The full playbook for building a creator community

Should you build a creator community?

The short answer

The thesis is half right, and the right half matters more.

The pattern is real and recurs across forty years and every category, from Harley riders in 1983 to a chocolate startup running a creator Discord last year. Our own database shows it too, the one piece of evidence here that nobody sold us.

The second half, that these brands "do really well", is not established. Community and success turn up together, and almost nobody has shown which causes which. The best designed test on this question found no effect, and some of the largest companies in the world have closed the programs people hold up as proof.

A creator community is one way to buy a standing relationship with creators. Standing relationships compound, and the community version is the hardest to copy and the easiest to get wrong.

Where the thesis holds

The shape keeps reappearing

The same structure shows up in places that were not copying each other, which is as strong as a pattern gets without a controlled trial.

Tabs Chocolate is closest to your example: a Discord where creators trade what is working, and the company grew on it rather than on ads.

The Roblox and LEGO numbers are the sturdiest in the table, because they are filed with regulators or tied to a published royalty.

Tabs Chocolate

Click to enlarge

A Discord where 250 creators share hooks and briefs

• $11M in 18 months, close to no paid ads
• Creators trade what is working in the room

tabschocolate.com

How sure we are: The headcount comes from their software vendor.

Olipop

Click to enlarge

Seeded creators plus a commission ladder, 1,400 codes

• Creator sales went from 4% to 12% of all sales

drinkolipop.com

How sure we are: The 982% return comes from the brand's affiliate software vendor, so it is a sales page, not an audited result. No video here: every result was a stranger's taste test, not the creator programme.

Sephora Squad

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A paid year long cohort you apply to

• 30,000 applications in 2021, running 8 years
• More than 250 creators since 2019
• A 12 month term, pay reported at $5,000 to $50,000 a year

Open it: https://www.sephora.com/beauty/sephora-squad

No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 403 Forbidden).

How sure we are: The pay band comes from reporting, not a filing. The quoted 68 out of 16,000 ratio describes one earlier cycle, so read it as a shape, not a rate.

Gymshark

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Seeding, then athletes, then their own event

• A 300 pound a day business took 30,000 pounds in 30 minutes
• 125 paid influencers as of 2020, with no published headcount since

Open it: https://www.gymshark.com/pages/athletes

No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 404 Not Found).

How sure we are: The event worked partly because the brand was already hot, the cause and effect question this page could not settle.

Salesforce Trailblazers

Click to enlarge

Trailblazers, badges and local chapters

• 18 million members
• More than 200,000 members across more than 800 groups in the shapes table

trailhead.salesforce.com

How sure we are: Salesforce's own published membership number.

Roblox

Click to enlarge

Creators build the actual product

• $410.6M paid out to creators in six months
• About 85% of Roblox developers earn under $100 a month

create.roblox.com

How sure we are: One of the two sturdiest numbers in the table, because it is filed with regulators.

LEGO Ideas

Click to enlarge

Fans design sets, the designer takes 1%

• 3.43 million members
• A 1% royalty on net sales, ten free sets, and a credit on the box

ideas.lego.com

How sure we are: The 1% royalty is solid everywhere. The count of sets shipped is quoted three incompatible ways, so use the royalty, not the count.

Harley-Davidson Owners Group

Click to enlarge

Owners group, running since 1983

• Over 1 million members
• Forty years of the same structure, which is where this pattern starts

Open it: https://www.harley-davidson.com/us/en/club/index.html

No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 404 Not Found).

How sure we are: Harley-Davidson's own published membership number.

One study found a causal effect

Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah (Marketing Science, 2015) compared customers who joined a retailer's community against a matched group who did not, before and after launch. 19% of the revenue after launch was caused by joining, not just correlated with it, and the effect held over time and across channels.

Bapna and Umyarov (Management Science, 2015) gave away Last.fm premium subscriptions at random and watched what friends did next. Being connected to a new subscriber raised the odds a person paid by more than 60%.

The community sometimes comes first

SITS Girls was a blogging community that became a bookable network of about 50,000 publishers and was bought in 2014. The room came before the roster, and the roster is what got sold.

SITS Girls, then Sway Group

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A blogging community that became a bookable network and was sold

• About 50,000 publishers
• Bought in 2014
• The room came before the roster, and the roster is what got sold

swaygroup.com

How sure we are: The clearest case here of a community coming first, not built on top of a brand that already worked.

What our own numbers say

This comes from our own sponsor deal table, counting each sponsored video once.

On the same shelf, the community brand keeps its creators

AG1 and LMNT sell a similar product to a similar person and started buying creators within a month of each other in 2021, and behave very differently.

LMNT runs a roster a third the size and gets three quarters of the output by rebooking the same people.

LMNT's heaviest creators are a fitness coach with 123,000 subscribers, a keto channel, a hiking channel, an ultrarunner and a farming channel. AG1's heaviest are Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman and a travel channel with 4.5 million subscribers.

LMNT puts 71% of its money into creators under 500,000 subscribers, and AG1 puts 53%. LMNT's largest creator group is health at 36%. For AG1 health comes fifth, behind lifestyle, travel, sports and entertainment.

One brand is buying into practices where an electrolyte is already part of the daily routine, so it can stay. The other is buying attention, so it has to keep shopping.

LMNT, the videos behind that number

414 creators, 2,128 videos, 56% booked more than once, 5.14 times each on average.

An electrolyte is already part of these creators' daily routine, so the brand can stay.

AG1, the videos behind that number

1,109 creators, 2,805 videos, 36% booked more than once, 2.53 times each on average.

AG1 is buying attention, so it has to keep shopping.

Retention on its own is not proof of a community

I measured how concentrated each brand's creators are, on the theory that a community around a shared practice would show up as a focused roster. Across 25 brands and 51,000 sponsored videos, concentration has no relationship with how often a brand re-books (correlation minus 0.02).

Squarespace has the most scattered roster measured and the highest loyalty: 91% of its creators booked more than once, eight videos each on average. It has no community, just an affiliate program that has been open and paying for a decade.

A standing relationship produces loyalty, and a community is only one way to buy one. A long running affiliate program is a cheaper way that works.

Squarespace

Click to enlarge

The most scattered roster measured and the highest loyalty measured

• 91% of its creators booked more than once, an average of eight videos each
• No community, just an affiliate program open and paying for a decade

squarespace.com

How sure we are: Ours, from the sponsor deal table.

Widening it to 44 brands makes this worse, not better

A second pass covered 44 brands and 70,000 sponsored videos. If the thesis held as a ranking, brands with famous creator communities would top it. They do not.

The top two have no community at all, and Notion, the program software people cite most, sits near the bottom.

Two rows are too thin to lean on. Notion is probably split across three domains we hold separately, and Bloom shows only 24 videos, a hole in our coverage rather than a finding.

What survives is the comparison within one shelf. AG1, LMNT and Ritual sell the same kind of product to the same person and started a month apart, so the other explanations for the gap are held still. Across shelves, payment structure matters more than community, which is why Squarespace tops the table.

Where the thesis breaks

The best designed test found nothing

Algesheimer, Borle, Dholakia and Singh ran a year long randomised field experiment at eBay Germany (Marketing Science, 2010). Inviting customers into the community raised participation. Participation then had no effect on bids or revenue, and a negative effect on listings and on how much people spent.

