---
title: Content creators vs influencers — which to hire for an app
slug: content-creators-vs-influencers
summary: Why Coconote hired content creators (good videos, small followings) instead of influencers, why Cal AI's ex-influencer lead now runs UGC alongside influencers, and the trade-off — UGC gives cheaper views, established influencers give trust that converts.
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [organic-growth, ugc, influencer-marketing, creator-strategy]
related: [creator-outreach-at-scale, influencer-deal-pricing-rpm-and-flat-rates, ugc-pay-structures-and-free-views, founder-led-virality-before-ugc, boosting-organic-winners-spark-and-partnership-ads]
sources: [yt:Wg70HlO-5gY, yt:l0vswWcGmMs, yt:qnDdabj8Fok, yt:22wFjjVyXUI]
updated: 2026-10-24
---

# Content creators vs influencers

## TL;DR
- On interest-graph feeds (For You pages), **followers matter less and less; content quality matters most** — hire people who *make great videos*, not people with audiences.[^1]
- Coconote tried ~**30 creators in its first two months**; **3** drove growth, one ran the main Coconote account to hundreds of millions of views.[^2]
- Influencer prices rose with agents and brand demand, so cheap ($1–2 CPM) influencer deals got rare in 2026. UGC brought CPMs down again.[^3]
- Alfie Dickens (Cal AI) would run **both**: UGC for cheaper views, big influencers for **trust** — people copy creators they follow aspirationally.[^4][^5]
- Spark-style paid boosting works better on UGC accounts than on influencer accounts.[^6]

## Details
**The content-creator thesis ([[people/zack-hargett]], Coconote).** At his previous startup, Scout, the very first TikTok on a brand-new account got 8M views and ~150K sign-ups in two days (2021). That convinced him followers are irrelevant. Coconote's model was to find creators who produce great content and pay them to post — one of them ran the main Coconote account.[^1][^7][^2]

**Influencer trust ([[people/alfie-dickens]]).** Cal AI's best-converting deals were big lifestyle influencers quietly using the app in daily vlogs. Viewers aspire to the creator's life, and the team wanted Cal AI to become a *trend* everyone joins, not just "the app fitness people use".[^4][^8] Cal AI had stopped UGC because its influencer CPMs were so good, and was restarting UGC in mid-2026 as influencer prices climbed.[^5]

**Market shift ([[people/drew-levin]]).** A year earlier only indie hackers ran UGC. By mid-2026 big apps and consumer brands were switching from big influencer and paid budgets to UGC every week.[^9]

**Effort trade-off ([[people/jake-castillo]]).** Influencers are hard to reach, negotiate with and manage, attribution is murky and views fluctuate, which is partly why Cal AI layered on paid ads.[^10]

## Disagreements / caveats
- "Influencer vs creator" is a spectrum: Nicole Cheung DMs micro-influencers (~10K views) to post on new accounts ([[ugc-creator-recruiting-and-pay]]), which is Coconote's "content creator".
- Alfie's view that UGC converts worse than influencers is a hypothesis ("potentially"), not measured.[^5]

## See also
- [[creator-outreach-at-scale]]
- [[ugc-pay-structures-and-free-views]]
- [[ugc-new-account-warmup]] — why creators post from new accounts

[^1]: yt:Wg70HlO-5gY @ 25:31 — Zack Hargett
[^2]: yt:Wg70HlO-5gY @ 17:36 — Zack Hargett
[^3]: yt:l0vswWcGmMs @ 47:58 — Alfie Dickens
[^4]: yt:l0vswWcGmMs @ 23:15 — Alfie Dickens
[^5]: yt:l0vswWcGmMs @ 49:29 — Alfie Dickens
[^6]: yt:qnDdabj8Fok @ 32:03 — Drew Levin
[^7]: yt:Wg70HlO-5gY @ 26:21 — Zack Hargett
[^8]: yt:l0vswWcGmMs @ 22:05 — Alfie Dickens
[^9]: yt:qnDdabj8Fok @ 03:58 — Drew Levin
[^10]: yt:22wFjjVyXUI @ 47:14 — Jake Castillo