✅  Why your influencer campaigns feel like slot machines — and the fundamental mindset shift required when you move from bottom-of-funnel paid ads (where people are ready to buy) to top-of-funnel influencer marketing (where you’re building awareness and trust), including why measuring seven-day attribution windows guarantees you’ll kill winning campaigns before they mature.

✅  The Predictable Pyramid framework that eliminates the guesswork — SARAL’s three-layer system that starts with high-volume seeding (50-100 influencers receiving free product), graduates the best performers into ambassadors (commission-only, no upfront risk), and crowns the top 20% with paid retainer deals, reducing your risk at every stage while maximizing posts per day.

✅  How a skincare brand accidentally proved influencers’ real value — the case study that shows what happens when you cut influencer marketing because “it’s not driving sales,” only to watch your Google Ads CPC more than double within two months because you killed the top-of-funnel awareness feeding your branded search volume.

✅  Posts Per Day (PPD) as your North Star metric — why optimizing for overall ROAS or direct attribution is the wrong scorecard entirely, and how tracking the daily volume of organic posts about your brand across social platforms gives you the leading indicator that predicts downstream performance across every channel.

✅  The ownership and compensation playbook for creator content — exactly how to structure usage rights at each pyramid level (free seeding = they own it, ambassadors = 30-day usage by default, paid retainers = you own it), plus the two ways top brands pay for whitelisting high-performing UGC (flat monthly fee of $100-500 or percentage of ad revenue generated).

✅  How SARAL’s AI agent (Sia) handles operations without killing authenticity — the human-first approach to automation that eliminates manual busywork like finding relevant creators, drafting personalized outreach, negotiating terms, and managing product shipments while keeping relationship-building and strategy in human hands where it belongs.

Steve welcomes Yash Chavan, Founder and CEO of SARAL, for a masterclass in transforming influencer marketing from random spray-and-pray tactics into a predictable revenue engine. With over 250 brands served and $40 million in incremental revenue generated through the platform, Yash brings the kind of systematic thinking that actually makes influencer programs scale—whether you’re just starting or already doing eight figures.

The conversation opens with the core problem most brands face: they treat influencer marketing exactly like paid ads, expecting immediate, trackable ROI from a channel that fundamentally operates at the top and middle of the funnel. When you run Facebook ads with interest-based targeting, you’re bidding on people actively looking to buy—that’s why attribution is clean and ROI is measurable. But influencers work differently. They’re creating awareness, building trust, and introducing your product to audiences who aren’t in buying mode yet. Measuring them purely on seven-day attribution windows or last-click sales guarantees you’ll conclude “influencers don’t work” when the real issue is you’re using the wrong scorecard entirely.

Yash introduces the Predictable Pyramid—the framework that’s made SARAL’s approach consistently successful across hundreds of brands. Here’s how it works: At the base, you run a high-volume seeding program, sending free product to 50-100 relevant creators. Your only risk here is cost of goods. Some will post organically, most won’t—and that’s fine because you’re looking for signals of genuine interest. The creators who post for free graduate to the middle layer: your ambassador program. Now you incentivize them with affiliate commissions to post regularly, creating consistent organic visibility. There’s zero risk here because you only pay when they drive actual sales. After three months, the data shows you which 20% of ambassadors are driving 80% of results. Those top performers graduate to the pyramid’s peak: paid retainer deals, whitelisted ad content, or higher commission structures. At every stage, influencers are qualifying themselves before you invest serious dollars—the opposite of how most brands operate, paying influencers upfront and hoping for results.

The episode’s most valuable insight comes through a case study Yash shares about a skincare brand that perfectly illustrates how influencer attribution actually works. The brand was running both influencer seeding (getting 2-3 posts per day organically) and Google Ads simultaneously. Their Google Ads were “crushing it” with low CPCs, while influencers showed minimal direct sales attribution. Frustrated by the lack of trackable ROI, they cut the influencer budget entirely and doubled down on Google Ads. Two months later, their Google Ads CPC more than doubled. Why? The influencers were driving all the top-of-funnel awareness that fed branded search volume, which made Google Ads perform efficiently. Kill the awareness layer, and suddenly nobody’s searching for your brand anymore—your “winning” channel collapses because you starved what was feeding it. The brand reactivated influencers immediately once they understood the relationship.

Yash emphasizes that the North Star metric for influencer programs isn’t ROAS or attributed revenue—it’s Posts Per Day (PPD). How many organic posts about your brand are showing up daily across TikTok and Instagram in your target audience’s feeds? That’s the leading indicator. More PPD means more awareness, which means higher branded search volume, more direct traffic, better conversion rates (because people recognize and trust your brand), higher AOV, and better LTV. None of this shows up in influencer platform attribution, but it’s transforming your entire funnel economics.

The conversation also covers practical execution details: how to structure content ownership at each pyramid level (spoiler: at the seeding stage, they own it; at the retainer stage, you do), how to find the right creators (ask five customers who they follow and target those niches), and how SARAL’s AI agent Sia automates the operational grunt work—finding creators, drafting outreach, managing shipments—while keeping strategy and relationship-building firmly in human hands. This isn’t about replacing marketers with robots; it’s about eliminating the boring tasks that prevent teams from running influencer programs at scale.