It is the cleanest test on this question, and it did not support the thesis. One market is not every market, so it does not settle the argument, but it means the effect shows up in some settings and not others rather than being a law.

Large companies keep closing these programs

Discord closed its own partner program, and Discord is the example in the thesis. Duolingo, the company most often held up as proof that community works, switched to streaks, leaderboards and notifications after listing.

Xbox Ambassadors, closed

Shut down in October 2024, after 13 years

• Thirteen years of a program held up as proof that this works

news.xbox.com

How sure we are: Announced by the company. No video here: every result was about Xbox Insider or the reporting tool, not the Ambassadors programme.

Discord Partner Program, closed

Discord closed its own partner program in October 2023

• Discord is the example in the thesis

support.discord.com

How sure we are: Announced by Discord. No video here: nothing on YouTube covers the closure.

Duolingo Clubs and forums, closed

Click to enlarge

Clubs, forums and Events all shut, 2022 and 2023

• The volunteer contributor programme was shut down
• Contributors were offered paid roles and a shared $4,000,000 fund
• What exists now is a fan run server, not a brand one

blog.duolingo.com

How sure we are: Duolingo is the company most often held up as proof that community works, and after listing it switched to streaks, leaderboards and notifications.

My Starbucks Idea, closed

Click to enlarge

190,000 ideas and 277 built, then closed in 2018

• Asked people to gather around the company itself, like every dead program on this list

stories.starbucks.com

How sure we are: Starbucks' own published totals.

Glossier rep program, closed

Click to enlarge

Discontinued

• Our own table holds 38 videos across 15 creators for Glossier
• That 60% re-book rate is fifteen people, so read the count, not the rate

glossier.com

How sure we are: Ours for the video count. The closure is reported rather than announced.

Almost every number is sold by somebody

Olipop's 982% return, Tabs' 9.8x, Kettle & Fire's cost per engagement and Cozy Earth's 55% of revenue all come from the software vendor the brand was using. impact.com, Social Snowball, Aspire and MOGL each want the number large, and none of these figures has been independently audited.

Lululemon's 1,500 ambassadors are verifiable. The return on them is not published anywhere, and the "high ROI" claim traces back to a marketing blog.

A described community and a working one are different things

Neuro Gum's founder describes 500 creators in a Discord with a sales floor to stay in, three tiers, a recorded orientation and a quarterly call with the chief executive. On paper, it is your thesis at its best.

We hold no TikTok records for them. What we can see is 38 placements across 16 channels, the top three creators holding half the work, and no sponsored video since 27 June 2026. The community may be real, but it was invisible in the only evidence we have.

Neuro Gum

Click to enlarge

500 creators in a Discord, described by the founder

• A sales floor to stay in, three tiers, a recorded orientation and a quarterly call with the chief executive
• What we can see is 38 placements across 16 channels
• The top three creators hold half the work, and nothing since 27 June 2026

neurogum.com

How sure we are: Described by the founder, never verified from outside. We hold no TikTok records for them, so the community was invisible in the only evidence we have.

The success does not track the community either

AG1 has the worst creator loyalty on its shelf and is one of the largest supplement brands in the world. PRIME runs collegiate ambassadors and posted a 70.7% fall in UK turnover in its 2024 accounts. Temu and Shein became the fourth and ninth largest digital advertisers in the United States with no community of any kind.

If community caused success we would not see this much of both without each other.

Most communities are a few dozen people and an audience

At Atlassian, 12% of users answered 91% of the questions. About 85% of Roblox developers earn under $100 a month. A community of 500 usually means 20 people talking and 480 reading, and the 20 produce the result.

The version that survives

Three claims survive.

A standing relationship beats a placement, and it compounds. Every brand in our data with loyalty above 55% has some structure holding creators in place: a community, an athlete roster or an affiliate program that never closes. The structure is needed but not enough, because Notion has an ambassador program everyone writes about and sits at 29%.

Having the program is not the thing, using it is.

The community has to be about something other than the brand. LMNT's creators are held together by keto, ultrarunning and hiking, not by an electrolyte. Tabs' Discord is held together by learning to make ads that work, and the school communities you mentioned by the subject.

The dead programs above, My Starbucks Idea, the Glossier reps and Duolingo's forums, all asked people to gather around the company itself.

The advantage is that it is hard. An affiliate program buys the same loyalty faster and cheaper, and anyone can copy it by Friday. A community around a practice takes years and cannot be bought, which is why brands that have one are hard to dislodge and why most attempts fail.

Dennis, what I could not settle is whether community causes growth or successful brands can simply afford one. Gymshark's event worked partly because the brand was already hot. The next step would be to take ten brands with a known community start date and measure their creator loyalty before and after, the same method as the Marketing Science study, and possible with our data.

What this means for us

We already sell what this argument points at. Our data shows brands losing half their roster after one video, and we can now price that against a competitor who keeps theirs.

The pitch is not "build a community", a two year project a marketing manager cannot approve. The pitch is the gap: AG1 books 1,109 creators to get 2,805 videos while LMNT books 414 to get 2,128, and LMNT is not smarter, it just stays.

We looked at this for ourselves in the creator signup work and decided against it: at our size the database row is the asset, and a community of 40 people reads as dead. That still holds for us, and it does not weaken the case for a brand that already has thousands of creators.

Competitions, prizes, and the rooms brands run

What a creator competition buys, the eight shapes a creator community takes, and what our data says about both

The short answer on competitions

The word competition covers three things, and two are not community at all. One is an ad buy with a prize attached. One is recruitment.

Only the third, a contest among people already in the room, is a community event, and almost nobody publishes numbers on it.

Our own data draws the line. The brands famous for creator competitions barely book creators. Doritos has one recorded sponsored video in our table, Lay's one, Chipotle five, Duolingo five, Discord three.

Sephora, which runs a cohort you apply to instead, has 298 videos across 105 creators and books more than half of them again.

A competition gets a brand content without taking on creators. A community takes on creators without paying for every video. They are not two versions of one idea, and a brand that runs the first while calling it the second gets neither.

Three kinds of competition, and only one is a community

One, the spectacle. A huge prize, one winner, thousands or hundreds of thousands of entries. Doritos Crash the Super Bowl and Lay's Do Us a Flavor are the famous two.

The prize buys press and a pile of entries from strangers, and almost none of them hears from the brand again. It is advertising with a contest bolted on, and it works on those terms.

Two, the audition. The prize is the contract. e.l.f.

gave three winners a paid representation deal in 2020. Sephora picks a cohort out of applications every year. Chipotle opened the fifteenth seat of its Creator Class by public contest.

This is recruitment: the competition is the door into a community, not the community.

Three, the internal contest. A leaderboard, a monthly sales race, a prize for the best hook, a trip for the top ten, run among ambassadors already signed. It is the only real community event of the three, and it has almost no public evidence, because the numbers sit with the brand instead of in a press release.

The third kind is the one worth copying, and the one this document could not settle.

What was actually run, and what the prize was

How sure we are of each of those

Doritos and Lay's are the sturdiest, because both companies put the prize and the entry count in their own press releases and both were reported independently.

Sephora's pay band, the Spotlight total and the Shorts Fund come from reporting, not filings, so they are good but second hand. The most quoted Sephora ratio, roughly 68 chosen out of more than 16,000 applications, describes one earlier cycle reprinted without its year, so read it as a shape, not a rate.

