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. ㅤ David 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. ㅤ Stephen 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. ㅤ ### Guest Bio Stephen 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. ㅤ ### What We Cover - **Two 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. ㅤ ### Resources Mentioned - Faved: 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. ㅤ *Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.*