Creator marketing that scales like paid ads
TL;DR: We run creator marketing end-to-end so companies can test and scale the channel without needing to hire.
Marketers do not need to be convinced that distribution matters.
The harder question is whether a channel can become repeatable before it consumes the whole team.
Creator marketing is one of those channels. It oftentimes performs 3-5x better than traditional digital ads. When it works, it can drive real awareness, clicks, and signups from audiences that are hard to reach through paid ads. But running it well still tends to mean spreadsheets, inboxes, rate negotiations, contracts, draft reviews, tracking links, payment follow-up, and a lot of manual judgment.
That is what we built Beluga to fix.
Why this problem got under our skin
One of the largest spenders in creator marketing made the labor problem concrete for us. They are spending in the high six figures each month, and told us they employ 30+ people to run their creator partnerships. Even then, each rep can only manage around 18 creators.
They also told us that if they had $2M ready to put into the channel tomorrow, they wouldn’t be able to do it. They would need to hire even more people.
That is a wild ceiling for a marketing channel that should scale with spend.
We got pulled into this from both sides.
Fernando saw the brand side up close at Dare Drop, helping gaming publishers run creator campaigns. The demand was real, but the operating model still looked like a traditional agency: lots of coordination, lots of manual work, and a hard ceiling on how much the team could scale.
We also spent time on the creator side while trying to build a Rippling for the self-employed. Working with creators on taxes showed us the other half of the problem: even when a brand deal is a good fit, the process around it is painful. Creators have to find deals that match their audience and content style, align expectations with the brand, actually run the campaign, and then hope they get paid on time.
We kept seeing the same thing from both sides: brands wanted creator marketing to work, creators wanted better deals and less chaos, and everyone was somehow stuck in spreadsheets, email threads, and manual follow-up.
What Beluga does
The problem is not that creator marketing is mysterious. It works when you find the right creators, give them enough room to make authentic content, track the results properly, and run enough shots on goal.
The hard part is doing all of that consistently without making it a headcount problem.
Beluga is our attempt to make creator marketing feel more like running a paid acquisition channel: set the target, set the budget, see what is happening, and double down on what works.
We run campaigns ed-to-end, including:
- Creator sourcing and vetting
- Pricing and negotiation
- Contracting
- Deliverable management
- Creator payments
- Performance tracking
- Post-campaign analysis
The goal is that a founder or growth team can test creator marketing without building the internal machine. If the results are there, we help them scale the channel without turning it into a hiring plan.
Since starting in March, we have generated over 3M views for clients ranging from YC companies to Series F hyperscalers, and saved over $100k in negotiations.
Beluga helped take Freebuff, Codebuff's free coding agent, from roughly 50 to 1,200 daily active users at peak.
For another Series F company, we drove 3,500+ signups in two weeks.
Who Beluga is for
We are most useful when you already believe creator marketing could fit your market, but you do not want the channel to require a whole internal team before it can scale.
Our bet is that the traditional operating model is the problem: most of the sourcing, negotiation, coordination, payments, and reporting should not require dedicated headcount inside every company.
That also changes what is possible. When the work gets cheaper and easier to coordinate, you can test more creators, go after smaller but better-matched channels, and deploy more capital without being bottlenecked by how many deals an internal team can manually manage.
The signal we look for is simple: can we name a real content audience where your users spend time?
"Developers who watch AI coding tool reviews on YouTube" is a clean audience shape. So is a consumer category with obvious creator communities. A niche B2B buyer can still work, but if the buyer is hard to describe in creator and audience terms, or the product only moves through a long enterprise committee, the test usually has less conversion signal.
The other important thing is seriousness about the experiment. Creator marketing is not one magic post. It takes enough well-matched attempts to learn which creators, formats, and messages work. If distribution is a real priority and you want to test the channel properly, that is the conversation we are best suited for.
Why us
The reason we think we can make this work is that we have lived the messy parts.
Fernando ran millions in ad spend at Meta and then sold creator campaigns at Dare Drop. Zan, our Head of Account Management, led outreach across tens of thousands of creators and is a content creator himself. @Jack Swisher spent years building AI systems at Bubble and now works on building the infrastructure needed to make our vision a reality.
Between us, we have seen the agency side, the creator side, the paid acquisition side, and the automation side.
Our mission is simple: make creator marketing as measurable and easy to run as paid ads.
The ask
If creator marketing is on your roadmap and you do not want the channel to become an internal ops burden, we would love to chat.
And if you know another founder or growth lead who already believes distribution matters and is thinking about creator marketing this year, an intro would be hugely helpful.