Gymshark66 is the most cited creator challenge in fitness and its prize is not published, which usually means the prize is the attention.

One number here comes from a software vendor, not a brand. Social Snowball publishes an ambassador programme that took 1,500 applications in three months at a claimed sixteen times return, brand unnamed. That is a sales page, not a result.

Doritos, Crash the Super Bowl 2025

Click to enlarge

$1,000,000, a first quarter Super Bowl slot and a trip

• Opened September 2024, thousands of entries cut to 25 finalists, then a public vote
• Won by Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell for a spot called Abduction
• One recorded sponsored video in our table

doritos.com

How sure we are: Prize and entry count are in Doritos' own press release, and were reported independently.

Lay's, Do Us a Flavor

Click to enlarge

$1,000,000 to the winner on more than 700,000 submissions

• $50,000 to each of two runners up
• Won by Paula George for Bacon Grilled Cheese
• One recorded sponsored video in our table

lays.com

How sure we are: Prize and entry count are in the company's own press release, and were reported independently.

e.l.f., Eyes. Lips. Famous.

Click to enlarge

Three winners, each a $5,000 representation contract and a year of product

• Run in 2020
• The prize is the contract, so this is recruitment, not a contest
• e.l.f. lives on TikTok, so its 27 videos here are a coverage hole, not a fact about the brand

elfcosmetics.com

How sure we are: Reported, and the structure is confirmed by the brand. No video here: nothing on YouTube covers the 2020 contest.

Chipotle, Creator Class

14 founding creators, the 15th seat opened by public contest

• Run in 2021
• The prize was the contract, with no separate cash figure published
• Five recorded videos in our table, a coverage hole because Chipotle is TikTok-native

newsroom.chipotle.com

How sure we are: Announced by the company. No video here: nothing on YouTube covers the Creator Class.

Snapchat, Spotlight

Click to enlarge

$250,000,000 paid to more than 12,000 creators in the first year

• Against a promised $1,000,000 a day
• Cut back, then closed

newsroom.snap.com

How sure we are: From reporting, not a filing, so second hand.

YouTube, Shorts Fund

Click to enlarge

$100,000,000 in total, paid at $100 to $10,000 a month

• Ran 2021 to 2023
• Replaced by a share of advertising revenue

blog.youtube

How sure we are: From reporting, not a filing, so second hand. No video here: every result was a general monetisation explainer, not the Shorts Fund.

Gymshark66

Click to enlarge

A 66 day challenge with a shortlist and a named winner

• Annual
• No prize value published anywhere we could reach

gymshark.com

How sure we are: The most cited creator challenge in fitness, with no published prize, which usually means the prize is the attention.

The rooms brands run for their own creators

The absence is worth stating plainly

We searched eighteen other brands for a private creator room and found nothing published where we could read it: Fanatics, Liquid I.V., Webflow, Figma, Canva, Adobe, Glossier, Bumble, Red Bull, Alo, Vuori, Celsius, poppi, Olipop, Crocs, e.l.f., Shopify, and Discord's own partner programme. Figma's two communities are open and public, not vetted.

That is absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. A private room is private, so the ones that work are the ones a search cannot see, and the ones we can read about are the ones somebody wanted us to see. Both Discords in the table above are known only because a vendor or a founder chose to describe them.

Notion ambassadors

Click to enlarge

Around 200 ambassadors across 23 countries, in two Slack workspaces

• More than 600 applications in the first week
• Channels by country, and one where members compare what they earn from templates and courses
• The program tech writes about most, at 29% re-booked in our table

Open it: https://www.notion.so/Notion-Ambassador-Program-45448f9b8e704c7bab254bd505c4717c

No preview card, the page did not load for us (a page with nothing to read, matched window.location.replace).

How sure we are: Described publicly. Our 29% is probably split across three domains we hold separately, so treat the rate as thin.

The eight shapes a creator community takes

Two rows need a warning.

The affiliate ladder is the worst documented shape on the list, though most brands could start one on Monday. Nobody publishes their tier schedule, and both Abercrombie figures come from a company that sells affiliate software and disagree with each other.

LEGO Ideas is the best documented and still gets misquoted. The 1% royalty is consistent everywhere. The count of sets shipped is not: sources say 50 as of 2022, 82 including sets only announced, and 19 currently in production, which are three different questions wearing one number.

Use the royalty, not the count.

Red Bull Student Marketeers

Click to enlarge

More than 4,000 worldwide, running since 1987

• The biggest community named on this page
• 34 recorded sponsored videos across 28 creators, 14% booked again
• Only Bumble is lower

studentmarketeer.redbull.com

How sure we are: Red Bull's own recruitment page for the headcount, ours for the videos.

Abercrombie Creator Suite

An affiliate ladder that climbs with sales

• Tiers reported at 10% up to either 25% or 33%, and the two sources disagree

abercrombie.com

How sure we are: Both figures come from a company that sells affiliate software, and they disagree. No video here: nobody films a tier schedule either.

Revolve Festival

The event or trip as the centre of it

• 1,200 to 1,500 invited for 2026, mostly creators

Open it: https://www.revolve.com/

No preview card, the page did not load for us (https://www.revolve.com/ could not be fetched: TimeoutError:).

How sure we are: Reported invite counts, not a published figure.

What our own numbers say

Same method as part one: a booking is one distinct video, counted once, so a video recorded twice cannot make a one off creator look like a repeat.

The competition brands do not buy creators

The top and bottom of that table are two different worlds. The five brands with the most famous creator competitions sit in the first five rows with fifteen videos between them. The two running application cohorts, Sephora and Canva, sit at the bottom with 609 videos and repeat booking above half.

A competition is not a way of working with creators. It gets their output without the relationship, and our table shows what that looks like a year or two later.

Sephora, the videos behind that number

298 videos across 105 creators, 51% booked again.

Runs an application cohort, not a competition.

Canva, the videos behind that number

311 videos across 117 creators, 52% booked again.

The other application cohort. Sephora and Canva hold 609 videos between them, against fifteen for the five most famous competitions.

The biggest community on the list has nearly the worst loyalty

Red Bull has more than 4,000 student marketeers, the biggest community named here, and 34 recorded sponsored videos across 28 creators, of which 14% came back for a second. Only Bumble is lower.

Those 4,000 people are not turning into standing relationships with paid creators. The community and the creator roster are two separate systems inside one company, and neither feeds the other.

Red Bull, the videos behind that number

34 videos across 28 creators, 14% booked again, beside 4,000 student marketeers.

Where these numbers are thin

Below about 100 videos, read the count and ignore the rate. Glossier's 60% is fifteen creators, Bumble's 7% is fourteen, Roblox's 16% is nineteen. A percentage over that few people moves by ten points if one creator posts once more.

This is YouTube only. A brand that lives on TikTok, like e.l.f. or Chipotle, shows up here as a hole in our coverage, not a finding about the brand.

Where the prize model breaks

The law treats a prize very differently from a fee

In the United States a contest decided by chance is a sweepstakes and has to offer a free way to enter. New York requires registration and a surety bond for the full value of the prize on any pool above $5,000, filed thirty days before launch.

The Federal Trade Commission treats a chance to win as a material connection, so anybody posting about their own entry has to disclose it, and a hashtag on its own does not count. The Commission settled with Publishers Clearing House for $18,500,000 in June 2023 over designs that made people believe buying something improved their odds.

