How I Built a $100k/Month Creator SaaS

Very volatile life as entrepreneurs, you know, we went from, you know, mansions to sleeping on couches

[music]

to now what you see is nearly 100k MRR. So, Mateo, you started your journey as a creator. I saw how managers treat the majority of their talent. They only focus on top 20% [music] and we wanted to build a tool to empower that bottom 80%. You know, one creator's [music] trash is another creator's treasure. Yeah. And so we built this referral network where creators earn passive commission on every deal they share. Today on the pod, we have Mateo Greenberg. He's a founder of Creator Lookup. Mateo went from sleeping on couches to 100k MRR in less than a year. So, Mateo, what is the business you've built? So, while living in LA, I saw how managers treat the majority of their talent. They only focus on top 20% and we wanted to build a tool to empower that bottom 80%. To discover more brand deals and fulfill those deals. So, that's when Jose and I launched BYOB, which stands for Be Your Own Boss. From there, we built out a brand deal marketplace. How were we going to source the deal brand deals and put it on the marketplace? Yeah. And you know, after some back and forth, we landed on why don't we just have creators share deals with one another? You know, one creator's trash is another creator's treasure. Yeah. And so we built this referral network where creators earn passive commission on every deal they share. For example, Ted Zahhar, he does What do you do for a living? Content in New York City. He's a street interview guy.

Exactly. He doesn't do casino brand deals.

Yeah. Or gambling deals. And he sent that deal to us. We then empowered 10 other creators to take on that deal and then he started earning $1,000 a month in commission. It was there no way to scrape these deals online? We thought about doing it that way, but those are the same deals that every other platform is sourcing.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what a lot of people don't understand is like all these creator networks have this internal like line of communication that's going on that it's not like a LinkedIn job post.

right. And often times those deals that you do scrape,

Yeah. it's too little, too late. Oh.

We were sharing the deal as soon as it landed in the creator's inbox.

Okay. And the creator could do the deal themselves or they could share it with the community.

Got it. So, your idea was how are you going to get paid from that? So, we were going to take a cut of the new brand deals we brought the creators that otherwise wouldn't have that opportunity. And did you have the payment processing built inside it? This was all very, very manual. Uh in those days, yeah, we didn't really have the technical skill set. Okay. Okay. And how long were you working on BYOB and like what happened with it? Yeah. So, as soon as we graduated, we knew we didn't want to take on a real job. We wanted to continue BYOB. Yeah. And we were blessed to get into an accelerator through MIT and we spent that summer really starting over from scratch. Yeah.

They encouraged us to stop whatever you're building, just interview customers. Yeah. It was amazing. We interviewed over 30 creators in less than 30 days and we really learned what their biggest pain points were. And in that year, the biggest pain points were sourcing more deals, making more money. Yeah. And it wasn't necessarily like spending less time or being more organized. It really was how can I make more money through brand deals? And we realized that as much as creators, this is a pain for them, they're not willing to spend the money to solve that pain. Yeah. And also, I don't personally believe creators will share the deals that much. Yeah. As you want them to. Yeah. Yeah.

know. That was another issue we were running into. So, you were running out of cash, basically. Yeah. I mean, the first five years of Jose and I working together, Yeah. we were either losing money or breaking even. Okay. Yeah. We were You worked on this for five years. Yeah, we worked together like this is one of many projects. We also rented a house in Beverly Hills and we hosted creator events and threw parties. It was a $10 million house and we put all our money into it and that just broke even. Luckily, we didn't go into more debt. Um but very volatile life as entrepreneurs, as you know. We went from, you know, mansions to sleeping on couches to now what you see is nearly 100k MRR. Yeah, so I think like people see the 100k MRR, but clearly it's just taken you a very long time and a lot of painful lessons along the way. Okay, can you explain what Creator Lookup is? Yeah. It really starts with the pain of finding creators. For us, that was the biggest challenge and for so many of our brand and agency friends, Yeah. it was theirs, too. And at the time, through BYOB in our agency, we were just brokering lead lists on the side. Little did we know that was its own business. Yeah. And we decided of January, so actually pretty much a year ago today, we decided to pivot completely towards the database of creators and making it as easy as possible. And I think I understand this pain point because Instagram doesn't have a very good search bar to find creators. So, essentially, they are helping brands on scale to find creators and land negotiate as many deals as possible because it's a volume game. It is a volume game. Gone are the days where you could DM 50 creators and run a campaign.

