We Spent $900 on Influencers, Then Built a 3,500-Member Discord Community Without Ads
On day eleven of our influencer campaign, I opened the spreadsheet and did the math. Five creators paid. $900 gone. In return: 30 to 40 leads who regarded our product the way people regard a timeshare pitch, politely and mostly for the snacks.
I'm Barbara Nekrasova, CEO of the international marketing agency Erste Advertising. Less than three months later, the Discord server we built for our FinTech client had more than 3,500 members, and after that first test we didn't spend another cent on ads.
This is the unvarnished version of how: the failure, the manual grind, and the parts where AI helped and the parts where it very much didn't.
Key takeaways
- A $900 test with five paid influencers produced only 30 to 40 low-intent leads, so we stopped after 10 to 11 days.
- We built the Discord community by hand: 20 members in 3 to 4 days, 100...
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