In the United Kingdom the CAP code covers every prize promotion, whether it turns on skill or on chance.

A contest of skill among vetted, contracted ambassadors avoids most of this. An open draw among strangers does not, which is a good reason to keep the internal contest and the public spectacle separate.

The FTC and Publishers Clearing House

Click to enlarge

An $18,500,000 settlement in June 2023

• Over designs that made people believe buying something improved their odds
• A chance to win is a material connection, so an entrant posting about their own entry has to disclose it, and a hashtag on its own does not count
• New York wants registration and a surety bond on any prize pool above $5,000

ftc.gov

How sure we are: The Commission's own press release.

A prize can lower the effort it was meant to buy

A long line of experiments on paying people for something they did willingly keeps finding that an expected reward reduces their appetite for the task itself. Leaderboards work the same way: published work on rank comparison reports that only the people near the top read a leaderboard as success, and everybody else reads it as losing again.

I have summaries of that literature, not the papers, so treat it as a direction to check before building a leaderboard, not a citation.

The arithmetic of one winner

Doritos cut thousands of entries to 25 and then to one. Lay's took more than 700,000 submissions and paid three people. Every entrant did the work and the brand keeps the entries.

That is fine with strangers. Run it on your own hundred ambassadors and ninety nine of them worked for a prize they did not get, and you face those ninety nine again next month.

An open contest hands the pen to strangers

Mountain Dew ran an open naming contest in 2012 and 4chan took it over, voting an offensive name to the top and leaving a prank on the site. The company pulled the whole thing. It was a consumer contest, not a creator one, and it is why the vetted internal version and the open public version should never share a mechanism.

Mountain Dew, Dub the Dew

An open naming contest taken over by 4chan in 2012

• An offensive name was voted to the top and a prank was left on the site
• The company pulled the whole thing
• A consumer contest, not a creator one

mountaindew.com

How sure we are: Widely reported at the time.

Crash the Super Bowl is not a cautionary tale

It ran for ten years, ended in 2016, and came back in 2025. The gap was a deliberate move to a year round creator programme, not a collapse, so the ending is no proof that contests fail.

What this means for us

The version worth copying is the third, the contest inside a roster a brand already has. It is the cheapest of the three, the only one with no real registration or bonding problem, and the only one where the brand still has the people afterwards.

The pitch comes off the table above. A brand thinking about a competition is thinking about content, and our data says the brands behind the most famous competitions have almost no standing relationships to show for it, while the two running application cohorts book more than half their creators a second time. So the question for a brand is not whether to run a contest, but who would still be here in a year.

Dennis, the gap I could not close is the internal contest, the only one of the three that matters to us. Brands keep those numbers, so all that is public is vendor sales pages. To settle it, ask two or three brands we already speak to what their ambassador leaderboard did to repeat purchase. They can answer that off their own dashboard, and nobody has published it.

Two related pieces: Where influencers actually gather maps about 90 rooms creators are already in, split by whether each holds talent or buyers, the other side of this question. Creative competitions shortlist covers competitions we could enter for social proof, a different subject with the same word.

Facebook, in depth

Creators talking about the business of being creators

This is the tier that matters most to us. These are people who already take money for content.

The craft groups, where the skill lives

Not business groups, but full of people who make things for a living and are easier to reach than a creator with a manager.

The blogger networks, older and underrated

The blogging world built this playbook first and its groups are still running. These people have email lists, which almost no new creator does.

The audience groups, which is the idea most people miss

Our own data says a greens powder buys travel and lifestyle channels far more than it buys health channels. Across AG1's placements, travel is 17 percent and lifestyle nearly 25 percent, while health is 8.2 percent. So the creators a wellness brand actually wants are sitting in travel and outdoor communities, not in supplement ones.

These are not creator groups. They are where the creators live.

Marketer-side, where our buyers are

Reddit, in depth

Reddit is the most searchable of the lot, which matters because you can read years of history before you ever post.

Discord, in depth

Discord is where the younger and more technical creators are, and where a tool company's community doubles as a talent pool.

Slack, where the buyers are

Slack skews professional and brand side. Two matter.

Skool and the paid communities

Skool became the default paid-community platform after Alex Hormozi invested and pushed it hard, which brought scale and also brought a lot of hustle-culture noise. Read the free ones before paying for anything.

How to run it, step by step

The 4 steps, short version

For warming them up, I would just include getting the ones that you already have.

So whether they're affiliates, whether they're customers, whatever, those are the main ones. Tools like Outer Radar to find them, scraping tagged posts on Instagram, and lots of other mechanisms.

So if we break it down into first steps, the first step is to warm them up. So that's doing seeding, PR boxes, outreach to get familiar with additional faces or TikTok affiliates. There are always ways to do contests.

The second is actually bringing them into the community with a deal for the ones that are approved. Then third is running the community, and fourth is then whitelisting, which puts gas on the fire.

• If we break it down into two jobs, the community's first job is to attract new creators.
• Then the second job is to give them a reason to stay and continue to work with the brand.

Step 1: Warm creators up before you ask for anything

• Once this step is done, you have creators who know and like you before you make them an offer.

1.1 · Start with the creators and customers you have

• Your first ambassadors can be the customers, fans and staff you already have.
  • Organifi: its first ambassadors were its own customers, avid fans who wanted to promote it at launch. From Mind Pump Show, December 2022.
  • Sol de Janeiro: a handwritten note to people who talked about the brand on their own, before it was at Sephora. From Sol de Janeiro Official, April 2018.
  • Ulta Beauty: its Ulta Beauties are store associates, many of them creators with their own following. From The CMO Podcast, August 2026.
  • Ulta Beauty has since doubled the Ulta Beauties creator program.
  • From The CMO Podcast, August 2026.

Finding your 'tribe' or nano-influencers leads to closer customer relationships and community feedback.

““ But then as we became a larger energy and focus brand that could go up against the Red Bulls and the monsters and rock stars of the world, we realized like I'm not trying to be a rock star, you know, or I don't want to be locked into 5 hours of energy when I'm stepping into like a meeting or just trying to do something. I'm just trying to get mentally sharp. And that's what we realize is the path that we could really play in because a lot of people want that. So if you find your nano influencers, your tribe, how people interact, you're closer with your customer because that's the community you're building and your community is giving you feedback, man. Especially if you're just starting your company, like don't worry about the revenue, you know, worry about like this is how my consumer interacts and that's how you can get really deep. There's a great tool in my life like name drop tools and stuff. ””

1.2 · Send a PR box with a community invite

• If you've done a good job with the PR boxes and you have good brand association, you will get a lot of influencers who want to join the community.
  • SugarBearHair: it sent the nicest box, took creators in the group on trips like Coachella, and they stayed loyal. From Kent Yoshimura, on Open Residency, June 2025, 9:36.

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1.3 · Gift every week, at a set number

• Automated gifting lets a small team reach hundreds of creators every week.
  • Grüns: about 2 hours a week reaching 500 TikTok and Instagram creators and 150 YouTube creators, through automated gifting. From Archive's page on Grüns.
  • Spacegoods: a lookalike search off its best paid creators finds 100+ similar creators in minutes (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.

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1.4 · Put your best early creators on a retainer

• One creator on a monthly fee can carry most of your sales.
  • NeuroGum: it hired 15, 20, 30 creators to make content every single day, and took five or six months to go viral on TikTok. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
  • Peach Slices: one $600-a-month creator brought $150,000 of its $226,000 GMV (vendor's own numbers). From Brands Meet Creators' own page on Peach Slices.

