The $50,000 Floor Nobody Tells You About Before You Try Influencer (with Stephen Titus from Faved) | Ep. 20

Most B2B teams have already run their influencer test. Four or five creators sitting dead center in the category, twenty or thirty thousand dollars, a handful of posts, and a quiet decision that the channel doesn't work. The test was never big enough to prove anything either way.ㅤDavid Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with the co-founder of a competing marketplace to argue about where creator budgets actually break. You'll walk away with a spending floor, a reason to buy creators outside your category, and a straight answer on what AEO changes about influencer content.ㅤStephen brings four years of running flat-fee creator partnerships at scale, a bootstrapped P&L that forces him to care what brands actually renew on, and a blunt estimate of how little of B2B advertising currently reaches creators at all.ㅤGuest BioStephen Titus is co-founder and CEO of Faved, a marketplace connecting brands with creators for flat-fee sponsorships. He runs it with a team of eight, more than 30,000 creators, and hundreds of brands, and has deliberately kept the company bootstrapped after raising venture capital for earlier ventures. He and his co-founder are engineers who first met the world of influencer marketing by accident: they built a productivity smartwatch straight out of university, ran a Kickstarter, and discovered that niche communities could drive volume that paid media couldn't. Multiple failed startups followed before Faved. He now works with consumer brands in supplements and cosmetics alongside a growing roster of AI and software companies.ㅤWhat We CoverTwo founders, two watch companies: Both David and Stephen started watch brands and backed into influencer marketing the same way.Why flat fee, not commission: Stephen's case for making creator deals more transactional and merit-based.The sin of raising VC too early: Investors became the customer, and the actual customer got ignored.Bootstrapped as a forcing function: Revenue as the funding model ties the platform's goals to the brand's goals.The real competitor is an agency: Not platforms. Mostly no-name agencies and headcount.Alignment before spend: Awareness, clicks, qualified interest, or sales. Pick one before the budget moves.The $50,000 floor: Below that, on one platform, across 20 to 30 creators, you learn nothing.What the first 50K actually buys: One or two creators worth doubling down on with the next 50K.Go non-obvious on category: A CRM should be buying performance coaching and freelancer creators, not just sales creators.AEO, SEO, GEO: Stephen's view that it's all the same job with a new front door.Trust beats topical match in LLM answers: Why a running creator mentioning HubSpot can outrank a sales creator.Consistency over spikes: Monthly baseline spend, or your competitors take the share of attention.B2B is under 1%: Stephen's estimate of creator spend as a share of B2B advertising budget.ㅤResources MentionedFaved: Stephen's flat-fee creator sponsorship marketplace.Limelight: David's B2B influencer marketplace, discussed as the friendly competitor.Luma AI: Named as one of the AI brands running creator partnerships.Notion: Cited as a brand reaching prosumer audiences through creators.Skillshare: Example of an advertiser running a known playbook that just needs tooling to scale.Brilliant: Named alongside Skillshare as a scaled creator advertiser.HubSpot: Used in the example of trust outranking topical match in ChatGPT answers.Kickstarter: Where Stephen's first company discovered the power of niche communities.ㅤSafe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.