Two Decades of Deal-Making: What I Discovered Backing Into Influencer Marketing

The agency executive cut me off mid-pitch.

"Listen, I don't care about AI. I don't care about all that shit. We're trying to negotiate 300 creator deals simultaneously and our entire team is just going back and forth on email. We're dying here in valueless admin."

They weren't interested in my projections about the future. They were drowning in present reality.

That conversation was about eighteen months ago. It changed everything.

The Volume Trap

Going from initial outreach to signed contract takes 60 to 80 messages on average, whether it's a $1,000 deal or a $10,000 partnership. If you're doing 300 creator deals a month, that's 18,000 to 24,000 back-and-forth messages. Teams spend their days managing this communication flow rather than developing strategy.

The industry demands transacting at the speed of creation—when a trend emerges, you have days, not weeks, to activate creators. But the infrastructure still operates at the pace of traditional media deals.

The first several dozen messages aren't about legal terms. They're about: Are you interested? What's your rate? If it's a gifting campaign, what's your address and sizing? What are your content preferences? All of that high-quality data gets captured in email threads or WhatsApp conversations, manually transcribed into spreadsheets, sent to clients for approval, moved back to email for more back-and-forth, then finally transferred into contracts that get saved as PDFs.

Here's what struck me across hundreds of conversations with agencies and brands: analytics platforms tell you everything about performance except what you actually paid and what you actually got. Engagement rates, reach, audience demographics—all tracked meticulously. But the foundation for every future negotiation, every budget decision, every strategic choice about which creators to work with again? That data disappears into scattered systems.

How We Stumbled Into This

I spent twenty years managing major label band Delta Rae and working as an executive producer at Religion of Sports, watching simple agreements take months to execute because of process inefficiency, not legal complexity. I built Basa to centralize deal flow from initial outreach through signed contract.

Originally I was building for film, TV, music, podcasts. Change happened glacially there—established processes, guild structures, institutional ways of working. Then people in influencer marketing started reaching out: "This sounds exactly like what we need."

We backed into this opportunity. For months, my cofounder and I kept expecting to discover some fundamental reason the problem couldn't be addressed. Why wasn't this already solved? The pain was so obvious, the volume so acute.

What we found instead: they were facing what I believed most industries would experience in the future, but experiencing it in the present. The volume was outpacing the infrastructure. When we showed people what we were building, they asked when they could start using it.

I've talked to agencies across nearly every region now—different cultures, different legal systems. Whether you're in Dubai or São Paulo, London or Los Angeles, the operational challenges are universal. The platforms are global. Influencer marketing isn't a specialty channel anymore—it's just becoming marketing.

Over the past eighteen months, we've built a team of experts with firsthand experience in this space—people who've lived these problems from the inside and understand not just what's broken, but why previous attempts to fix it haven't worked.

Why Legacy Systems Break at Scale

The shift from controlled distribution to algorithmic distribution eliminated scarcity while creating infinite content competition for finite attention. Managing hundreds of simultaneous relationships profitably, coordinating across multiple time zones and currencies daily, adapting to algorithm changes that can shift entire campaign strategies overnight—what insiders accept as normal would have seemed impossible in legacy media.

The challenge isn't just volume—it's that the economics have fundamentally changed. A $500,000 music licensing deal could absorb weeks of coordination overhead because the math worked. In influencer marketing, you need to manage hundreds of relationships profitably. Whether it's a $1,000 deal or a $10,000 partnership, the process takes the same amount of time. The economics only work if you can execute efficiently at volume.

One brand director told me about reallocating budget mid-campaign. They'd spread $100,000 across different creator communities to test which demographics resonated. Three weeks in, they discovered their product performed far better with an unexpected audience segment. Because they'd structured the campaign as distributed tests rather than one massive commitment, they could shift budget toward what was working without having already spent everything.

That flexibility doesn't exist in traditional advertising. The difference isn't just cost efficiency—it's the ability to learn and adapt based on real performance data before committing the full budget.

Building for Volume, Not Changing Behavior

What became clear as we built Basa is that we're not changing how deals work or how long they take. People will still negotiate. Relationships will still matter. Complex partnerships will still require phone calls and back-and-forth.

But macro conditions are shifting dramatically. Distribution models are moving from closed systems to algorithmic systems. AI is lowering production costs. Content moves faster, trends emerge and fade within days. The industry increasingly demands transacting at the speed of creation, and the infrastructure hasn't evolved to handle that pressure.

The distinction matters: behavior stays the same, but the volume and velocity demand better infrastructure. This pattern matches what I witnessed in music and sports media during industry transitions. The teams that embraced operational efficiency didn't just survive—they dominated. They could take on more clients, deliver better results, and maintain healthier margins because their systems scaled efficiently.

The agencies building this infrastructure now will handle more volume profitably while competitors struggle with scattered communication. When a brand trusts you to manage 300 creator relationships efficiently, they'll trust you to handle 3,000.

Where We're Building

The agencies that get this aren't asking us to change how they work. They're asking us to build infrastructure so they can keep working the way they know works—just at the volume the industry now demands.

Eighteen months in, we're still learning. This industry reinvents itself every few months—new platforms, new creator behaviors, new brand strategies. But the fundamental problem stays the same: volume keeps increasing while the infrastructure to handle it doesn't.

After twenty years in industries where change happened glacially, I found one where the pain is acute and the appetite for solutions is immediate. Influencer marketing is experiencing in the present what we believe most industries will face in the future—transacting at the speed of creation. They're living the pain point today. We don't know what pain points will exist tomorrow. But we're building infrastructure for how work actually happens now.