1.5 · Once you have a base, stop cold outreach

• NeuroGum: it pulls from TikTok Affiliate Partner groups and other creator groups instead of cold outreach. From Open Residency, June 2025.

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• How Nutrafol plans it, in a job post: the hire keeps relationships with creators, talent agencies and platform partners like GRIN, LTK and ShopMy to grow the network.
• From Nutrafol's job post on Built In.

Step 1 · Where it goes wrong

• Don't hire a vetted TikTok agency partner, because you're not building a relationship with the influencer.

Step 2: Set the deal structure

• Set a minimum in sales or followers before a creator gets a sample.
  • NeuroGum: a sample goes only to a creator with at least $500 of GMV across TikTok Shop in the last 30 days. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
  • OLIPOP: at least 10,000 followers on one platform, with room for health advocates, nutritionists and dietitians (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on OLIPOP.
  • Bloom: creators with 5,000 to 50,000 followers on a small budget. From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.

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Pick for fit, not size: Gymshark has no fixed checklist for its athletes, and picks them on content quality, brand fit and how their audience responds. Gymshark

Seed made creators pass a course and an exam before they could promote it

• Seed launched Seed University, a 59-minute Instagram Stories curriculum covering six subjects that prospective ambassadors had to complete and pass a 10-question final exam on before joining its influencer network. glossy.co
• Once vetted, Seed ambassadors received a 15% base commission for being part of the Seed network, plus 100% of the profits from product sales if they were not part of any other larger influencer network. glossy.co
• Nearly 1,700 people had registered for Seed University against Seed's more than 36,000 brand Instagram followers, and the brand planned to accept 100 to 200 influencers on a rolling basis. glossy.co

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2.1 · Set an open commission, more for your own

• Pay an open commission to everyone, and more to creators you work with directly.
  • NeuroGum: 15% on its open TikTok Shop plan, 20 to 25% for creators who work with it directly, set by GMV and partnership level. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
  • Nutrafol: $40 to $200 per new customer by default, with VIP rates case by case. From Katalys, Nutrafol's affiliate network partner, February 2026.
  • OLIPOP: a $36 variety pack and at least 10% commission, then a premium commission once the creator posts (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on OLIPOP.

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2.2 · Write down the monthly quota and who stays

• Write down how many videos a month keep a creator in the room.
  • Goli: 20 new videos in April before past months' GMV counts. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
  • Force Factor: at least 15 new videos in January to earn on videos posted before it, and every entrant a verified member of its Discord. From Force Factor's January 2026 challenge page.
  • NeuroGum: its Discord started with 500 creators, anyone under the GMV goal was removed, and it now has 3 tiers. From Open Residency, June 2025, 6:55.
  • How Goli prices a sample: at least 1 video or live for every sample, and samples are never guaranteed.
  • From Brands Meet Creators newsletter, July 2025.

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2.3 · Add a reward ladder, top tier earned

• Pay bigger rewards as a creator's sales climb, and make the top tier earned.
  • Force Factor: a $120 bonus at $1,000 of GMV, up to $15,350 at $100,000, paid on only the highest tier reached. From Force Factor's January 2026 challenge page.
  • IM8: tiers at 1, 20, 75 and 300 orders, so the orders a creator's link brings in move them up. From IM8's ambassador page.
  • ADVANCED: every Partner started as an Ambassador and moved up only after showing results. From ADVANCED's Partner page, read September 2026.
  • Goli: $10,000 extra to creators making $10,000 every month of Q4 from Q4 videos. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
  • K2O: $1,000 to any creator who posted 1 video a day for 60 days, with no sales or view minimum. From K2O's CEO, August 2026.
  • Nello: 3 month retainer opportunities and a MacBook for $3k of GMV, per a creator newsletter. From Brands Meet Creators newsletter.

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2.4 · Financial incentives are just the starting point

• Influencers are not limited to financial incentives only.
  • e.l.f.: a TikTok audition called Eyes. Lips. Famous., and 3 winners each got a $5,000 contract and a year of product. From e.l.f.'s own press release, August 2020.
  • IM8: invites to its events, masterclasses and workshops, on top of free product, merch and 10% on every new customer order. From IM8's ambassador page.
  • Ghost: a different fan every week as its legend of the week, instead of its biggest named creators. From PricePlow, June 2020.
  • What the Zoom is: IM8 says people on its 90-day subscription get exclusive access to its scientific advisors and performance coaches, like a quarterly group Zoom with Dr.
  • Dom D'Agostino and access to Bobby Rich, David Beckham's trainer.
  • From Foundr, April 2026.
  • IM8 gives it to its subscribers; you can give the same access to your top tier.
  • From Foundr, April 2026.
  • Nutrafol: passing its Academy earns a creator an accreditation badge to show their audience. From Nutrafol's own Academy page, April 2026.
  • Ketone-IQ: its own Team page names Mitchell Hooper, Truett Hanes and Ryan Collins as partner athletes. From Ketone-IQ's Team page.

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2.5 · Keep the biggest rewards scarce, let trips grow

• Keep the top prizes for a few, and let trips grow as the group does.
  • NeuroGum: only 10 top creators go on a trip, prizes like a Rolex, and only 3 were on billboards in Miami or Times Square. From Open Residency, June 2025.
  • Revolve: its trips ran from five or six people to a month in the Hamptons with about 70 influencers, 12 a weekend. From Lewis Howes, 2018.
  • Its Coachella trip started in 2010 with two influencer friends renting a house together, and grew to close to 500 influencers.
  • From Lewis Howes, 2018, 25:09.

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What they pay and the terms

• Pay them on every sale: In 2019 Seed offered its vetted ambassadors a 15% base commission, and all of the profit on their sales if they belonged to no bigger network. Glossy, July 2019
  • Amazon pays influencers a commission on every sale their pick brings in, with Amazon Games titles earning the most at 20%. CNBC, June 2022
• Give them reasons to stay: In 2023 Lululemon's Creator Network asked for at least 3,000 followers on one channel, and gave creators commission, early access to new products and events. WWD, June 2023
  • Glossier started paying its most engaged customers a sales commission, and brought them into special events. Quartz, November 2016

1. A system must be created where people are truly incentivized to create good content, otherwise they will just hover around.

   “ And what we realize that a lot of these companies start to do is like because they're so desperate to try to get these creators, they would be doing sampling like here and there and then realize that most people are just there to get free stuff. You know, you could very easily run a very unprofitable Tik Tok business by just giving samples away to a million creators. So, unless you create a system where people are truly incentivized to create good content for you, most people are just going to be hovering around. And and that's like with anything in life, right? Like, if you're not incentivized to do great things in life, why would you even do it? ”

2. The lead gen product on TikTok can be used to drive communication through creators to the rest of the portfolio.

   “ What are the products that we want to push forward because we know that we're going to get incremental profitability on it versus the ones that we know aren't going to ever make profitability on Tik Tok. We just completely killed them. I think all these brands are trying to push everything they can on Tik Tok. Use Tik Tok as like an Amazon style marketplace. And that's not the case anymore. You need to be very specific about what products are going to work, what products are going to be the rotisserie chicken at Costco, you know, the lead gen product. So you could then drive communication through your creators, through everything else to uh the rest of your portfolio. ”

3. Clicking into a live on TikTok places you within that company's retargeting algorithm, increasing your visibility on their feed.

