How Scoop AI Reframes Creator Marketing Infrastructure to Scale Fast

I quit my job as a business leader at Truecaller 6 months ago with the intention of building something new, but I hadn't quite landed on what exactly that was going to be. I decided to take some time off. After a 2-month break, I started consulting for a few DTC brands on growth and operations and stumbled into creator marketing. With my exposure to systems we put in place, I was shocked by how poor the infrastructure for this vertical really was. Despite being a $34B market, the tools and processes built for the sector are a decade behind. I decided it was time to fix it and that's how I decided to build Scoop. We want every brand team to have the leverage to scale without headcount pressure or external dependency. Our experience with managing data and engineering at scale gives us real leverage to reimagine the operating system for creator-led growth.

We are still very early in our journey. We launched our MVP in early February and quickly got 7 customers on board by engaging on open Slack channels. This seemed like magic. But we soon realized this wasn't scalable, so we went deep with these 7 to get our product ready for launch. It's been just 5 weeks since the launch of our public-ready version, and we've onboarded 10 brands since then and also started working with 2 e-commerce giants. We started out like every B2B AI SaaS company, reaching out to potential ICPs on LinkedIn. But this exchange proved too slow, and the conservative exercise we were running on email led to no results. We knew this was going to take time, so we decided to shift gears quickly and switched over to cold calls 2 weeks ago, and that was one tactical measure that just clicked. We've started booking 4-5 calls every week since then.

Like I highlighted, the tech stack the industry is used to is in a sorry state. This has led to the adoption of non-scalable processes. The hardest thing for most tech companies to do is to change customer behavior and approach to work. The biggest pushback we hear from customers is that the tool doesn't conform to their process. As product builders, we are opinionated on the things that should change, and what we spend the most time on in the first two weeks is showing a customer how life can change if they are accepting of change. We handhold them and get them used to a new way of getting their work done. When you are able to show them that this cuts effort by 80%, half the game is won. Another big challenge we face is also the mindset issue that our ICPs have. We almost always have to educate leaders in the space that adoption of technology doesn't necessarily make people redundant. It just shifts the scales in the right direction for the long term and defines new standards for team building. This is an area we come across quite often.

Influencer marketing is estimated to be a $34B market. But most people assume that influencer marketing = creator marketing. Anything at the intersection of brand, creators, and content marketing is what this market really is. 1. UGC ads, where creators make content that is used by ads teams for creative volume and testing, and contributes heavily to the digital ads market. 2. Paid socials on amplifying UGC or partner ads - this market alone is $15B+ and growing rapidly. 3. Social commerce, affiliate creator networks and programs, where creators double up as an independent sales channel, powers over $200B in GMV just for the top retailers. There are a lot more such examples. In my opinion, markets intersect with each other, and the true sizing of a market only comes from truly understanding these intersections. When we look at the opportunities in the market, we see the opportunity to build infrastructure that is at every intersection where a creator is involved.

We are an agent-led AI platform for all things creator marketing. We’re currently live on Instagram and TikTok. We plan to stay focused on making collaboration between brands and creators as easy as possible. We plan on investing a lot more into our AI capabilities for managing all the ops that go into launching successful partnerships. Most creator marketing platforms have only focused on the brand side of problems and have treated creators as mere ad placements. We will also be building tools and systems that can enable creators to work more effectively within the space.

5 weeks into our soft launch, we've crossed 15 customers who have been onboarded onto the platform.

I spent the last 7 years of my career at Truecaller. Started out leading consumer growth initiatives and eventually switched over to building multiple product verticals. I briefly worked on building our digital ads platform that does ~$150M in annual revenue. I was then tasked with building a new enterprise business for the company, which I led from $0-$30M ARR, serving over 3,000 businesses across 40 countries. We did all this with a fairly lean team by building high operational leverage using technology and data. My background with digital ads does give me some perspective on the problems we're solving, but we're not exactly industry insiders. I look at this as an advantage because we're not starting off with industry biases. We're looking at the problem landscape with an entirely fresh perspective.

We weren't very active in recording our journey publicly. In today's world, I believe every team should build in public. This brings you visibility and builds honest conversations that can really help with your growth journey. This can be on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, or Reddit. Every founder should be doing this. Let people hear your story. These stories compound, giving you visibility that translates to quick learnings and potential wins. The advantage of doing this is that you perfect your storytelling so you can connect with your customers better. The other mistake I'd say we've made is trying to perfect everything. It's better to move fast and make mistakes. Your customers are not going to be as hard on you as you are on yourself.