Noah Tucker identified a critical gap in creator marketing: brands relied on outdated tools to manage modern partnerships. As the founder of Social Snowball, Noah developed a solution that transforms how e-commerce brands and creators collaborate through affiliate marketing, now serving over 2,000 leading brands seeking sustainable, measurable creator partnerships.

Identifying the Market Gap

When Noah began his entrepreneurial journey, he attempted to establish partnerships with creators to generate trackable revenue. However, the available tools weren’t designed for modern creator collaborations.

“The only existing options were affiliate platforms built for publisher affiliates, like the more traditional affiliates,” Noah says. “And when I tried to onboard a creator or influencer into an affiliate platform built for publishers, it was just a user experience nightmare.”

The alternatives offered little improvement. Noah explains that the only other options were creator management CRM tools, which were “more tools for getting content deliverables from creators and paying them a flat fee in exchange for those deliverables. Those tools had little affiliate tracking or incentive functionality.”

This notable gap in the market prompted Noah to establish Social Snowball, developing a platform specifically designed to help brands transform their creator partnerships into performance-driven revenue channels.

“We help brands turn their creator and influencer partnerships into a performance channel, both with an incentive structure and attribution and kind of just the whole management workflow,” Noah explains.

Supporting Both Brands and Creators

Social Snowball serves two distinct purposes in the creator economy ecosystem.

For brands, Noah aims to help them “turn creator and ambassador partnerships into a performance channel that is contributing a meaningful amount to their new customer acquisition.”

With advertising costs rising and tracking becoming more challenging, Noah highlights the importance of diversification: “Paid ads are getting more expensive and harder to track, and brands need to diversify their customer acquisition efforts. It can’t just be dependent on one channel.”

Noah’s insights stem from his deep understanding of brand challenges: “Brands that are 100% dependent on Meta have a lot of platform risk for their new customer acquisition. And creator and influencer is a great channel for that. You can build a powerful program with the right tech to generate this new customer acquisition.”

For creators, the platform focuses on enabling sustainable income streams: “to help creators generate a full income from brand affiliate partnerships,” Noah shares.

This includes “helping creators find brands to partner with, accurately compensating creators for the value that they’re bringing to brands, and allowing them to create a full income for themselves so that they can have financial freedom from these brand partnerships as well.”

Comprehensive Platform Features

Social Snowball offers extensive tools managing “everything from sourcing creators to gifting products to creators and influencer seeding, attribution, giving creators a portal to log in to see their data.”

Noah highlights the platform’s complete solution: “Not just attribution for sales, but also creating commissions and being able to send payments directly to the influencers, being able to capture social content that the creators have made, posting on Instagram or shoppable videos on TikTok Shop, and saving all that content so that the brands and creators have access to it in an easy-to-use media library.”

The platform includes communication tools and fraud prevention measures. “We have our email builder; you could integrate with Klaviyo to send more complex emails to creators,” Noah notes. The system also focuses on “managing fraud, making sure that the attribution is accurate, that there are not self-referrals, and that codes aren’t leaking to coupon sites.”

The Transformation of Creator Marketing

The creator partnership model has seen significant changes over the past decade. Noah believes that ten years ago, an influencer partnership was very much what the tech for influencer partnerships helped brands do. 

“You pay influencers a flat fee and get a deliverable in return. That deliverable could be content you could repurpose into ads; it could be a certain amount of posts or on a feed or story,” he explains.

This approach made sense historically because “brands could fully rely on more traditional paid ads as their entire acquisition channel at the time [and] 100% of their new customer acquisition could come from Facebook.”

However, Noah notes significant changes in paid advertising: “It’s much more expensive to reach the same people. It’s much harder to track. The CPMs fluctuate; it’s much more unpredictable.”

Addressing Modern Marketing Challenges

Today’s creator partnerships present unique complexities. 

“A creator could have an Instagram, a YouTube, and a TikTok following,” Noah explains. “Right now, if a brand is partnering with that creator just to manage that one partnership, they have to use TikTok Shop to manage a TikTok Shop relationship and then something to manage their D2C affiliate partnership from the traffic from Instagram.”

Social Snowball’s TikTok Shop integration provides a unified solution. “When the creator signs up with you, they’ll not only get an affiliate link to drive revenue to the brand’s website and D2C channel, but they’ll also be enrolled in a TikTok Shop collaboration, be able to add products to their TikTok Shop Showcase, and create shop content on TikTok through one workflow,” Noah explains.

The company is organizing the TikTok Shop Growth Summit on November 4 to help others learn what works best on the platform.

Success Through Customer Advocacy

For brands starting with affiliate marketing, Noah recommends beginning with customer advocacy programs.

“For a new brand that doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth or is just starting, one type of program that I always recommend to brands like that start with is tapping into their customer base and turning customers into affiliates,” Noah says.

He shares a success story from The Pod Company, which sells ice baths and wellness products. “They are generating a ton of revenue from customers making referrals, and they get creative with how they do it,” Noah explains.

The company maintains engagement through consistent communication and incentives. “They send many emails to their customers encouraging them to make referrals. So they send inspirational content examples they could post on Instagram, showcasing other customers who have made a lot of money by referring friends.”

Protecting Brand Value

Social Snowball addresses discount code abuse through innovative solutions. 

“There are all these coupon sites like Honey, RetailMeNot, and Capital One Shopping that pick up these discount codes,” Noah says. “When those codes leak to these coupon sites, it causes this whole disaster because not only are you giving out discounts to customers who weren’t supposed to get the discount, but when it’s an affiliate code that leaks, you’re also paying commission for every sale that goes through with that code.”

The platform’s Safelinks feature provides a solution: “A Safelink is like a coupon code alternative… whenever someone clicks on it and gets taken to the brand storefront in real-time, a unique single-use discount code will be generated from Shopify and given to the shopper to use during their shopping session,” Noah details.

The industry continues to embrace performance-based partnerships. Noah advises new brands to start with customer advocacy. 

“Your customers are great because you don’t have to gift them products,” he says. “They already have products they could film UGC with and post on social media. They already love your product enough to spend their hard-earned money on it. It’s the perfect way to get some word-of-mouth activation without having a huge influencer budget.”