Creator Seeding & Affiliate Growth

We wanted to build a community of creators who enjoyed immi and could introduce the brand to relevant audiences.

The primary goal was to recruit affiliates through product seeding: invite creators to try immi, and offer interested creators the opportunity to earn commission. Organic awareness and content for our ads team were additional benefits. For major celebrities, the focus was relationship building and organic exposure.

However, sourcing, outreach, shipping, and follow-ups were painfully manual. Long outreach emails requesting content received little interest, and managing each relationship individually made the program difficult to scale.

Creator selection

I learned that follower count alone wasn’t a useful filter. Some large accounts had low views or engagement that raised questions about audience quality (bots/spam accounts). So I took a few steps back and created a framework our team could follow.

I organized sourcing around three groups:

• Emerging creators: People with strong momentum, including reality-TV cast members ahead of a new season.
• Established creators: People with engaged audiences who might already work with similar brands.
• Celebrity-level creators: People where there was a credible opportunity to connect.

I evaluated prospective creators against four criteria:

• Audience fit: Did their content and audience align with our product?
• Brand experience: Had they worked with similar brands or participated in affiliate programs?
• Creative fit: Were they posting consistently, with natural opportunities to feature immi?
• Momentum: Were their audience and engagement growing over time?

I set monthly and quarterly sourcing priorities to test new niches where there's outsized impact. At times, I incorporated requests from our ads team, such as finding athletes or moms whose content matched creative they wanted to test.

Outreach testing

Initial email outreach received a 1–2% reply rate and only 20% of the people who responded were interested in a sample. I quickly pivoted to Instagram DMs so creators could immediately see the brand’s profile, but our detailed email-like DM's still asked for content before establishing a relationship. I learned creators hate being pitched and often ignore long messages, we needed to be direct and casual.

I pivoted again, cut 95% of the message and led with a simpler opening:

“wanna try high protein ramen? 👀🍜”

Moving to Instagram, simplifying the message, and following up consistently brought reply rates to 12% and of those that replied 80% wanted to try samples. Creators could try the product without committing to deliverables.

After delivery, we asked for feedback and invited creators who liked immi to join the affiliate program. This made recruitment a continuation of the relationship.

Systems and program management

After testing the process manually, I built a multi-stage Airtable CRM in fall 2021 to manage seeding and affiliate recruitment end to end. It covered outreach, delivery, feedback, affiliate onboarding, and content tracking, supported by 20 semi-custom messaging templates, three follow-ups per stage, and SOPs for routine operations and common exceptions.

I recruited, trained, and managed a virtual assistant to operate the workflow while I owned strategy and performance. Airtable supported relationship management, alongside Shopify Collabs and Klaviyo for affiliate and communication workflows.

During the January 2024–February 2025 reporting period, I tracked organic views through Archive AI and adjusted sourcing and outreach against our targets. As creator interest grew, I tightened selection criteria to keep spending focused on relevant relationships.

A simple one-liner worked better than an upfront content ask.

Offering creators the opportunity to try immi without requiring deliverables generated more interest and created a better starting point for a relationship.

Seeding and affiliate recruitment worked as connected stages.

Product feedback gave us a natural opening to discuss an affiliate relationship with creators who liked immi, rather than souring the relationship if they were not interested at the time.

Follow-through mattered as much as the first message.

Consistent communication helped relationships progress from initial interest to delivery, feedback, and potential affiliate participation. A documented workflow made that consistency easier to maintain as the program scaled.

Higher interest required stronger selection.

More interested creators didn’t mean everyone should receive product. Applying the selection framework more rigorously helped us focus spending on relevant audiences and relationships aligned with our goals.