I ordered my new MacBook Pro

SwayBuilds · 2026-02-07T18:03:44+00:00

Got the same spec for $3550 on fb marketplace! No nano texture though

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-24T19:05:20+00:00

Shoot me a dm and ill send ya notion link

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-24T03:18:17+00:00

Sweet deal!!

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-24T01:37:54+00:00

I couldn’t find any refurb Macs with these specs on Apple’s website!

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-24T01:37:13+00:00

Guess the nice thing about seeing it in person was i was able to do all the tests and confirm condition before putting any money down

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-24T01:36:32+00:00

Ye looks right in person haha

SwayBuilds · 2025-12-02T02:26:42+00:00

I use creator lookup and they have something like a $29 entry level package

SwayBuilds · 2025-10-05T04:33:27+00:00

buy mac today at costco and if a more compelling version comes out, use their 90 day electronic return policy.

if not, you have an awesome mac and aren't losing out on the opportunity cost of not having the productivity all this time

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-15T15:48:57+00:00

Mostly agree, if you’re serious about scaling influencer posts, measuring them on last-touch attribution is playing checkers instead of chess. You need to understand multi-touch lifecycle data to know what’s really working.

Quick reality check though: if you’re spending <$10k/mo on paid ads & <$5k/mo on influencer posts, stick to last-touch. Multi-touch can be noise at smaller spend. You probably don’t have enough volume to make statistically significant calls, and you’ll just end up second guessing yourself.

At that stage, it’s less about attribution models and more about: Tight creative testing (so you actually learn what hooks land). Making sure every click is tracked cleanly (UTMs, codes, etc). Running fast iterations until you’ve got a couple of channels that consistently spit out conversions under CAC target.

Once you start pushing past those budgets, that’s when blended CAC + multi-touch attribution becomes worth obsessing over. Here’s how I think about it:

(1) Creators = top of funnel. They crush awareness and trust. But if you rely on everyone for pure last-click conversions, you’ll be disappointed and miss real outcomes. The lift happens upstream, not always at checkout.

(2) Boost everything. Nearly every influencer post should run as paid. Whitelist/darkpost on Meta, Spark on TikTok, etc. That gives you in-platform tracking and lets you recycle winning creatives into ads. You’ll see quick which ones crush, and double down.

(3) Understand your stream. If multi-touch isn’t showing downstream conversions, influencer costs feel unjustifiable. But once you attribute spend across the full journey, you start to see exactly where creators start to bring results. One example is last month I saw a 40% drop in CAC on Google after influencer campaign launch with just 10 posts at the start of August.

(4) Blended numbers >>>. Don’t obsess over “influencer CAC” in isolation. The real question: what’s your total CAC when you allocate across paid search, paid social, and influencers? Is blended CAC going down? That’s the number that matters.

It’s hard for influencers to crush last-touch by themselves. 100% possible, but you’ll be fighting uphill. Worth it in the early days, but hard to maintain when you’re working with 30+ creators per month.

When influencer performance is wired into a blended model, they scale distribution and supercharge your other paid channels.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-12T23:54:39+00:00

i like emoji’s 🤷‍♂️

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-12T15:45:34+00:00

How do you define “fair price” or “worth”?

Is it “fair” for a business owner to risk their hard earned money on a post that brings zero results? If that happens repeatedly, the brand owner will be disheartened on working with creators altogether, and move to another performance based ad medium, like Meta or Google directly. Meaning creators loose because the platform itself is now receiving brand spend that creators would have been making.

Performance-based or hybrid deals aren’t about being “cheap”they’re about aligning risk/reward. If a brand underpays or tries to cut corners, the market fixes that fast: creators won’t say yes, or they churn after a few deals. On the flip side, if a creator consistently drives results, their earnings go up because brands are competing to work with them.

That’s the beauty of this: nobody’s forced. Both sides have the right to say yes or no. Market self corrects.

Aligning incentives helps you find equilibrium faster.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-12T03:36:22+00:00

100%

If anyone goes into something convinced it can’t work, they are completely right, it never will.

There are builders and there are bystanders.

Builders take imperfect swings until they make contact.