Yeah. It takes a minimum list of 1,000 to get maybe 100 responses. Yeah. And that's what we do so well. We have 400 million creators in our database and you can search, you know, based on follower count, but also based on keywords in their bio, caption, hashtag, average views and also pull their email addresses sometimes even phone number. And the interesting thing is both Mateo and Jose are non-technical and they were able to build this beautiful platform without any coding like knowledge. Can you explain how you built it? We made a lot of hiring mistakes when it came to finding a technical lead, a CTO, and we realized we were outsourcing our leverage in a lot of ways because we don't know how long it's supposed to take and quite frankly, we were being lied to and a lot of these engineers were over promising and under delivering as as much as that sucked and we wasted a lot of time uh not only interviewing, but managing those relationships. And Jose, my co-founder, decided he's going to learn how to code. And thanks to thanks to prompting, thanks to Vlad and Cursor, we built our platform from scratch and we don't no longer need to wait for someone to respond to us to make a change to um you know, update a feature. That's incredible. Like without any coding language, they've hit 100k MRR just by web coding the platform themselves. I think this is probably one of the best case studies of web coding that I've come across. Um can you talk about who your ideal customer is and how did you acquire your initial customers? When we first launched, our ideal customer was anyone that would give us money. So, I actually went on freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and I was just looking for anyone that was, you know, needing a basically a VA to source creators for them. And first client was actually a sauna company looking for health and wellness creators and I sent them that that list right away. I didn't even ask for money. It was before we had a contract and they ended up loving the list, paying me out and then once I as soon as I had the money, before it was it was sitting in escrow, actually, Yeah. I sent Jose $100 on Apple Cash. And this was right when we pivoted BYOB, so vibes were pretty low. Like we were pretty defeated. Felt like a a pretty big waste of time and failure. Yeah. Um and I really believe like even that $100, proving that this is something people will pay for, made a huge difference in the morale for our company. Let's talk about some growth tactics along the way. Have you experimented with any kind of marketing on scale? So, the question is how do we scale? Yeah. We used our background as agency as well as the network we built through the creator platform BYOB to source many of the first clients. when a creator gets email inbound email from a brand, we know that brand is already looking to work with more creators. So, we could upsell them on, "Hey, here's a list just like, let's say, Manav, 10 other creators that look like Manav. Yeah. Let us know if you need more." Mm. And that was a great funnel to get our first 10, 20 clients. Uh from there, a lot of word of mouth. And then we actually updated our own tool to also source LinkedIn top voices and ones that are in the marketing influencer space, we would use our own platform to source, outreach to them, ask them to post and then boost that LinkedIn post uh to more lookalike. So, essentially, your business model is a credit-based system where you can spend the credits and get the leads, but how I also want to talk about is that your entire business model or there's more? So, we really believe in giving a lot for free. We're not afraid to give away 200, 400 credits in creator leads if that means that person could then be brought on to a search plus outreach you know campaign or a full end-to-end management. So it translated into a done for you outreach model.

That's right. Because what he what they're trying to say is like there's a lot of brands who struggle with outreach. A lot like cuz it's we know it. Like I think people are very bad at following up and I think you guys have mastered the outreach. Master. And I And I think

I'd hope so, yeah.

And as a as a brand I think you guys are saving brands so much time that it's a no-brainer. Yeah. Yeah. So the the idea is let's get as many users on Creator Lookup as we can, see who are power users, and then hop on a call with them and see if they need more services. And we have mastered outreach. Our open rates are anywhere between, you know, 70 to 90% response rates on the open is somewhere on the average of 35%, you know, brands love just filling out maybe a short intake form and then a pool of creators in their niche is in one inbox for them to choose from. How did you get your initial customers for Creator Lookup? Hustling. Hustle. I mean, we would we would go to events every day. Yeah. I think we met some of our biggest clients actually at parties here in LA. Yeah.

Uh for example, at a 4th of July party, we met one of our biggest clients. At Tech Week, CES, all these brands, they need growth and the best way to grow right now is influencer marketing. And I and I agree with you. Like the best way to meet your customers is in person. Yeah. Cuz the outreach campaigns don't nearly work as well as the in-person events. Absolutely. And once you have your first two, three, four clients, getting testimonials made the sales so much easier when you couldn't reach those people in person cuz they see a testimonial, it's pre-built trust, you know, other people are vouching for you. It made a huge difference for us, so I'd highly recommend filming those testimonials. I know it's not fun, but it's worth it. And what's on the 2026 roadmap for Creator Lookup?

Can you tell us what features you're coming up with? So our vision is to make influencer marketing as easy as paid ads. So if you ever launched a Facebook ad campaign, it's a few clicks and your budget's deployed and your content is being shown to your exact audience. That's our goal. Where where in the midst of it? We're still keeping personal touchpoints, our strategy calls, but we want to make it self-service to the point where you only need that if you'd like. Mhm. Interesting. Uh Okay. Uh can we can we talk about your tech stack? Cuz so can you explain all the software products you're using right now to run this company? Yeah. Our backend is hosted on fly.io, built with Python using fast API. That's really the core of our scraping. Our front end is built on Vercel. It's a Next.js project. For emails to new users, we use Resend onboarding flow. We're using GA4 for user analytics and PostHog for session analytics. And it's actually really entertaining to watch those sessions in real time. For coding the app, we're using Claude and Cursor. For our website, we're using Framer. For payments, we're using Stripe and Row. Shoutout to Alec at Row. And lastly, for our email sending, we are using SmartLead. So what's the cost of running creatorlookup.com and people are curious how what's your margins look like? Yeah, great question. We're really scrappy. We always have been and we had to be to survive. And we're only burning 5K a month right now and most of that is going towards subscriptions. So on the pod I ask every founder if they could go back in time, what would they do differently? If I could go back in time and realize what impact AI would have on businesses, I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time trying to raise money. You really don't need it and I think it's a big distraction. It's a shiny object that's really just a vanity metric. I think a lot of founders are focused on that, which is the wrong thing where they should be focused on actually selling, actually getting users. And it's refreshing because people in LA actually focus on sales. And you need to sell to have a business.