trend like this, like how, how should they be thinking about if, if they can capitalize on it or, or how? Speaker 1 I think it's always always like even if you're in business right now or if you're trying to start a business, looking at trends is always such a big thing. Like for example, I'm sure there's been a lot of like products that have been made to help people with high rocks, whether it's like to help them train for a high rocks or to help them compete better when they're doing a high rocks. It could be like gloves or something, you know, I don't know, but it's always super vital in business to look at what's trending right now. I think that's probably one thing that Cali I did so well it throughout is like always trying to hit the trends. For example, I go back to the the Mormon wife, Jesse, that we worked with. We tried to time her posts so that a couple of them came out just before the new season, and then a couple of them came out just after the new season was released. And I think it was like Season 3 and it was huge at the time. Everyone was talking about it. So everyone would go on their pages and like, you'd expect her to be like a super expensive brand deal because she's so famous. But because we timed it so right, the CPM was actually really, really low because everyone was going on her page anyway. Speaker 3 I was thinking about that with like Love Island because like, you know how like the, you know how they always do their reunion like a multiple weeks later with Love Island or like Love is Blind or any of the dating shows. And because they wanna give it a chance for drama to stir up on social media. And then by the time they do the reunion, there's been eight weeks of drama that they can blow up the show again on social media for Round 2. And like, but I feel like a lot of these people like the talent on the shows are they're like going insanely viral from nothing basically because they just they usually find people that are like maybe small influencers or like not influencers at all. And then they cast them and then they blow up because of the show. But then they're not really they're not really that monetized like AI feel like a lot of them do get brand deals, but they're pretty fresh. Like this seems like a a pretty good opportunity to like. Speaker 1 Fine influencers, yeah, Love Island is always one that we've spoken about. The hard part is as soon as someone goes on Love Island, every single brand will be in their DMS, like as soon as they're out. We did a couple of videos last year with one of some of the people from the UK, Love Island, Harry Cooksley, and like he did Day in the Life video. So we thought they were going to do really well. And they did do pretty well at the start, which was good, but it didn't do as well as we thought it would. And sometimes it's like it's, it's finding that balance between people just watching them because they were on Love Island or people watching them because they actually want to know what they do in their life. Speaker 3 Yeah, I guess it depends on like the depth of the the trust that the person has, the audience like, like are you just watching this for entertainment and then you like kind of casually follow them in Instagram or do you like really resonate with them on the show? So you like actually want to follow them for their lifestyle and stuff like. Speaker 1 That and one interesting thing with Harry was he was with a girl called Shakira and she was like really, really popular and all of the girls that watch Love Island were kind of like mostly interested in Shakira, I think. And so when we posted videos, a lot of the comments on the videos were about Shakira. So that also made me think that's that's probably why the the videos didn't perform as well as we thought is because people are actually just watching Harry's content to to see Shakira rather than to see his, which is maybe not it's like half true. But because Love Island's demographic probably is mostly women, that's why it maybe didn't perform so well. And maybe if we partnered with Shakira instead, we would have done a lot better. Speaker 3 But if she's the one that everyone loves, then she's probably more in demand as well and harder to find. Speaker 1 Yeah, because we tried to partner with her through Harry, but yeah, it never ended up happening. Speaker 3 What about Jesse then? How the heck did you guys get? Because this is a pretty big show, honestly. Speaker 1 So one of my assistants at the time of one of the workers at Kelly I Jackson, he was, I think he got looped in with with an influencer manager for the Mormon Wives and he again made a really good relationship with her, which helped us land a couple of brand deals with Jesse. So creating that relationship again with the agent or manager or influencer manager is the main reason that we were able to sign these. And then we usually actually try and get the influencer added to the group chats that we that we have. A lot of the time agents are like, no, we don't add the influencer. It's just we manage everything as the middleman. But a lot of the times we try and get the influencer added so that we can create that relationship with the influencer rather than just with the manager, because I think that really, really helps. Speaker 3 So let me show you this. A lot of app founders I talked to have a feeling their app has viral potential but don't want to be the person brain rat scrolling an hour a day hunting for formats or worse, burning thousands on creators shooting videos that just flopped. Recently I've been telling every founder I meet about Spytalk. It's basically an AI Tiktok viral marketer that I've seen a lot of top app growth teams using. You just paste a link to your app and this agent scroll holds hundreds of thousands of Tik Toks for you. Finds the outlier videos from competitors who've already cracked the best formats that are driving installs in the niche. Speaker 4 Of your app and then it remixes the hooks, the angles and then it makes playbooks so you can pretty much copy paste virality and then it alerts you when it detects new breakout formats that would also work for your app. Speaker 3 This is the only growth tool IA 100% vouch for on this channel because there's a ton of Gen. AI content