We've worked a lot with influencers so far at Firecrawl, big and small, producing millions of impressions in total. To my surprise, the large creators consistently outperformed for us.
Gamma is the counterexample I wanted to be true. They've grown to roughly 70 million users with hundreds of millions of decks and docs created. (And fun fact, Gamma is also a Firecrawl customer)
They talked openly about going all-in on micro-influencers, onboarding over 1,000 creators and letting each one tell the story in their own voice.
We tried to use the same playbook but it didn't quite work out.
The first thing we learned is we have different creator densities. Gamma makes presentation software and almost anyone can authentically promote it. Whether you're a teacher, founder, recruiter, or fitness coach, you can use it (and possibly post about it), which makes the creator pool enormous. Firecrawl on the other hand is web data infrastructure for agents and developers, a much narrower audience and creator pool.
In addition to the creator density problem, there's the massive coordination tax when you're managing dozens of small creators.
Dev micro-creators certainly exist but coordinating and scaling a program with them is a massive investment. You have to find them, vet them, onboard them, get deliverables, review for technical accuracy, and chase timelines. All of it compounds quickly, especially if you want very high quality content that is aligned with your brand.
When trying to scale our micro-influencer program, the headwinds of creator density and coordination tax were too much, especially given the results we saw. They were generating impressions which was great, but not many signups at all.
So we ended up flipping the approach entirely, we went for creators with a bigger reach and deeper relationships with their audiences. This had a much better effect for us. The end content was super high quality, aligned with our brand, and drove significant signups. In addition, we saw an incredible second-order effect. When we worked with a major creator in the dev tools space to post about Firecrawl, smaller creators noticed and started making their own content without us asking or paying. So we inadvertently created a wave of organic follow-on from many of the types of micro-influencers we were targeting originally.
The second-order effect sold us on our current approach long term, but I don't think it's the right call for every company. Depending on your target audience, creator pool, and product, you have to experiment and choose the right approach.