Vamp : Creator Discovery
Designed: 2025
Product: Vamp Customer Audience:
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Choosing the right Creators to work with on a campaign is pivotal to the content delivery and performance. This project comprised a suite of functionality that enabled Brand users to evaluate Creators on their own, for the first time.
Background-- Vamp Context & Challenges
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Problem Space
When I started, the Vamp platform offered little insight into individual Creators— Brands could only see Creators' handles and a link to their social profiles— and only after they’d applied for a Campaign. Considerable time was spent wading through irrelevant applications and social channels to understand which Creators were a good fit, and whether they had any prior experience to provide reference. Hiring the wrong person would cost significant time in delivering the content, and the content itself often would not perform as well.
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Our team leaned on 3rd party solutions
I sat with the Campaign Delivery team to understand their techniques for success. They used a variety of tools to discover which Creators were working in a Brand’s niche, comparing audience stats and aesthetic vibes, then reached out over social platforms to verbally recruit folks who were a fit. They typically did not bother to check whether Creators were already on-platform, as there was no easy way to do this. Time and tools were expensive— and as our direct competitors, came with a risk that we could be cut off. |
Outside, users foundered or fled
Externally, our customers would be less likely to complete this task at all. Lack of time or skill frequently resulted in a late ask for this step to be serviced by our delivery team. While this was a short-term revenue stream, it created a resource jam, which impacted quality and margins down the line— it wasn’t making us money in the long run. Some did have the savvy to know what to look for, and access to the tooling and skills to do it— these folks realized they did not need us at all, and churned. |
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I started by looking at how others solved this
Our favorite tool for identifying good-fit Creators was Captiv8, a specialist. Its major utility is to highlight Creators who fit particular parameters, and display key audience specs at a glance. This sped up the search by narrowing down the universe to a pool of folks with the pre-determined demographics. The other flow our team used was to compile a shortlist and export it directly from the search, for the Brand client to review. It was quickly identified that this workflow required foundational functionality, and should be sequenced later. |
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Next: Analyzing gaps between what we have, what we need, what we can get.
As the first project of its scale at Vamp, the build process was its own discovery adventure. I worked with Engineering leads to determine which UI had standard components, so we could hit the ground running. We also reviewed API docs for each social platform, to determine which data points we could include in profiles. Understanding effort vs impact came in handy later, when prioritizing functionality for each feature. |
Designing a Solution
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To get to MVP, I sorted each major job as a feature piece. Stories were mapped and prioritized to build the leanest journey.
Search for Creators, View their profiles, Invite to a Campaign. From here, I added the next tier of detail, defining possible functionalities for each. I sliced out all stories that were not necessary to complete an end-to-end chain, to validate the bare minimum, then negotiated them back if the workaround trade off created more effort than the build. |
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In an org that was learning how to do product development, it was crucial to stay transparent about which items were on the table, which were not, and how later slices were decided.
We protected our “nice to have” space for delighters for our internal team, eg “paste a column from a spreadsheet into the invite box”. These niceties helped the internal team feel seen (a concern, with the strategic emphasis on growing the self-service segment), while providing amenities that could benefit all power users of the system.
We protected our “nice to have” space for delighters for our internal team, eg “paste a column from a spreadsheet into the invite box”. These niceties helped the internal team feel seen (a concern, with the strategic emphasis on growing the self-service segment), while providing amenities that could benefit all power users of the system.
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As an ambitious initiative, we looked for opportunities to reduce load and risk.
Creator profiles were new, and success of Search required their data to fuel filters. Creators might adopt slowly, so we decided to auto-populate them with as much data as we could, pulling directly from their social platform profiles. |
Wherever possible, we used existing components to comprise the UI, adding polish with intention, where we patterns could see more use in future. This allowed the new to blend with the old, but still feel like an uplift.
As the Engineering team was new to this way of working, I partnered closely with the CTO to help her team build skills as a group— each epic would be led by a different dev, but each build process would be a swarm. This allowed them to practice skills while supporting each other and working together. It also encouraged them to identify patterns and reusable elements across the projects.
As the Engineering team was new to this way of working, I partnered closely with the CTO to help her team build skills as a group— each epic would be led by a different dev, but each build process would be a swarm. This allowed them to practice skills while supporting each other and working together. It also encouraged them to identify patterns and reusable elements across the projects.
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Releasing the suite required multiple departments to work in sync.
We quietly rolled out each feature as it was complete, so we could work reactively one bit at a time. This also gave Creators lead time to check out and curate their new profiles. Those who did were rewarded with a boost in the search results, for their engagement. |
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As all three were ready, we rallied the Support and Campaign Delivery teams, as well as the Account Managers, so they could prepare and unify their messaging in advance.
Outcomes of the launch
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Impact on external activity
The response from our base was overwhelmingly positive. Interview and survey data yielded proactive praise for the features, late-ask service requests dropped almost entirely, knocking on to retention. Monitoring how they use these features would inform where we could build out in future—
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Impact on internal delivery
Our team were able to bring nearly all of their service flow into our platform. The Search tooling made it possible to target Creators who are already on the platform, reducing external recruitment work in all but niche cases. As a Search configuration and Creator profiles were sharable to logged-out users, our folks were able to compile shortlists for major clients by using direct URLs. Observing how they used this would inform scope for including List-building natively in-platform. |
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This project set key foundations for future initiatives to run faster.
The filtering system we built out for Search would able to be reused in the creative brief creation— matching the data sets would also allow users to filter application eligibility, further reducing cruft. The invitation system provided a smoother pathway for Creators to onboard and get to work immediately, which our internal team could use for recruitment. |