tools out there, but none of them tell you what to make. Spytalk makes sure you're never in the dark about what's actually working. Now. I'll put the link in the description. Brute Force Outreach: The Future of App Marketing I'm really interested now in like the tactics of the volume because I feel like with all with like relationship based games, like, you know, influencer marketing in order to get those really high quality relationships and like invest in the in the calls and like it all kind of depends on how much volume are you able to do. Because if you, if you only reach out to 100 influencers and you have amazing conversations with each one, you're still only going to get a certain percentage. But if you have like 100,000, you know, then you're going to and then you treat each one really, really well. That's where you get like the huge results. So do you guys have a huge team like outreach team that's just like spamming every person on earth or like like how do you, how do you operationalize like a team? Speaker 1 So at the start, we had a couple of marketing assistants that did outreach. So we would maybe have like 5 marketing assistants that did outreach and they tried to reach out to 100 people each a day. And then as we grew, that number of marketing assistants grew. And then now we have about 25 marketing assistants doing outreach for us each day and they, we push them to try and reach out to 100 influences a day each. So that's 2000 influences every single day that we try and reach out to. So I think over the last over and obviously they don't always reach 100 a day. It's sometimes they can get stuck and only get like 6070 or sometimes even like 50 or 40 just depending on how well they can do that day. And obviously when you reach out to a lot, you end up finding similar creators that you can't reach out to again. But overall, since we've made something that tracks it, I, I think the numbers are like we reached out to about 220,000 influences and then we've on boarded and slash signed probably, I think our list is probably around 2 to 3000 influences that we've on boarded or signed. So it really is a numbers game. And what we kind of expect is, you know, we reach out to, let's just say 100 influences. We'll probably only get like 10 replies. From those 10 replies, we'll probably only get two people that book a call. And from the two people that book a call, we might sign one of them. But it's more like, let's say you have 1100 people will reply. So 10%, fifty people will book a call and we'll probably only sign ten of those 50. So we've signed 10 people from 1000 and that's probably pretty good numbers. I'm probably making them sound better than they are. It's probably more like 1 from every thousand. Speaker 3 But, but if you've reached out to more than 200,000 and then you've you've signed about 2000, it's about like a 1%. So it's like the numbers didn't write and but I didn't even know that there was 200,000 influencers fitness influence. Like I thought there was maybe 10,000 total in the world, but there's like, it's kind of shocking that there's that many. Speaker 1 And I think that's where it comes into like Zach always talks about the Tam and most app founders and most business founders would talk about the Tam of the market. The fitness market is so big that there's just an endless amount. And don't forget, like we also are reaching out to people from France, from Germany, from Spain, from the UK, from the US, like all different countries as well. And compared to most brands, we were, you know, less picky with who we worked with. As long as they could kind of get the app into their video and it and it'd be like a decent CPM, we usually said yes. Speaker 3 You're doing like 200,000 outreach, but then if only 10% of those people reply, then you're getting, yeah, like 20,000 people replying to you. But then you, you, you said like another 10, maybe 10% of those actually book a call. So what's the reason for like not booking a call? Speaker 1 A lot of the time, like agents don't like to book calls because they have brands reach out to them all the time and they want to hear a lot of information before they do jump on a call because otherwise it's just a waste of time. Some influencers just don't want to call you. They just want to negotiate on on the phone or like on text or on on e-mail. But I would say like it. It's probably like it probably 10X is your chances of signing someone on a good deal if you do call them rather than just messaging them because you can create that relationship. I feel like we keep going back to this, but that is the main thing, you know, creating that relationship and trust is what helps you sign it for sure. Speaker 3 So if if you message a creator and you're like, hey, I love your content, like I want to do a deal with you, let's do a call. And then they're like, yeah, I'm like somewhat interested in the deal, but I don't, I don't really want to do a call. Like would you still continue to talk to them and try to work something out? Speaker 1 Yeah. So we have a system where the initial outreach goes out. Most people usually would just reply saying what's your budget? Because they want to get straight to the facts. So then we would, but then we would kind of try and explain, you know, this is what we want to do. We want it to be seamless videos. We want it to be a long term partnership, stuff like that, which kind of persuades them a little bit more like, oh, it does sound good. We can definitely make something work. And so we had those messages before and then we would be like, you know, we'd love to jump on a call and finalize this deal with you. So we had, you know, it was kind of like classic persuasion persuasive, you know, like, oh, this is what we want to do. This is why it suits you. And then once they kind of seem interested in that, then we say, you know, we'd love to jump on a call and finalize this and then the call you, that's when you would then talk about the rates in inside of the call. Speaker 3 That's that's good. I feel like a lot of people try to go straight for the kill, like on message one, right, Just like, hey, let's do a brand deal. Can we hop on a call and obviously the you're just you're going to get a lower called