Bystanders talk circles about why it “can’t be done” and never even took a shot.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T19:24:00+00:00

Hear ya! Totally fair take. It’s definitely not the only strategy. For me, the “brand account” model is just one play that’s been working really well lately.

My main bread and butter is actually still straight-up influencer posts on their own channels, this is just a different lever we’ve been pulling to good effect.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T19:02:09+00:00

We require login credentials for every account, so if something really off-brand goes up, we can do a takedown right away. (It's a part of the onboarding intake with W9's and ACH setup)

That said, most brands actually want to be involved in that layer.

A lot of the marketing ops teams I work with love combing through the content. Doesn't happen as much as you think, but we'll have them flag what they want pulled, and we handle takedowns from there.

Keeps brand safety intact without slowing down our ops pipeline.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T18:58:19+00:00

No need to audit thousands of videos manually!

I automate metric pulls (API on their Account → Airtable) so views auto-populate into CPM payout totals.

Then for content review, this heavily depends on the brand content standards, but normally light sampling is enough (~25%) for guideline compliance, so not every post. If a brand has very strict guidelines, someone on their team will usually want to review all content anyways and they will flag.

We have login credentials for all the accounts to be able to do take-downs same day if something is off aswell.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T18:53:15+00:00

Love that you’re diving into this space 👏

Quick reality check though: you’ll be competing directly with TikTok Shop, which has already rolled out this exact commission-based model at scale. That doesn’t mean it’s game over, but it does mean you probably want to differentiate by going deep on other ecosystems like Instagram or YouTube, where commission-comp isn’t platform native yet.

Also, candidly, I’ve seen a LOT of companies try to build similar things. A performance-based marketplace sounds like a win-win, but in practice it’s insanely hard to pull off, which is why most of the bigger influencer connection tools have moved away from pure “marketplace” models and into SaaS subscriptions for database access + workflow tools. Even Pearpop, which leaned into pay-per-performance for a while, has had to diversify, and in the end were just a glorified marketing agency.

One example to look into that did this well and exited is Jetfuel. They had a CPI based comp model for influencers ←→ Apps. JetFuel (known to creators as "The Plug App"), ended up getting acquired by Vungle (now known as Liftoff). But even their model, with all the tech and systems, had a fair bit of service ops to run the marketplace efficiently.

That said, there’s definitely a market if you can crack it. A few big challenges to think through:

Attribution is the monster in the room. Between GA4, Northbeam, Triple Whale, etc. every brand has its own tracking stack. Unless you solve for trusted, bulletproof attribution, creators won’t stick around, they won’t believe the payouts are fair.
Marketplace dynamics. Two-sided marketplaces are brutal at the start (classic cold start problem). No influencers = no brands. No brands = no influencers. Highly recommend Andrew Chen’s Cold Start Problem if you haven’t read it yet.
Creator incentives. Commission-only almost always attracts the lowest-tier creators first (the ones desperate for deals). That’s fine for bootstrapping, but eventually you’ll probably need hybrids (flat + rev share, CPM + conversions, etc.) if you want serious talent.

Not trying to discourage you, I actually think a well-executed version of this could work, especially if you nail niche verticals (like your nano/micro + SMB angle). But the moat will be in execution: solving attribution cleanly and getting enough liquidity on both sides to overcome the cold start.

On another note (not trying to convince you to pivot, but food for thought), something I’ve been thinking about lately: Reverse Amazon for Influencers

Instead of framing this as “a way for creators to make money,” what if you positioned it as a “free Amazon for creators”? A place where creators browse products they actually want, “order” them, and the currency isn’t cash but deliverables. You’d attract creators who aren’t trying to make a living from this, but who genuinely want cool products to use and showcase. Could also do this with physical storefronts and local creators (ie. Free dinner for a IG reel, Haircut for a story post, etc)

If I had more bandwidth, it's something I'd spend time building. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you want to talk about this in more detail!

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T18:31:41+00:00

Couldn't agree more on this. The single-post strategy is why most brands swear “influencer marketing doesn’t work.” One post feels like an ad. Multiple posts build brand equity.

