We're a YC company, and before we ran creator marketing for anyone else, we ran it on ourselves. The goal? Prove that creator marketing actually converts for AI & tech startups.
15–25x
Cohort activation
7.9%
Engagement rate
Campaign details
Brand
Beacons
Type
Creator partnership (1 Reel)
Platforms
Objective
Drive Media Kit sign-ups and activations
Creators
1
The Challenge
Can a creator sell your product better than you can?
Beacons needed to know whether creator-to-creator marketing could be a real growth channel for our Media Kit feature. The hypothesis: a creator explaining a tool she actually uses, to an audience of other working creators, would convert better than standard acquisition.
We didn't run this to chase a big number. We ran it to prove a point, cleanly, on a small budget, so we'd know whether to scale it with confidence. One creator, one Reel, five days of tracking.
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Beacons team
How beacons did it
One creator, one reel, full-funnel tracking.
We partnered with Arine Kim (@arinekimm) to produce a single Instagram Reel promoting Media Kit to her creator audience. The content was creator-native: Arine explaining a tool she uses herself, in her own voice, to creators who monetize the same way she does.
We tagged the link with UTMs to track the full funnel from view to activation. No guesswork about what worked.
Reach before a single click
88.9% of the reel's reach came from non-followers, so the message traveled well past Arine's existing audience.
The right people, not more people
Everyone who activated was in a vertical where brand partnerships are the core monetization path.
The results
The activation rate is the result that makes the case.
Our baseline cohort activation rate is about 2%. This cohort ran at 30–50% depending on the week, with the strongest conversions in the trailing week as viewers returned to content they'd saved.
The absolute numbers here are small on purpose. We sized this to validate the channel cleanly, not to maximize volume. Now we know it works, and we can scale it with confidence.
15–25x baseline activation — the primary signal the test worked, from a 30–50% cohort activation rate against a ~2% platform baseline.
7.9% engagement rate — more than double the 3–5% industry benchmark, from a single creator-native Reel.
2.6% end-to-end conversion — view to full activation, across 28,613 reel views and 157 tracked visitors.