percentage with that? Speaker 1 Yeah, it would be nice if you could do it in one message. It'd save a lot of time for everyone, but I don't know if it's possible. Speaker 3 Yeah, it really is all about relationships. Just like even in the business world, if you think about as a founder, you get a DM from some random person you don't know and maybe. There could be like a business partnership or maybe it's a hiring thing or or whatever it is. Like if someone asks you to jump on a call in the very first message, most of the time I ignore the message. Like it's like you, you kind of want to get a little bit more background because like especially for influencers where there's schedule, like they probably became an influencer because they want a certain lifestyle of like, I want to just do whatever the heck I want, like throughout my day. And booking calls is like the opposite of that. Like most of them have never even touched a calendly unless they're like very business minded or whatever. But yeah, the the DM back and forth seems like really important actually. Speaker 1 Yeah, you make a good point. It usually is the business minded people and influences that they jump on the call because they're kind of used to that world, whereas like the other people that don't necessarily think in a business way probably didn't. Speaker 3 And then on the call, what are the reasons for people saying no ultimately to the deal? Is it just about the math usually? Speaker 1 It's usually just whether we can pay them what they want. That was it because most of the time, you know, we won them over by saying the classic of, you know, these videos are going to be seamless. We want this to be a long term partnership. You guys can post your normal videos. We don't want to change the ideas that you have. We just want to sneak the up in there. That usually won them over to bring the price down a little bit. And sometimes it brought it down enough to where it could be profitable for for us and a good deal in the long run. Sometimes people didn't really budget, didn't really, you know, they just still went with the same prices and was still too high or yeah. And then we just knew the deals weren't going to be profitable for us. So it just kind of stops there. And there's not much you can do at that point because if they're not willing to make a video at a price you want, then it's not worth it. So I guess it comes down to the patients again, where it's so hard. You when you first start a business, you want to just get posts out. You want to just start hitting the road hard and, and having like videos go out and all of that. But I think one important thing is making sure it's the right video, the right niche, the right audience, because otherwise, like it's just not going to work. And yes, you might get a couple of videos out early, but they're not going to be right. Speaker 3 Do you also incentivize your your marketing assistant like per call or per close deal or anything like that? Speaker 1 We did sometimes run like competitions. So we would have like whoever reaches out to the most influencers in the month and gets a prize, whoever, whoever on boards the most influencers in a month. So like the flow would be that the marketing assistance would send like a calendar link of the manager and the manager would close the deal. But we would have like a referred by someone. So whoever like we, we sign the most of from that referral one like a prize, whether it's like a cash prize or like a voucher or something like that. Incentivizing the marketing assistance was such a huge thing because fundamentally they might not think that they have the most important job, but realistically, I wouldn't be sat here with you right now if they if they, you know, didn't do any outreach because we wouldn't have got anywhere. So they're they're really what start the coil is turning. And if you don't incentivize them and keep them motivated, then everything kind of just shuts down. Speaker 3 While you have like more than 200 marketing assistance now right on the team. Speaker 1 More than yeah, we have 25. Sorry, yeah. Speaker 3 25, sorry, yeah, 25 and then 100 like 100 messages each per day. That's yeah, that's a lot. And then are you, are you finding these people as like virtual assistant job sites or like how like what is the profile of a person that you because they need to, they're like doing the outreach. But then once the person, once the influencer replies, the marketing system has to do some like do they like the relationship building kind of like starting to do some of the like negotiation slash persuasion on the on the TMS? Speaker 1 We actually built a system that did that for us. To answer the first question, we went through a company that hired marketing assistants. So we we've kind of been with the same company that hired them from the start and they would just provide us people. And then when it comes to the relationship building, it was actually AI that did most of them like initial negotiating to get them to the managers or to get them handed off. So as soon as it the first outreach message was sent, the marketing assistance job was done. Speaker 3 Wow OK that's pretty wild. Is that like can you do that in mini chat like I replied? Speaker 1 I don't know. This was all to do with e-mail. Speaker 3 Oh, e-mail. Speaker 1 Yeah, most of our outreach is actually e-mail DMS do work but not really as well I don't think. It depends though, if you have like huge personal brand and you send DMS, it's going to work. You know like if Mr. Beast sends you Adm, you're going to reply. But if other people send DMS and we could only send a certain amount of DMS from our account each day because it like stops you after a while and stuff like that. So emails but was much better. Speaker 3 Did you ever think about like using your existing influencers to do the outrage, like logging into their account or stuff like that? Speaker 1 We didn't log into their account. You'd have to have like an extremely good relationship with them for that. But we, we did have a referral system. Yeah. So we, we, we'd send messages like each month saying like, hey, do any of your friends or any of your friends looking for brand deals. And we would actually pay the influencer