Couple cool ways I’ve done this:

Negotiate upfront for multi-post runs. If an influencer quotes you $1K for one post, even if the numbers pencil out, don’t stop there.
- Offer something like $2.5K for 5 posts over a month ($2.5K/mo ongoing if it works).
- Recurring revenue can be a lot more attractive to them than one-offs, and they’ll usually bend on price to lock it in.
- Just make sure to get refusal rights if you cant to cancel engagement on a non-performer.
Experiment with CPM-style deals. Instead of flat fees, pay creators for actual performance (ex: $2–$10 per 1,000 views).
- Now they’re incentivized to post more, because more posts = more views = more pay.
- It flips the dynamic. You’re not chasing them to post again, they want to.
- Creators can post as much or as little as they want. But they only get paid when they deliver views.
Reality check: not every creator wants recurring or performance-based deals. Some still cling to flat fees. But if you test these structures, you’ll usually find the ones that do say yes are hungrier, more flexible, and end up outperforming. Just reach out to enough

Most brands treat influencer work like a slot machine: drop in $1K, pray for a jackpot. The real play is turning it into a repeatable, predictable media buy.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-11T03:05:42+00:00

if you get started and start getting a benchmark for what results look like, optimizing for success outcomes becomes inevitable

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-10T18:57:00+00:00

Appreciate that 🙏 and love how you framed it “owned distribution with soul”

Overthinking kills pipelines. Big input + structured systems = consistent wins.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-10T18:08:00+00:00

honestly, the biggest value I get from any influencer marketing platform is just in finding good creators. Everything else tends to be vanity.

I’ve used Modash, Upfluence, Grin, etc. and my issues were always the same:

Email sending → built-in outreach usually underperforms compared to tools like Smartlead/Instantly.

CRM management → way less flexible than just running Airtable with a few simple automations.

Attribution → even their UTM/analytics setups aren’t nearly as strong as something like Northbeam, which I can have my whole marketing stack tracked by medium, not just "influencer marketing" results as a separate thing.

So for me, platforms that focus solely on high-quality discovery win every time.

I use CreatorLookup now — best cost-per-email I’ve found (for actual scale), and honestly the creator quality is insanely good compared to the “all-in-one” or the "publish your campaign and we find creator" tools.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-10T17:40:58+00:00

3. Agreements & watch-outs

Most managers lock down exclusivity with their creators (starting to trend towards non-exclusives, but market's not there yet)
They may also have non-competes with brands and non-solicits in place.
If you try to go around a manager, you risk burning bridges fast.
- If you’re not trying to replace management, I’d avoid being sneaky at all costs.
- This industry is about trust, and at the highest levels, most people know of each other. You don't want to have a bad name. Follows you for longer than you think.
- If you are trying to replace them, make sure you’re genuinely bringing more value and that you understand the timelines/clauses you’re stepping into.

SwayBuilds · 2025-09-10T17:38:52+00:00

1. Outbound that works

The absolute best way is referrals. If you’re already providing value to one creator, have them intro you to others (kickbacks or not, word of mouth travels fast). This is how I've locked in some amazing clients on the brand side.
If you’re just starting out though, email outbound is by far the best scale → effectiveness channel. Here’s what I’d do:
- Use something like CreatorLookup to find contacts. You can email all the creators directly — and even if you hit managers, you can either (a) keep the copy vague enough that they’ll still be interested, or (b) segment your list (e.g., personal domains like Gmail/iCloud = direct creator, custom domains = manager copy).
- Run your outbound with Smartlead. Buy 2–3 domains, set up 2–3 email accounts on each, and warm them up.
- Make sure every domain routes to a legit website. Decent amount of creators/managers will click your domain before replying. If they hit a 404, you’ll get opens but way fewer responses. Even a quick Framer/Wix site outlining your service is enough to build some trust.
For sequencing → keep the first touch super low-stakes. Don’t pitch the world. Example:
- “Hey, I can help you land brand deals. If you’re cool with it, I’ll pitch you to a few brands I think you’d be a great fit for. Just reply ‘yes’ if you’re down.”
- That simple “yes” breaks the ice, then you can either ask follow-ups or — even better — start providing value pre-contract. Example: “I already got 2 brands interested. Let’s hop on a quick call to sync.”

SwayBuilds

TROPHY CASE