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Content creators vs influencers — which to hire for an app

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.

Updated 2026-10-24·4 sources·organic-growthugcinfluencer-marketingcreator-strategy

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.45
  • Spark-style paid boosting works better on UGC accounts than on influencer accounts.6

Details

The content-creator thesis (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.172

Influencer trust (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”.48 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 (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 (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 (How to find, vet and pay UGC creators for an app), which is Coconote’s “content creator”.
  • Alfie’s view that UGC converts worse than influencers is a hypothesis (“potentially”), not measured.5

See also

Footnotes

  1. $6.7M ARR, No Paid Ads, and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years – Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett, Coconote @ 25:31 — Zack Hargett ↩ ↩2

  2. $6.7M ARR, No Paid Ads, and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years – Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett, Coconote @ 17:36 — Zack Hargett ↩ ↩2

  3. Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AI @ 47:58 — Alfie Dickens ↩

  4. Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AI @ 23:15 — Alfie Dickens ↩ ↩2

  5. Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AI @ 49:29 — Alfie Dickens ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. I Studied 1,000,000 UGC Ads, This Is What Will Grow Your App @ 32:03 — Drew Levin ↩

  7. $6.7M ARR, No Paid Ads, and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years – Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett, Coconote @ 26:21 — Zack Hargett ↩

  8. Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AI @ 22:05 — Alfie Dickens ↩

  9. I Studied 1,000,000 UGC Ads, This Is What Will Grow Your App @ 03:58 — Drew Levin ↩

  10. How Cal AI turned creators into a growth machine — Jake Castillo, Cal AI @ 47:14 — Jake Castillo ↩