Influencer marketing in tech is shit at the moment. It’s riddled with fake ads, promotions, growth hacking strategies, bots and people doing whatever it takes to win even if it’s pure hot shit. Lies everywhere too. Influencers used to mean people with the ability to influence others with value not a “3 clicks to collect $50 AI slop canon contributor” Whereas teams need champions. They want to get the word out there and they need genuine feedback, interest and usage from champions, early adopters and the right people that their product helps. We’re taking a bet to fix influencer marketing by turning it into Growth Champions, even if the champions are paid. From my time as a Product Manager, I loved talking to end users and they loved me too. That was a beautiful relationship. A champion is truthful and says what it is, even if the product isn’t all that, because they care. A champion would ordinarily be interested in the product or be curious enough to want to try it out. It shouldn’t be forced. Products that go viral and ‘sustain’ virality do so through people using, talking about, recommending and spreading the word, not 1000+ botted influencers from some platform. I recently had a chat with the team at @mercury and realized that I was a champion and want to see them succeed. I don’t have to promote their product for a fee. Mercury needs to find more people like me, which is hard atm. I was a champion even before I signed up to Mercury because they were the only fintech provider that would open a US bank account for a foreign founder in minutes. Influencers at scale are usually gun for hire and most times not potential users. We know this because we’ve run influencer campaigns ourselves. Product teams run early access programs and customer advisory boards. What do growth teams have? Personally, I’ve been a champion for some of my favorite devtools over the last 10 years namely @sanity_io, @Netlify, @supabase, @Cloudflare and now @bot without speaking to anyone on some of these teams. I always ‘market’ these products for free. We’ll find all the technology champions on the planet and incentivize them to do work they’d already do for free, starting with the first 1 million champions. The best of you will be invited to specialized workshops on content creation, we’ll get you great gear and hold you to the high quality standards we have. The world needs more authentic opinion produced with quality. Maybe you think I'm wrong but I’ve got insane conviction this is the way to go, and I’m putting everything towards it. If you want to swim against the tide fill the form below to join us. If you own or run a company and want to work with growth champions, indicate interest on the form too. 1/2