1stCollab

The other ninety percent is a spreadsheet. It is finding creators, then messaging thousands of them, then negotiating a price with each one, then writing a contract, then approving a draft, then paying an invoice, then, at the end of the year, sending a 1099. It is the sort of work that scales badly, because it scales linearly: twice as many creators is twice as much haggling. Brands solve this by hiring people, or agencies, or both, and the cost of the campaign quietly becomes the cost of coordinating the campaign.

1stCollab's bet is that this ninety percent is not really creative work at all. It is operations. And operations, historically, is the sort of thing that software eats. The company - a Y Combinator Winter 2023 outfit based in San Francisco - lets a brand source thousands of relevant creators across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and then does the tedious parts on the brand's behalf: outreach, negotiation, contracting, payment, and yes, the taxes. What used to take teams months, the pitch goes, now takes hours.

The founders are unusually well-suited to make this argument, because they spent years building the machine that decides what people see. CEO Leon Lin ran Discovery product at Pinterest - Home, Search, the recommendation surfaces - across roughly nine years in which he watched the company grow from about a hundred people to three thousand. Co-founders Varun Bansal and Andrew Liu came from the same recommendations-and-search world at Pinterest and Coupang. Carina Cater, who built influencer programs at Whatnot, Robinhood, and Curology, supplies the domain knowledge for the part that is not a ranking problem.

Put those two things together - people who know how to predict what will perform, and someone who knows what a good brand deal actually looks like - and you get the company's central claim: that a platform can guess, before a dollar is spent, which creator will move the needle, and then route the budget accordingly. The name for this, in the deck, is ROI optimization. The name for it, if you have ever bought a search ad, is an auction with a quality score.

That is a large claim, and it is worth being honest about it. Facebook and Google transformed digital ads because they made buying measurable and automatic - you could see what worked, and you could buy more of it without talking to a salesperson. Influencer marketing, by contrast, is still mostly artisanal. Deals are struck over DMs. Performance is fuzzy. Whether 1stCollab becomes the auction layer for creators, or merely a very good operations tool for a while, is the open question the company is being paid to answer.

The evidence so far is encouraging in the way early-stage evidence usually is: real, specific, and not yet enormous. The platform says it connects thousands of creators with brands each week, that it has served hundreds of startups, and that larger brands using it have scaled to thousands of influencers while saving more than a million dollars a year in spend. Named customers include Notion, Character AI, Quora, Framer, Gamma, Locket, and SnapCalorie - a roster that skews, tellingly, toward companies that themselves think in terms of funnels and conversion.

The other side of the marketplace is the creators, and here the product wears a friendlier face. The tagline aimed at them is "better brand deals, a lot less work," which is the same value proposition as the brand side, run in reverse. Creators get matched opportunities, an auto-updating media kit, applications that take about a minute, a real person to talk to, and - the detail that gets quoted back in testimonials - payment that arrives in hours rather than after ninety days of polite email. The platform is free for them. Liquidity on the supply side is what makes the demand side work, so giving it away is not generosity; it is the business model.

What makes 1stCollab interesting is not that it has a clever feature. It is that it picked the unglamorous layer on purpose. Plenty of companies want to help you make content or measure a campaign. 1stCollab volunteered to handle the contracts and the payroll taxes, which is exactly the kind of work that is boring enough to be defensible. If you can make the tedious ninety percent disappear, the remaining ten percent - the creative - is the only thing anyone has to think about. That is a good place for a piece of software to stand.