Social Tip will pay anyone with a social media account to post about products they’ve purchased – even users with private accounts and fewer than 200 followers. 

Founded by former North Atlantic fisherman-turned-entrepreneur James Watt, the platform launches in the UK in a few weeks with 350 brand partners already signed up, including Wagamama, Huel, ASOS, Tala, PureGym, and Virgin.

James isn’t your typical tech founder. After building BrewDog into a global beer business over nearly two decades, he’s now applying his community-building expertise to digital marketing. Under his leadership as CEO from 2007 to 2024, BrewDog grew from “two humans and one dog” to 3,500 employees, producing one million cans of beer daily and operating in 65 countries with 130 locations.

“Social Tip at our most basic premise as a company is far better off not giving one influencer with 1 million followers $5,000 to do one post. We think the company is far better off if it gives 500 of its customers $10 to do 500 posts – more authentic, organic, and eyeballs on it. And you’re delighting your customers and shortening the distance between yourself and your customers,” explains James.

The platform emerges as trust in traditional advertising continues to decline and influencer fatigue grows. “I think customers believe advertising less and less,” James observes. “Too many companies are focused on bottom-of-the-funnel mechanics and trying to reduce marketing. They’re done building to a formula, which you can’t do because you miss out on love and emotional connection. We want to translate brand love into a competitive advantage.”

James created Social Tip to serve both everyday consumers seeking to monetize their genuine product recommendations and brands looking to activate their existing customers as advocates. With social media projected to drive 42% of purchase intent by 2030, according to James, Social Tip positions itself as “word of mouth for the digital age.”

How Social Tip Works

Social Tip functions as a mobile app connecting brands with their actual customers. The process is straightforward for both sides:

For brands, setup takes approximately 5 minutes. Companies create an account and deposit funds ($100-$2,000), and the platform manages itself. The brand can then track performance through a real-time dashboard showing who’s posted, content details, payment amounts, viewership, and remaining account balance.

For users, the experience is equally simple. After downloading the app and connecting a social media account “with just two clicks,” they post about products they’ve purchased. Social Tip’s patent-pending AI algorithm determines payment based on reach, engagement, follower quality, and content quality.

“We’ve built a patent-pending AI-based algorithm that works out the value of that post based on reach, based on likes, based on engagement, based on quality of followers, based on the quality of the post itself,” James explains.

The system verifies purchases, ensuring authentic recommendations. “Anyone who gets paid by Social Tip, we verify that purchase,” James emphasizes. Users receive real money – not vouchers or store credit – that can be withdrawn to their bank account immediately.

The Private Account Advantage

Social Tip’s most distinctive feature is its ability to tap into private accounts – a marketing channel previously inaccessible to brands.

“We’re the only marketing tool that helps brands access private accounts,” James explains. “75% of people on social media platforms or Instagram at the moment have private accounts. We and our technology operate with private accounts as well.”

This capability opens up an opportunity for brands, particularly since recommendations within these curated networks may carry even greater weight. “The person’s probably carefully curated who follows them. They probably know them all personally. So somebody making a recommendation or posting about and loving a brand in a private account carries even more significance and has even more of a positive impact,” James notes.

He reveals that beta testing has already demonstrated promising results, generating high-quality user-generated content for participating brands.

Data-Backed Effectiveness

The approach is supported by concrete data showing the effectiveness of peer recommendations:

“Someone is 7.5 times more likely to purchase something if they see a positive post from someone they know versus a positive post from an influencer,” James states. Additionally, “the average engagement rate for someone with a thousand followers is eight times higher than the engagement rate for a conventional influencer.”

These statistics support James’s assertion that genuine customer advocacy can deliver better results than traditional influencer marketing, especially when deployed at scale across numerous smaller accounts rather than concentrated in a few large ones.

A Complementary Marketing Channel

Despite its potential to influence current practices, James positions Social Tip as one component of a complete marketing strategy rather than a wholesale replacement.

“Is Social Tip designed to replace macro, nano, or micro influencers? No. Is it designed to replace advertising? No,” he clarifies. “This is something that should sit alongside those things, take up a very small part of the overall marketing budget, but be a very effective part of a company’s marketing budget.”

The platform operates on a straightforward business model, taking a small percentage of the reward paid to the consumer. This allows brands to put a small slice of their marketing budget back into the pockets of their customers as a ‘thank you’ for their advocacy.

Community Building: Lessons from BrewDog

Social Tip’s approach stems directly from James’s experience building BrewDog, where community engagement proved central to success. He draws a distinction between passive audiences and active communities:

“So many brands confuse audience and community,” James observes. “For me, community, it’s all about a two-way street. There’s got to be open communication and a shared mission, but there’s got to be value going both ways.”

At BrewDog, this philosophy translated into concrete community involvement: customers voted on new beer releases, helped select new locations (earning $5,000 for each successful recommendation), and 227,000 customers even became shareholders with equity stakes in the business.

“Everything comes back to just shortening the distance between the company and the customers,” James explains. “If you get a community working, that advocacy is so compelling.”

Changes in the Industry

James’ forecast that 42% of purchase intent will come from social media by 2030 represents a change from current marketing budget allocations, where he notes, “most companies probably spend 80 or 90% of their budget and their efforts outside of social media.”

Simultaneously, James believes the effectiveness of conventional influencer marketing faces challenges. “I think there’s diminishing returns in that space,” he observes. While acknowledging there are still “amazing influencers out there who have a fantastic impact,” the entrepreneur notes many larger influencers are “not quite getting the engagement rates that they’re hoping for” and “trying to sell too many things that they maybe don’t love.”

This, he adds, creates an opportunity for more genuine approaches. “I think the whole space is in a bit of a churn at the moment, and authenticity is ultimately what’s going to win,” James predicts.

International Expansion and Employee Advocacy

With the UK launch imminent, James has clear expansion plans for Social Tip: “We want to expand internationally. We’re excited to launch in the U.S. and then look beyond as well.”

The platform will also expand to include employee-generated content. “With Social Tip, we can turn your customers into your influencers, but we can also turn your employees into your influencers and reward them for doing that as well,” James explains.

For brands looking to strengthen their community-driven marketing, James offers straightforward advice: “The key question is how can you shorten the distance between your company and the people who love the things you make? Who are your biggest advocates within your customer base, and how can you get as close to them as you possibly can?”

Through empowering everyday consumers to monetize their genuine product enthusiasm, James believes Social Tip delivers “an amazing way to have a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving market space.”