For brands listening in Q4, Yash’s advice is clear: if you’re hearing this in September or October and have a few weeks to spin up a program, do it now—ad costs are about to skyrocket as everyone doubles down on paid media for Black Friday Cyber Monday. But if it’s already November, don’t get distracted mid-Q4. Focus on your current channels, then use December to build momentum for a New Year launch. Once you have 50+ ambassadors, you essentially have a launch engine you can activate anytime by coordinating them to post simultaneously.

This isn’t theory about “going viral” or hoping the algorithm favors you. It’s operational discipline applied to influencer marketing—finally treating it like the awareness engine it actually is instead of expecting it to perform like direct response advertising.

Strategic Takeaways

👉  Stop measuring influencers like they’re paid ads—they operate at completely different funnel stages. Paid media targets people ready to buy (bottom of funnel), so attribution is clean and ROI is immediate. Influencers build awareness and trust (top and middle of funnel), which means their impact shows up weeks later in branded search, direct traffic, and conversion rate improvements across all channels. Judging them purely on last-click attribution is like evaluating your Facebook ads based only on organic reach—you’re using the wrong scorecard and killing campaigns that are actually working.

👉  Use the Predictable Pyramid to eliminate risk at every stage of your influencer program. Start by seeding 50-100 creators with free product (your only risk is COGS), identify who posts organically, graduate those people into commission-based ambassadors (zero risk since you only pay for actual sales), then after three months promote the top 20% performers to paid retainers or whitelisted content deals. This approach lets influencers qualify themselves before you invest serious dollars, versus the typical approach of paying creators upfront and hoping they perform.

👉  Track Posts Per Day (PPD) as your North Star metric, not attributed revenue. The goal is maximizing how many organic posts about your brand show up daily in your target audience’s social feeds—whether that’s 2 posts per day or 20. More PPD drives awareness, which feeds branded search volume, improves conversion rates because people recognize your brand, increases AOV, and lifts LTV. None of this shows up in seven-day attribution windows, but it’s transforming your entire acquisition economics across every channel.

👉  Find the right creators by asking your customers who they actually follow. Don’t guess at which influencer niches match your ICP—talk to five real customers, ask to see their Instagram and TikTok feeds, and identify who they’re following. A supplements brand selling to bodybuilders needs completely different creators than one selling to yoga moms, even though both are “fitness supplements.” Your customers are already telling you which creators have their attention and trust; you just need to ask.

👉  Structure content ownership based on where creators are in your pyramid. At the seeding level (free product), the creator owns the content—if you want to whitelist it for ads, expect to pay $100-500 monthly for usage rights or offer a percentage of revenue generated. At the ambassador level (commission-only), your terms can include 30-day usage rights by default. At the paid retainer level (contracts), you typically own the content outright. This tiered approach respects that creators own their work while giving you clear paths to leverage high-performing content in paid campaigns.

👉  Give your influencer program at least 30 days to show results—seven-day windows kill winners before they mature. Real customer journeys from first influencer impression to purchase consistently run longer than a week, especially for considered purchases or higher-ticket products. The skincare brand case study proved this: influencers weren’t showing up in seven-day attribution, but when they got cut, Google Ads CPC doubled because the awareness feeding branded search disappeared. Measure in 30-day windows or you’re evaluating campaigns before they’ve had time to compound.

Yash Chavan
Founder and CEO of SARAL

Yash Chavan founded SARAL to solve what he saw hundreds of Shopify brands struggling with: turning influencer marketing from random, unpredictable tactics into a systematic revenue engine with clear ROI. What started as helping brands think more strategically about creator partnerships evolved into building what Yash calls “the world’s first influencer operating system”—a platform that handles everything from influencer discovery and outreach to seeding logistics, affiliate management, contract negotiations, and payment tracking.

Before building SARAL, Yash spent years watching ecommerce brands treat influencer marketing like a slot machine—sending products to random creators, paying people upfront with no guarantee of results, and then concluding “influencers don’t work” when they measured top-of-funnel awareness channels with bottom-of-funnel attribution metrics. His breakthrough was recognizing that influencer programs needed operational frameworks, not just better tracking tools. That insight led to the Predictable Pyramid approach, which has now helped over 250 brands generate more than $40 million in incremental revenue.

What makes Yash’s perspective valuable isn’t just the platform he’s built—it’s his understanding that most brands fail at influencer marketing because they’re optimizing for the wrong outcomes. While everyone obsesses over attributed sales and seven-day ROAS, Yash focuses on Posts Per Day (PPD) as the leading indicator that predicts downstream performance across every channel. His case studies consistently show the same pattern: brands that build systematic, high-volume influencer programs see improvements in branded search, direct traffic, conversion rates, AOV, and LTV—none of which shows up in influencer platform attribution, but all of which transform overall acquisition economics.

SARAL’s recent launch of Sia, their AI agent for influencer operations, reflects Yash’s philosophy about automation: eliminate the boring operational tasks (finding creators, drafting outreach, managing shipments) but keep strategy and relationship-building firmly in human hands. It’s human-first automation that lets small teams run influencer programs at scale without sacrificing the authentic relationships that make this channel work in the first place.