   “ We decided not to cut out lives at all and instead we like doubled down on it and we even built a studio here in Las Vegas to do all of our lives and we're trying to go longer. Lives are the most authentic way that you could interact with a consumer because it's not cutting, it's not editing, it is you in the moment. People are chatting with you and it's you being able to talk to them directly. And also on Tik Tok, if you click into a live, this is more of a technical thing, but if you are doing a live and someone clicks into it, you are now part of that company's retargeting algorithm. So you will start showing up way more on that person's feed if they decide to click into your live. So concurrent viewers become really, really okay. Important. ”

Step 2 · Where it goes wrong

• Creators stay only if they make money: Kent says so on Mina Elias, and so does NeuroGum's chief commercial officer on the DTC Podcast.
  • Cineshree Media: free samples without rewards attract freebie seekers and can sink a TikTok business. From Cineshree Media, April 2026.

Step 3: Keep the community active

3.1 · Have dedicated community managers

• Put named people from your own team inside the creator room.
  • NeuroGum: its head of growth and its brand manager are in the creator Discord, talking to creators there. From Open Residency, June 2025.
  • 1st Phorm: roughly 10,000 reps alongside almost 400 headquarters employees. From Joshua Schall, June 2022.
  • Spacegoods: 1,000+ active partnerships run by a part-time team of two, every code tracked through Shopify (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
  • Bloom splits its TikTok Shop team 3 ways: acquisition, retention and operations. Retention gets a team of its own. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, September 2026.
  • Nutrafol: in a job post, one hire owns sourcing, negotiation, contracts, creative approval and reporting, and tracks results daily, weekly and monthly. From Nutrafol's job post on Built In.

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He keeps Super Room because they are influencer experts he does not have, even though he could build the function himself.

““ There's a difference between who's producing and who's who's strategizing. And I think yeah, more of the strategy in-house the the agency is temporarily. I think the one that will definitely be, you know, Super Room just cuz they're like influencer experts and like I think they they give us a ton that we don't, you know, have and we could build it, but you know, it's currently working very well. But I think on the other side, yeah, our our two not to get into it too much, but like our two like real real big rock things are like having a we'll call it like a Discord, whatever it is, like a community of creators that that you just have a deal with. ””

3.2 · Make sure the brief is very simple, because the longer it is, the higher the chance they won't pay attention to the parts that you want.

• Give creators one page of product facts, then let them make it their own.
  • Bloom: one page of product information, key differentiators, highlights and benefits. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, July 2026.
  • NeuroGum: brand guidelines, hook ideas and product benefits, then creators run wild and free with it. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.

The brief and the content

1. In the early days, the focus was on what hooks worked, being in the trenches together, and making content daily as a New Year's resolution.

   “ So, walk me through like especially in those early days where you just started working with other content creators. Like you did this from like a pretty early stage, right? Yeah, pretty early stage, you know, it all started with like what hooks work for us, like let's be in the trenches together. Let's make content every single day as our New Year's resolution. ”

2. Sharing hooks with content creators and seeing what works and what doesn't is crucial.

   “ Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And seeing what works and what doesn't. Like even the orientation, I would show up on Zoom calls with them once a quarter and, you know, talk to our top creators. If there's no personal relationship that you're building or or even like a personal brand relationship you're building, these creators are just going to say whatever they want, right? Of course, because you're not guiding them. And in the same way, if you're not having that open dialogue, they're not going to come back to you and communicate with you on what's working, what's not, I'm getting this violation for this, I'm getting. ”

3. Without a personal relationship, creators may say whatever they want because they are not being guided.

   “ And seeing what works and what doesn't. Like even the orientation, I would show up on Zoom calls with them once a quarter and, you know, talk to our top creators. If there's no personal relationship that you're building or or even like a personal brand relationship you're building, these creators are just going to say whatever they want, right? Of course, because you're not guiding them. And in the same way, if you're not having that open dialogue, they're not going to come back to you and communicate with you on what's working, what's not, I'm getting this violation for this, I'm getting. And I think the key word here is relationship. ”

They are building a TikTok and IG trend dashboard with an agency so retained creators can see what is popping and go make five videos.

““ I would rather give them strategy up front, give them like like let's do the research, give them strategy, and they're coached, they know what makes a good ad, they know what makes a good post, like they know about the brand, and then they just create, and then it's just like every week they're just boom, here's five assets, here's whatever it is. Um that's the goal. So we're working with an agency right now to build out like an organic TikTok and IG real like trend dashboard, so we can just see what's trending in you know, our space relative to other stuff, and they can literally just see that, and they're on retainer, and they can just be like, all right, cool, redness is popping off, here are the top five organic videos in redness. I'm going to go make five, and we'll just get them uploaded that week. ””

3.3 · Ensure that not only the community managers but also high-level C-suite founders get access to meet the creators, and meet them often.

• Meet your creators on a fixed day, whether weekly or quarterly.
  • Bloom: 2 calls a week with its creator community to go over top videos, give feedback and run FAQs. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, July 2026.
  • NeuroGum: the CEO meets creators on Zoom about once a quarter to pass on the company's culture. From Open Residency, June 2025.
  • Ghost: fans spend 10 minutes a week with the brand on its YouTube channel, plus Warzone Wednesdays. From PricePlow, December 2020.
  • How Bloom keeps it personal: the team knew creators' birthdays and sent gifts on Mother's Day.
  • From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.

3.4 · Now, for the creators that are growing, make sure that they level up and have perks. Don't focus on the size; focus on growth, not only in how they are promoting your brand, but also in their own growth.

• Move your most promising creators into a smaller group that is harder to join.
  • goPure: a creator posting 5 videos a month who shows promise goes into a Discord or Slack chat, with incentives to get to 20. From goPure on Instant's podcast.
  • Sephora: Sephora Squad is a paid year-long cohort you apply to, with 30,000 applications in 2021, running 8 years. From the Sephora Squad page.

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3.5 · A lot of the time, once you start building intimacy, and if the community actually has the right channels and it's actually interesting, then you'll be in a position where you can start collaborating with creators on product launches and events.

• Your creators can tell you what to make next, before it launches.
  • Ulta Beauty: creators in the Ulta Beauty Collective feed insight back, "almost like a kind of a mini advisory panel". From CreatorIQ, March 2021.
  • Califia Farms: it works with its ambassadors every month, gets their feedback on all its products, and sends products before they hit the market. From 33voices, August 2016.
  • Hexclad: its Cooking with Hexclad Facebook group gets early access, so its best customers' reviews are on the product page at launch. From Marketing Operators, May 2024.
  • Mutant Nation: at the Olympia, Mutant asked Mutant Nation what formulas it wanted, and a couple of formulas came from its asks. From Bodybuilding Today, May 2016.