if we ended up signing one of their friends or one of their referrals, we would pay them a set like $100 or something if we sign one of their friends. And for some of the smaller creators, you know, an extra 100 or $200 if they just sent their friend's number if it was great. And so that really did help us actually. And again, it also kind of helped us get around the agencies because they would just send us that personal number and we would call the influencer directly. And even if they had management, sometimes we would be able to go around the management and just get a deal with the influencer direct. Speaker 3 And the the agency markup is what, like 20 to 50% maybe? Speaker 1 It's tough because something that I could think was a good deal, like say for example, I'm a creator. I could be like, that's a good deal. I would like that money. The agent will see so many different other deals and so many different other companies paying so much more that they'll be like, now this is a terrible deal. Even if the influencer was like, I'd like to do that, it didn't even get to them. So that was the hard part. And luckily at the start a lot less a lot of creators didn't have agents. But now even creators that get like 5000 views every video or 10,000 views every video already have an agent. So just getting them on board, it is so much more expensive. Speaker 3 Have you guys thought about starting a talent agency? Because you guys are really good at reaching out to a lot of creators. Speaker 1 I definitely thought about it because like, we had so many creators on on our system that maybe I could have, but we were just kind of so locked in for the last two years that it wasn't necessarily it was on our mind. But it would take a lot of time away from Kalai and no one had any other time to to do anything else. So maybe in the future, but. Speaker 3 All the stuff we've talked about so far, do you feel like a lot of it has changed from when you did it to now? Like what how you see the game currently and is that because like is it within the niche? Like is it because like the fitness and like the calorie tracking niche has changed and saturated over time? Or is like influencer marketing overall like also different? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think overall influencer marketing is just different. It's just more expensive. And so that that means now if you are making an app, if you're a founder, people look at the likes of Cali I and, and they see podcasts from Zach or any of the founders and Zach talks about them just doing influencer marketing. I'm not sure how possible it is now just to do influencer marketing to get off, get off and started. And that's probably why you see the rise of UGC. I think UGC content has grown so much in the last, probably just the last six months really, because you can kind of get those CPMS down again and that and that's kind of the, you know, the aim of the game as many people seeing it for as little and used to be able to do that with influencers. But now because of the agencies, because of because influencers know how valuable they are, prices have just skyrocketed and trying to find those two dollar $1.00 CPM deals just became a lot harder over the last six months for sure. Speaker 3 Do you guys do organic UGC now at Cal AI? Speaker 1 Yeah, we're starting to. We haven't we. We tried it and we did do some at the start. We had a guy called Dawson do a lot of UGC at start for us. He already had a good personal brand and he would just post on our page as well. But like after we had a lot of influences, we kind of stopped and because we got such good CPM deals with our influencers, it wasn't really worth doing UGC at the time. But now we're sort of transitioning and we are starting to do we actually like the in the last few weeks, have been looking into doing some more UGC. Yeah. Speaker 3 So if you were starting a brand new app today, you would you would choose UGC over influencers? Speaker 1 I wouldn't necessarily choose over influencers. I would just run both at the same time and I think you would probably see, you know more. Well I wouldn't say more. I'd say you'd see cheaper view from UGC now for sure. Speaker 3 Cheaper views but lower converting. Speaker 1 Potentially, yeah, I would say so because they don't have that trust of that well known influencer that people follow, you know. Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a lot. It's probably a lot cheaper views because then you're because you're not paying for the person's audience and you're kind of just like start finding a random person and then having them copy a format right or do a format that you think will go viral. Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah, and some of these UGC creators are really good. Like they probably should just make their own page and start like ripping on there, but some of them are just trying to get into it. So yeah, it's just copying formats and seeing what works and then doubling down on that format. Anyone can kind of do it. I've always wanted my wife to try and start UGC or try and start content or something but. Speaker 3 This is a great conversation, Alfie. Thanks so much for sharing the sauce on the channel. Yeah. Any last like parting words or like where people can find you? Speaker 1 I've been posting a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter or X recently so I guess you can find me there. I don't know if you'll tag me or anything like that, but OK, nice. Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll put your your profile in description. Well, thanks so much. Speaker 1 Thank you. Yeah, it was good, Good sharing with you. Hopefully I shared some source, but not too much, Yeah? Speaker 3 Yeah, awesome. Speaker 2 Something you might not know, most of the founders that cover on this podcast are hanging out right now in the Consumer Club Discord sharing. Speaker 3 Each other what's working now for consumer apps so you can apply to join consumer club if that sounds interesting to you. And this is the Super Bowl podcast. Of course you got to check out superwell.com. We have more videos on the channel. So dig into those to learn from app founders who are willing to share super tactical stuff about app growth.