Finding the Sweet Spot: What Makes an Influencer Worth Working With

Most founders approach influencer marketing the same way: find creators with lots of followers, pay them to post about your product, and hope for the best.

Then they're surprised when a creator with 500K followers drives almost no conversions, while someone with 50K delivers incredible results.

Barak Glanz, CMO of Coddy, learned this lesson the expensive way. After working with over 20 influencers with disappointing outcomes, he had to figure out what actually predicts success. The insights he gained helped Coddy scale to $1M ARR in one year using influencer marketing as their primary growth channel.

On a recent episode of the Levels Podcast, Barak shared which metrics actually matter when evaluating influencers—and why the ones most people focus on are often misleading.

Follower Count Is Overrated

Let's start with the metric everyone defaults to: follower count. It's visible, easy to compare, and feels important. Big number means big reach, right?

Not quite.

"Number of followers is not that important. But the average number of views is very important. There is some correlation between the two, but it's not like 100%."

What Barak discovered through his CoolScript 2 algorithm was that follower count and actual reach don't align as neatly as most people assume. An influencer can have hundreds of thousands of followers but consistently get views in the low thousands. Another creator might have a smaller following but get views that represent 30-40% of their subscriber base on every video.

The difference? Engagement and algorithm favorability. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram prioritize content that resonates, regardless of the creator's total follower count. A creator the algorithm loves will consistently punch above their weight. One it doesn't favor will consistently underperform.

For B2C apps trying to maximize ROI on influencer spend, this distinction is critical. You're not paying for access to followers—you're paying for actual views and the conversions those views generate.

The Channel Size Problem: Too Small and Too Big

Even when you've moved beyond follower count to focus on average views, channel size still matters. But not in the straightforward "bigger is better" way most people think.

Barak found that every company has a "sweet spot" for influencer channel size, with dangers on both ends of the spectrum.

Channels That Are Too Small

"If the channel is too small, it often wouldn't be worth it because it's too much hustle to work with them and even if you will see the investment back, it wouldn't be too much."

Micro-influencers can deliver strong engagement rates and authentic recommendations. But there's an operational cost to working with them that people often overlook.

Each influencer relationship requires negotiation, contract review, brief creation, content approval, and payment processing. Whether you're working with someone who has 5,000 followers or 500,000, the operational overhead is roughly the same.

With smaller creators, even if the ROI is technically positive, the absolute return might be so small that it doesn't justify the time investment. You might spend three hours managing a relationship that generates $500 in revenue—technically profitable, but not scalable.

Channels That Are Too Big

On the opposite end, you'd think bigger channels would be safer bets. More reach, more established, more professional. The problem? Pricing.

"If the channel is too big oftentimes they go over their heads and they think they deserve so much more money that it just wouldn't be worth it."

Large influencers often have inflated expectations about their value, demanding payments that don't justify the actual conversion rates they deliver. They know they have leverage, and they use it.

For a B2C app with limited marketing budget, overpaying for influencer partnerships can quickly drain resources without delivering proportional returns. Having accurate prediction tools like Coddy's attribution system becomes essential for knowing when to walk away from negotiations.

Platform Differences: Short-Form vs. Long-Form

Coddy initially focused almost exclusively on short-form video content: TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. These platforms aligned with where their target users spent time and provided quick, digestible demonstrations of the product.

But Barak has started experimenting more with long-form YouTube videos, and the results are promising—despite being harder to measure.

"Recently, in the past few months, we started experimenting more and more with long form videos on YouTube. And it works really, really well for us. It's just really hard for us to estimate how much money we're going to see back."

The challenge with long-form content is that it behaves differently from short-form. A TikTok video has a relatively short lifespan—it gets most of its views within a few days or weeks, then fades. Long-form YouTube videos are evergreen assets.

"YouTube is also like, marketing people call it evergreen. It's like when you do an ad on YouTube, it's like an asset that stays there for years gathering more views, more customers."

This evergreen nature makes long-form content incredibly valuable over time, but it also makes short-term ROI prediction nearly impossible. CoolScript 2, which works excellently for short-form content, can't accurately model returns on long-form videos because the payback period extends too far into the future.

For founders evaluating platforms, this creates an interesting trade-off: short-form content is measurable and fast, while long-form content is harder to attribute but potentially more valuable over years.

The 9-to-1 Rule of Influencer Marketing

One insight Barak shared that every founder should internalize: most influencer campaigns lose money.

"The big money doesn't come from many influencers. You work with 10 influencers, nine of them will be a complete waste of money and only one of them covers the cost for all of the other influencers."

This isn't a sign of failure—it's the fundamental economics of the channel. Influencer marketing follows a power law distribution where a small percentage of partnerships drive the majority of results.

The implication? You need enough budget to work with multiple influencers simultaneously. If you only have budget for two or three partnerships, the odds that one of them will be your breakout success are too low. You're essentially gambling.

But if you can afford to test 10-20 influencers while using data to improve your selection criteria with each cohort, you dramatically increase the probability of finding those winners who make the entire channel profitable.

This is where having a systematic approach matters. Coddy's CoolScript 2 algorithm helped improve their hit rate by filtering out partnerships unlikely to succeed before spending money. But they still accepted that most campaigns wouldn't break even individually—the goal was maximizing the magnitude of the wins.

Payment Structures: Fixed vs. Performance

About 90% of Coddy's influencer deals use fixed payment structures rather than performance-based compensation. This might seem counterintuitive if you're trying to minimize risk.

"It's mainly the influencer's preference. I guess that they just don't trust brands that much, so they just prefer to get a fixed amount."

Influencers typically prefer fixed payments because they've been burned by brands underreporting metrics or being slow to pay. From the influencer's perspective, a guaranteed payment is worth more than a potentially higher but uncertain performance payout.

For Coddy, fixed pricing actually works better when they have accurate ROI predictions. Knowing their maximum viable payment gives them leverage in negotiations and allows them to confidently make offers that are profitable if their predictions are correct.

The compromise some brands use is a hybrid approach: a smaller fixed payment plus performance bonuses. This satisfies the influencer's desire for guaranteed compensation while still aligning incentives.

Key Takeaways

• Average views per video matter far more than total follower count—focus on actual reach, not vanity metrics
• Every company has a "sweet spot" for influencer channel size: too small creates operational inefficiency, too large leads to inflated pricing
• Long-form YouTube content delivers evergreen value but is harder to measure than short-form TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts
• Accept the 9-to-1 rule: most influencer campaigns will lose money individually, but winners need to cover losses and generate profit
• Fixed payment structures dominate because influencers don't trust performance payouts, but having accurate ROI predictions lets you negotiate confidently
• Build prediction systems before scaling spend—testing without learning from each campaign wastes budget

Listen to the full conversation with Barak Glanz on the Levels Podcast to hear more about Coddy's journey to 2 million users and the systems they built to scale profitably.