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city by city domination

• Invite creators who can come: Beyond Yoga opened a pop-up in New York's Flatiron District and had movement classes led by local favorites Ali Brunson, Jada Covington and DanceBody founder Katia Pryce. WWD, September 2026
• Build the room so it films: Tatcha built its first pop-up's meditation room, wishing tree and on-site haikus, invited influencers to create content there, and saw over 9 million social media impressions. Glossy, March 2023
• Test the city with a pop-up: In October 2024 Rhode opened its first London pop-up for just four days, and TikTok videos posted from it that day reached millions of views. Refinery29, October 2024
• Skims opened its first European pop-up at Selfridges London, while planning its own UK and EU stores within 3 years. Retail Bulletin, June 2023
• Get sign ups before opening: A year later, before its Sephora UK opening, Rhode said it had the most customer sign ups of any brand launch at Sephora UK. WWD, October 2025
• Host local creators on launch day: On launch day Hailey Bieber hosted British influencers and beauty editors at a London dinner, with guests like Jessica Diner and Rochelle Humes. Desiree Design, November 2025

Step 3 · Where it goes wrong

• Without a personal relationship, creators may say whatever they want because they are not being guided.

Step 4: Now, from there, this is the most important part, and it's to actually take all that goodwill and now turn it into posts, deals and ad rights

• Once this step is done, you get a steady flow of posts, countable sales, and videos to run as ads.

4.1 · Sample big at launch, then 20 to 30%

• Sample big once at launch, then keep it to 20 to 30%.
  • Bloom: one big push at launch, then 20 to 30% of launch volume, with the community and retention tools in place. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, May 2026.
  • Bloom: it scales back up only when baseline video volume drops and every re-engagement effort has failed. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, May 2026.

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4.2 · Pay more once they post, reward posting too

• Our entire goal is to make influencers love your brand so much they're posting without even paying. And sure, you might have to pay a retainer. You might have to pay some lower fees, but all in all, it shouldn't have to be like, "I pay you $20,000 every time I want to make one 30-second integration."
  • The standard way of influencer marketing is I pay $10,000 per video.

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• Reward the posting itself, with a climbing commission, points or more product.
  • Olipop: seeded product, then a commission that climbs, across 1,400 codes (vendor's own numbers). From impact.com's Olipop write-up.
  • Clean Skin Club: ambassadors earn points for posting about the brand or making a product video, not only for sharing a code. From Tam Talk's, May 2020.
  • SOS: another bottle of SOS for a before-and-after photo it can share with its community. From Behind Her Empire with Yasmin Nouri, August 2023.
  • Boxed Water: tag a photo of the box and it plants two trees in a national forest. From Unconquered, January 2021.

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4.3 · Great little tip, by the way, especially for UGC for Meta ads: get loads of it inside your affiliate program from very small creators who are purely getting commission. You can have a clause which just allows you to post and use it if they in fact make anything with the seeded content.

• Goli: taking a campaign reward lets Goli use the creator's videos on Meta, unless the creator asks to opt out. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.

4.4 · Count every video and every sale

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• How Grüns counts it: 1,500 tracked UGC assets 4 months after launch.
• From Archive's page on Grüns.
• Goli: a tracking link, so the same video reposted to YouTube, Instagram or Flip earns reward credit too. From Brands Meet Creators newsletter, February 2025.

4.5 · Use the community posts to now acquire larger deals. This creates the flywheel.

• Show the posts to retail buyers, and grow your best creators into bigger roles.
  • NeuroGum: celebrity partners like Andrew Schulz and Yuki Tsunoda post it is coming to Costco and Walmart, and it sends those clips to buyers. From Ryan Chen on Sweat Equity, June 2026.
  • Cake's Body: its perk group of over 200 Hype Girls became its affiliate program, and one of them now runs its customer service. From Startup to Storefront, November 2022.

Step 4 · Where it goes wrong

• Plan for the videos to become ads, or the work stops at the post.
  • Grüns: its pipeline stopped when creators published, and turning the videos into edited ads stayed slow and manual. From Archive's page on Grüns.
  • Roughly, brands would actually spend 10% of the budget on organic creator marketing, which includes the community's expenses, and then 90% towards amplifying it through paid ads.

Nutrafol trains every partner before they post

Nutrafol Academy is a creator and influencer accreditation programme led by Nutrafol's Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Heather Woolery-Lloyd. Participants earn an accreditation badge, and all partners are required to complete the courses. [1]

Nutrafol’s own Academy says all brand partners must complete its courses, while a hiring brief describes an always-on programme designed to scale Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators who bring in sales against acquisition, ROAS and CPA. [1] [3] This is an uncommon pairing in wellness: compliance and scientific fluency on one side; performance optimisation and creator-volume management on the other.

The 2024 More to Hair campaign demonstrates the same system without a named creator at its centre. It used short films on YouTube, television, Instagram and TikTok to surface unexpected hair-health triggers.

How IM8 runs its creator community

IM8 gets creators into a room, gives them something to post, and brings its product into rooms other people already fill.

The groups IM8 runs

• IM8 picked its first 12 affiliates by hand. One of them did a 30-day social media challenge and went to her first few IM8 events in New York, and other creators tag #IM8Challenge.
• New ambassadors get a welcome box. It holds product, and in one case an IM8 sweater, and they post the unboxing with their own code and #IM8Ambassador.
• The IM8 Strava club had 4,155 members on 12 September 2026. Almost 200,000 people joined its challenge with Inter Miami CF, where moving 120 minutes earned a one-time $50 code.
• Creators who do not want to sell can make videos instead. IM8 sends free product, they make 2 videos within 14 days, and the ones whose videos do well over a 30-day test are invited into its Creator Directory for paid work.

Sources: a founding affiliate's post, an ambassador's unboxing, the IM8 Strava club, IM8's UGC creator page.

The events IM8 ran or backed

• A launch day in New York, 14 January 2025. David Beckham, Deepak Chopra and IM8's science advisers in front of press, with Chopra leading a meditation.
• IM8 Vibrante in Miami, April 2025. An evening of talks with David Beckham at the Faena Theater for about 150 creators, experts and press.
• Power Sessions with PURE Group in Hong Kong, January and February 2026. Trial classes in yoga, Pilates, FUZE and dance, each with an IM8 smoothie from the gym group's own cafe, nood food. A coach's post shows the classes still running in late August.
• A panel at the ELEVATE Wellness Summit in London, June 2026. Billed as powered by IM8, with its ambassador Tina Lond-Caulk speaking and product in the VIP gift bags.
• The Champion's Mile in London, 30 June 2026. A mile run hosted by Ironman world champion Lucy Charles-Barclay and Rose Harvey, booked through the Strava club.
• A creator afternoon at Flyfish Club in New York, 26 August 2026. A talk on sleep, supplements and longevity, and a gift box to take home.
• A drinks station at Lore Bathing Club in New York, 29 August 2026. IM8 served drinks from 12pm to 3pm during sauna sessions.
• A morning at NÔMADE Temple in Ibiza, late August 2026. Yoga, sound healing and an ice bath, with an IM8 welcome pack.
• Gift bags at talk evenings. IM8 product went into the bags at the Lipedema Summit, Lessons in Longevity in Windsor and The Longevity Series.

Sources: the US launch release, the Vibrante release, PURE Yoga, the FUZE coach, ELEVATE, the Strava club, Flyfish Club, Lore Bathing Club, NÔMADE Temple, Lipedema Summit, Lessons in Longevity, The Longevity Series.

Most of these cost IM8 one small thing, a smoothie, a drinks station or a gift bag, in a room somebody else already filled.

