u/Jayita_Bhandari

Curious if anyone here has started seeing signs that ChatGPT or Perplexity recommendations are influencing audience discovery. Feels like AI-assisted recommendations could quietly become another growth channel for creators, but I’m not sure whether that’s already visible in analytics for most people.I started monitoring referral patterns through Zen Reports after seeing unexpected sessions because I wanted to understand whether this trend is becoming meaningful or still tiny. Curious what others here are seeing.

Plaud handles recording and transcription well. My problem was always what comes after. I'd have a transcript, a summary, things that were discussed, and then nothing would actually happen with any of it.

Started using Invoko for the execution layer. After a meeting I say "what are the action items from this transcript" or "draft a follow-up email based on what we discussed" and it handles it. Sees my screen, reads the Plaud output, does the cross-app stuff. Free, no API key, Mac only.

The recording is the easy part. The follow-through is where most tools drop off. Curious if others are pairing Plaud with something else for the execution side.

I do growth work for a few small businesses. Influencer marketing has been performing well for them better than ads, more trust, cheaper CPM on small creator deals.

The problem is I'm eating hours on process. Sourcing takes half a day per campaign. Outreach is manual because templates get ignored. Follow-up slips when I'm juggling multiple clients. Tracking who's replied, who's negotiating, who's ghosted it's all in my head and a spreadsheet that's always out of date.

The channel works but at this volume the time cost is making it hard to keep margins healthy. How are other people running influencer programs for clients managing the ops side?

Running a small DTC brand. We've been testing nano influencers (under 10K followers) against Meta ads for the last quarter. Nano is winning on CAC by a meaningful margin and the conversion quality is better lower return rate, higher LTV on those customers.

The problem is we're basically running a manual outreach operation. One person spending 30+ hours a week on sourcing, emailing, following up, tracking. That labor cost starts to eat the CAC advantage pretty fast.

How are other DTC brands handling this at volume? Is there a point where the ops cost makes it not worth it, or does it just require dedicated headcount?

We've been testing it for six months. The CAC numbers are genuinely surprising significantly lower than what we're seeing on paid social. The content converts better too, probably because it reads like a real recommendation rather than an ad.

The problem is every part of the process sourcing, outreach, follow-up, negotiation is manual and slow. We're running maybe 15-20 active creator relationships at a time and it's already starting to feel like a part-time job for two people.

Curious if anyone has actually made this channel scale for a SaaS product and what the ops look like at higher volume.

We ran nano influencer programs for three clients over six months. The campaigns performed well. The problem was me.

I was the bottleneck. Finding creators, writing personalized outreach, following up, tracking replies, updating the client on status — I was spending 60-70% of my time on process, not strategy.

The moment that made me rethink everything: a creator replied to an outreach email three weeks after we sent it, genuinely interested. We had already filled the campaign. I found the email in a folder I hadn't checked in two weeks. That creator is now working with someone else.

After that I got serious about the ops side. Built tracking, automated follow-ups, set up a simple pipeline system. Cut the overhead significantly.

The actual work — picking the right creators, briefing them, reviewing content — that's where the value is. Everything before and after that should be as hands-off as possible.

Running our first real nano influencer program creators under 10K. Outreach going out via email. Reply rate is sitting around 5-8%.

I know personalized emails perform better than templates but personalizing 100+ emails is basically a part-time job. What's actually working for people how much do you customize each message, and is there a format that gets responses without sounding generic?