We needed Sadie first.

In 2025 we were growing our own brand through influencer marketing. We made it work, but it was far harder than it should be. Then we saw it wasn't just us.

In 2025 we were five people working on a product that was genuinely good and had real validation. Users liked it, and we wanted to scale it. So we turned to influencer marketing. Everyone was recommending it, and we pictured the reach, the millions of views, going viral. To be honest, it turned out to be a really rough ride for us. We thought we'd find creators, get them to post, and be done. But creators are artists, not your typical professionals. iykyk. We had to build a relationship first, then get them to post, then check what they had posted, then log every post and its views in a spreadsheet. Then came payment: one wanted PayPal, another wanted Venmo. It was too much for us.

Then came June 2026. By then we were fed up with the influencer marketplaces, or whatever you call them, and we weren't big enough to hire a team to handle it for us.

The marketplaces were expensive, and they didn't solve the actual problem. They helped us search and outsource, but in the end we still had to talk to every creator and do all the work ourselves. But at the end of the day, we're engineers. We saw a complicated problem that really exists, one everyone was suffering from, and thought: why don't we solve it? What if AI did all the boring stuff? The chasing, the follow-ups, the spreadsheets. Then we could spend our time on the stuff that actually matters, which was building our product.

Lean teams with big ambitions.

Five people, maybe ten, who would rather ship than hire. They keep the team small on purpose and still plan to grow at scale. We were one of them, so we know the work it takes.

Sadie is built for that kind of brand: the work of a whole marketing team, without hiring one. We'll keep growing with them.