According to West Monroe, the average US consumer spends $273/month on subscription services in 2021. If we look at the most common spend per month on the chart below, we get $10. Now divide 273 by 10, and you get a total of around 25–30 subscriptions.

The average person subscribes to anywhere between 20–30 subscription services per year. And this is just on the consumer side. Think of your work, how many services is your startup/company subscribed to? You will probably also fall anywhere between 20–30 different services.

If we extrapolate this, we could say there is a market for 100 service providers.

Now, how many software as a service providers (SaaS) are there?

According to Statista, the US alone has over 15,000 SaaS companies. If we take the top 10 countries, we get over 30,000 different SaaS companies.

The ratio is 100:30,000. For every 1 service in demand, there are over 300 services in supply.

This is why distribution has become so important in the last few years.

Great products no longer win on their own — great marketing does.

Part 2: Distribution is Key

Now think of the following scenario:

On one side, you have a PhD in nutrition who has spent the last three years studying how to make the healthiest energy drink. She has looked into every ingredient and has come up with a drink that not only tastes good but has amazing health benefits.

On the other side, you have an influencer who has no idea about energy drinks, but instead has one million followers.

If you were to give both five hundred thousand dollars to build a company, who do you think would succeed?

In the best case scenario, the influencer starts a brand and partners with or hires the PhD to come up with the recipe — giving the influencer a competitive advantage.

This is the world we live in today, where many great products and services never make the light of day simply because they don’t have distribution.

Part 3: Our first sponsored TikTok

As part of our journey at Citationsy (the world’s favourite reference management tool), we have seen first-hand how competitors with inferior products often survive in the market simply because they have better distribution.

When we started Citationsy back in 2018, users came to our service because we were a better alternative compared to the 20 other tools offering a similar service. As we continued to grow, we saw the importance of focusing on distribution, sometimes even over product. Of course product is important, but if you have distribution, you can incrementally improve your product while making money. Whereas if you have a great product but no distribution, no matter how good the product is, users won’t come and discover it on their own.

Last year, we realised TikTok was starting to dominate our marketing conversations. As you may already know, TikTok officially surpassed Google as the most visited website in 2021.

How hard could it be to run a little experiment to see if marketing on TikTok could actually boost growth? We had already tried Instagram, Google Ads, Facebook, Quora Ads, and nothing had worked well enough to continue investing in it. It makes sense — , who wants to see an ad for a referencing manager while scrolling on Instagram?

We started exploring TikTok and found that its algorithm works very well for finding your target audience. And if your content is sticky, your content will get pushed to a wider audience in the same demographic or niche.

By manually searching for people on TikTok, we found a group of users who had discovered this and had capitalized on it. They were posting videos (most of them on a daily basis) and their following was increasing from 10k to 30k to 50k to 100k in a matter of days or weeks. While some of their videos were going “viral”, others weren’t, but as they kept posting, they were also learning more about what worked and what didn’t.

After manually searching for several hours, we came up with a list of 30 TikTok influencers who could be good to promote with. They were posting on topics related to #studenthacks #studenttips #onlinehacks, and so on.

We sent emails to all of them and most of them got back to us. Some of them wanted high rates (especially the ones already working at agencies) such as $1,500–3,000 for one video, where their videos were averaging 100–200k views.

Out of all the people we reached out to, the influencers that were at the beginning of their journey were the most open to collaborating. They wanted good content in exchange for promoting us, and they didn’t charge as much as the more established creators.

One of the conversations we had was with Konstantinos from @SimplyDigital who now has 1,9M followers. At the time he had 150,000 followers and his videos were averaging anywhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 views. After agreeing to give him good content to share, he agreed to post a video about Citationsy for $340.

The video got 2,7 million views.

Citationsy got 32,000 additional website visitors over two weeks.

Out of those visitors, 116 converted to trial and 82 started paying.

At an average life-time-value (LTV) of $45, we got an estimated $3700 additional revenue.

Total Cost: $340

Additional Revenue: $3700

Today the video where we were featured in has over 3,2M views.

Part 4: The tool we built to make this process 100x faster (and how you can get access to it)

The trickiest part of finding good influencers to work with is a) getting their contact info and b) seeing their statistics to have a better understanding of their audience and engagement.

Having a good understanding of their channel will make you a better negotiator when trying to agree on a price.

It’s very easy to throw money down the drain when you don’t spend time looking into the creators and influencers you want to work with.

You can of course hire agencies, however, they usually charge fairly high rates, making it harder to get a good bang for the buck. For example, influencer marketing platforms Upfluence, Klear, and Tagger Media don’t show their pricing, you need to request a demo first. That’s when you know they are expensive! We actually spoke to all of them, and they charge between $500–4000/month for access to their database.

This is why after spending over a hundred hours of manual work carrying out our own influencer due diligence, we decided to automate the process and create a tool that not only helps us find their emails but also gives us useful stats, such as their most popular video, their share count, and so on.

Through the scripts we developed, we can automatically fetch the following information:

• Username
• Bio
• Email Address / other contact info
• Profile picture
• Status
• Video count
• View count
• Top videos data: Digg count, Share count, Comment count, Play count, URL, Song information

Here’s an example of a list we made: #Trending

If you’d like to get your own list for free, just go here: TikTok Influencer Finder

This is how it works:

1. Enter a hashtag that fits you market niche and send us a request
2. Using our tool we automatically collect emails and key stats, and send the list to you
3. Find the top influencers and connect with them, so you can get the best deal when promoting your brand

Try out the TikTok Influencer Finder here

And if you don’t want to reach out to creators and would rather post a listing and have influencers come to you, you can do that through Tiny Island too.

Bibliography

Nover, S. (2021). TikTok Overtook Google As The Most Popular Website In The World. Quartz. https://qz.com/2105400/tiktok-overtook-google-as-the-most-popular-website-in-2021/

Statista. (2021). Leading SaaS Countries Worldwide 2021 | Statista. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1239046/top-saas-countries-list/

West Monroe. (2021). The State Of Subscription Services Spending | West Monroe. https://www.westmonroe.com/perspectives/report/the-state-of-subscription-services-spending

Short-link: https://citat.io/tinyisland