Other brands doing the same

• Celsius at SoulCycle. 20 branded rides as SoulCycle's energy drink partner.
• LYMA at SoulCycle's The Barn. A Wellness Weekend with a branded bar and gifts on the bikes for 1,500 riders.
• Lemme at solidcore. A studio takeover for its creatine gummy launch.
• Whoop at Diplo's Run Club. 5K runs with a Diplo set after, at the New York and Miami stops.
• Puresport with Represent 247. A 500+ person run club to launch a joint clothing range.
• AG1 in Asia. A marathon sponsorship, run club events and an expo, with 10,000 samples, by its agency's own count.
• Athletic Brewing at Boulderthon. A free can for every runner at the after-party.
• Nuun at Orangetheory. The preferred hydration partner in the studios, rather than one event.

Sources: Athletech News, The Industry Beauty, WWD, Whoop, Represent, Mongoose's write-up, Boulderthon, PR Newswire.

How many people you reach

How many people you reach, by what you do

One video from the biggest running creator reaches more people than 10 run clubs posting about you.

The biggest running creator hydration brands have paid is Michelle Khare. This is the Liquid I.V. read:

Each answer is the number of people who actually see it. From 5 times on it is a range, because the same person can see it in two places.

Pay a running creator for one video

People who see it = views of one video. Hardly anybody watches the same sponsored video twice.

LMNT paid Makari Espe and Isaiah Photo, numbers 4 and 5 on the list:

The 10 biggest running creators hydration brands have paid

Get a run club to post about you

People who see it = the club's Instagram followers x the share who see one post, 4.7% to 7.55%.

Propel already works with run clubs. 6 of the 42 clubs and races we found call themselves Propel partners on Instagram, and 4 of them are among the 10 biggest: Atlanta Run Club, Koreatown Run Club, Ampersand Running Club and Built2Last Run Club.

Koreatown Run Club's Propel Hydration Hub, and Atlanta Run Club's relay with Propel:

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Built2Last Run Club's Propel sponsor poster, and Ampersand Running Club's free Propel 5K:

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The 10 biggest run clubs and races

Post in an online community that lets you

People who see it = members x the share who see one post, 10% to 47.81%.

Startup CPG's members are brand founders and marketers, not runners.

7 more online rooms let you post but publish no size, so they cannot be counted.

Exhibit at a trade show

People who see it = people attending x the share who stop at any one stand, 10% to 33%.

Health Optimisation Summit London, the biggest show we could count, advertises itself like this:

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7 more shows let you exhibit but publish no attendance, so they cannot be counted.

Counting down: from every runner in the US

Counted down from every runner in the US, one post from an average running creator reaches 250 to 1,200 people, and one from an average run club reaches 10 to 3,700.

This starts from the 23.3 million Americans who run 50 or more times a year and applies a published share at every step until it gets to one place.

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Both ways, side by side

1. The communities

What else the search found

• No room exists where health creators talk to each other about brand deals. We looked on Skool, Discord, Facebook and Reddit, and a second search from the other direction agreed.
• The audience is on Reddit and nearly nowhere else. r/Biohackers has 899,785 members. The biggest server under Discord's whole biohacking tag has 1,068.
• Three famous paid communities are really more to read. Members of Huberman Lab Premium, Peter Attia's premium tier and the base tier of FoundMyFitness cannot reach each other.

Every room, by kind

2. The run clubs

Run clubs are real, but each one is small.

The biggest club has 65,662 followers, and only 8 of the 42 clubs and races we found have more than 10,000.

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3. The creators

Hydration brands pay for reach, not runners.

The hydration brands on our shelf have paid 897 creators, who get 385 million views a month between them. 45 of those creators run, and they get 1.2% of those views. The biggest creator we know runs, Michelle Khare, is number 73 on the list.

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What that looks like: LMNT on Cleetus McFarland, number 1 on the list, and Liquid I.V. on Kill Tony, number 3. Neither one runs.

4. How much of the audience you could reach

All the creators they pay: 16.5 views a month per core runner. The ones who run: 0.2.

A core runner runs 50 or more times a year, and there are 23.3 million of them in the US. Share out the monthly views of every creator the hydration brands pay and each core runner would see 16.5, if every view landed on a runner. Share out only the running creators' views and it is 0.2.

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5. How many people are runners

10.3 to 18.2 million core US runners would use electrolytes.

52.3 million Americans ran on a road in 2025, and 23.3 million of them run 50 or more times a year. Between 44% and 78% of Americans drink sports drinks regularly, depending on their age, so that range is applied to the core runners.

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How to build a creator Discord community, step by step

Step 1: Put one team on it

• Do: name who recruits creators and who runs the room, in-house.
• Ex. Bloom: a scouting intern finds creators, a relationship manager takes each one over, a director runs it. 15 to 25 people, never an agency.
• Done when: one person owns the Discord and one owns recruiting.
• Watch out: an agency holds the relationship, not you. Bloom has never used one.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 2: Set the bar to get in

• Do: write down who gets a sample and who gets into the Discord. Getting in is earned.
• Done when: the bar is one line anyone on the team can apply.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 3: Write the offer before you invite anyone

• Do: a commission first, a reward ladder on top, and one top prize kept rare.
• Ex. NeuroGum: only 10 creators go on the trip to Florida, a few get a Rolex.
• Done when: the rates, the ladder and the prize are on one page.
• Watch out: creators stay only if they make money. A perk sits on top of the commission, never in place of it.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 4: Gift creators before you open it

• Do: gift on a fixed weekly number, with nothing asked, and watch who posts.
• Ex. Grüns: 500 TikTok and Instagram creators and 150 YouTubers a week, in about 2 hours.
• Ex. goPure: seeds product to affiliates who sign up, and gives them about two weeks to post.
• Done when: the first creators have cleared the bar from step 2.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 5: Open the Discord and onboard

• Do: make the Discord the place the rewards live, and train everyone who gets in.
• Ex. Goli & Force Factor: being in their Discord is a condition of the reward.
• Ex. NeuroGum: every creator sits a recorded three-hour orientation, a video plus a Notion doc, and they track who finished.
• Ex. Nutrafol: all partners have to complete Nutrafol Academy.
• Done when: every member has done the onboarding and knows their tier.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 6: Run it every week

• Do: put your own people in the room and meet on a fixed schedule.
• Ex. Bloom: two calls a week on the top videos, real time feedback and FAQs. Briefs are one page.
• Ex. NeuroGum: the head of growth and the brand manager are in the Discord. The CEO does a Zoom with creators once a quarter.
• Ex. goPure: rising creators go into a smaller chat, to take them from 5 videos a month to 20.
• Done when: the calls are on the calendar and someone answers in the room every day.
• Watch out: retention is the one most brands underrate (Bloom). A room nobody runs goes quiet.

More: the full step in the long version

Step 7: Turn it into posts, sales & ads

• Do: tie the rewards to posting, take the ad rights with the reward, then cut sampling.
• Ex. Goli: taking a reward gives Goli the right to run the video on Meta.
• Ex. Bloom: one big sampling push at launch, then 20-30% of launch volume. Back up only when video volume drops and re-engaging has failed.
• Done when: posts arrive without a new fee and the winners run as ads.

More: the full step in the long version

Keep in mind: Gymshark still gets 60% plus of new customers from paid ads. The community makes the posts cheaper, it does not replace the ad budget.

Where it breaks: the full list in the long version.

Your end-to-end playbook on an influencer community

The short, start to finish version of this playbook is its own post.

Part of the TikTok Shop affiliate playbook.