Running a creator marketing campaign for an enterprise brand means recruiting and DMing creators, negotiating contracts, tracking views, catching fake engagement, issuing payouts, and filing tax documentation. Tristan Rhee ran those programs by hand for brands such as Unilever and C4 Energy. Launchpoint, the platform he co-founded in January 2025, is his attempt to automate everything on that list he no longer wants to do manually.

The company, based in New York, operates with a team of about 20 and works with more than 300 companies, mostly VC-backed or enterprise brands with monthly creator marketing budgets between $20,000 and $500,000. Clients include Uber, Capital One, Unilever, and C4 Energy. Tristan, a Cornell graduate who spent three and a half years as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank, left finance to build the company and spent over a year developing it from his childhood bedroom before moving the operation back to New York last year.

Launchpoint launched with a school-by-school approach, starting at Ohio State and expanding to Michigan State, UCLA, Texas, and several other large state programs. The productized platform came roughly ten weeks ago. The shift, in Tristan’s framing, was less a pivot than an answer to an operational problem he had been living with.

“Creator marketing is the opposite of easy,” he says. “It’s very time intensive and laborious.” The comparison he reaches for is The Trade Desk, the programmatic advertising platform where brands deploy budgets with minimal hands-on management. Creator campaigns require finding people, negotiating terms, monitoring content, processing payments, and detecting fraud, all of which multiplies with every additional creator added. The question Launchpoint was built to answer is how much of that can be removed.

Automating Admin to Protect Creative Quality

The design principle of Launchpoint’s AI layer is automating areas where humans are not actually needed to do well. “Let AI do all of the stuff nobody wants to do,” Tristan says. “All of the compliance, all of the payouts, all of the view tracking, all of the tax forms, all of the negotiation between creator and brand.”

What the platform does not automate is creative judgment, i.e., which creators are a strong match for a brand, what content format will perform for a given objective, and how to translate marketing goals into briefs that work. “We keep a lot of the humans in the loop on the creative work,” Tristan says. The aim is to compress the administrative overhead so the team’s time is spent on the decisions that require taste and context.

The framing Tristan returns to is that AI should “enable more human content to be made.” The platform is not designed to replace the human layer in creator marketing, but to clear away the back-office burden that caps how much of the creative work can actually get done.

The UGC Model That Scales Without Adding Headcount

The secondary-account UGC model Launchpoint productized is what makes systematic automation tractable. Rather than managing bespoke influencer relationships on creators’ primary accounts, where every deal requires individual handling, the platform deploys creators on dedicated brand accounts. Creators post five to seven times per week. Compensation is view-based, at roughly $1 to $2 per thousand views, with individual video costs running $30 to $50.

According to Tristan, the model works because social algorithms no longer route content primarily through follower graphs. “If you scroll Instagram and TikTok, 99 percent of the videos you see are from people you don’t currently follow,” Tristan says. A creator on a zero-follower secondary account can reach the same users as one with five million followers if the content performs.

Because secondary-account posts follow a consistent format and a uniform compensation structure, they can be processed at volume without the per-relationship complexity of traditional influencer deals. That uniformity, Tristan notes, is what enables the platform layer. Launchpoint reports that over 50 brands generated more than 100 million views each through the platform in the past month at a sub-$3 CPM.

Fraud Detection as a Platform Advantage, Not a Manual Check

Tristan says that view-based pay creates the incentive to buy views. He estimates that close to half of the UGC views reported on other platforms are purchased rather than earned. “If you Google ‘Buy views on Instagram TikTok,’ there’s about 300 sites that will do it,” he says. “You can pay $20 and get a million views in like five minutes.”

Launchpoint runs nine detection signals on every video, including timing irregularities in how views arrive, comment behavior consistent with bots, random engagement spikes, and viewer geographic data. “Sometimes, we click on a video, and it’s posted from someone in the U.S. and it’s 98% India or Pakistan,” Tristan says. The company says it blocked more than $500,000 in fraudulent creator payouts in a single month.

This kind of systematic detection, Tristan adds, cannot be built by a services firm managing campaigns manually. Detecting nine distinct signals across thousands of videos per week requires infrastructure with consistent data access and automated processing. Recovering fraudulent spend and routing it toward legitimate creators is, in Tristan’s framing, not a cost but a direct performance improvement, one that the manual model structurally cannot offer.

The Rejection Rate Is the Platform’s Quality Signal

Launchpoint charges no platform subscription fee, instead taking a percentage of creator payouts when the platform delivers economic value. Tristan says the pricing structure is the enforcement mechanism for quality. “We actually turn away around 75% of the companies who try to list on our platform just because they don’t pay creators enough,” he says.

The intended output is matching precision that a manual operation cannot produce at scale. The stated goal is to give an enterprise client like Unilever exactly the 1,000 creators that fit its brief on the first query, without requiring the brand’s team to sort through a larger, noisier list. “We would prefer to give them five deals every day, and they’re all a fit,” Tristan says.

The next infrastructure layer under construction is the organic-to-paid pipeline. Because Launchpoint has Instagram and TikTok business partner status, it can pull hook rate data from organic posts before those posts are promoted, identifying which videos hold viewer attention past the first few seconds. Content that exceeds a 50% hook rate in organic becomes a candidate for paid placement, tested before any ad budget is committed.

When Creator Spend Catches Up to Creator Attention

The broader commercial argument Tristan makes is that creator marketing is undersupplied with technology relative to its share of human attention. By his citation, roughly 50% of human attention now flows to creators while creators receive about 2% of global advertising spend. “The only way to close it is with better technology,” he says.

He also argues that the brands already running creator programs are structurally mismanaging them. “Too much of creator marketing is episodic,” he says. “It’s around an event or around a certain time of the year.” His position is that the top performers from each campaign should be retained on ongoing contracts and reactivated for future campaigns, compounding into a deployable roster over time.

The platform Launchpoint is building is designed to make both the individual campaign and the long-term roster manageable without proportional increases in headcount. “All commerce is shifting towards creators,” Tristan says. “Someone that you trust talking about a product right in front of you, that’s where a lot of purchasing decisions are made.”

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