The influencer marketing gold rush has left many small brands in the dust, struggling to compete with deep-pocketed corporations for creator partnerships. 

Enter SARAL, a startup that is turning this scenario on its head, leveling the playing field, and changing the rules by democratizing access to the creator economy. 

As traditional advertising fades into irrelevance, the company’s vision of authentic, relationship-driven marketing captures the imagination of brands and creators alike.

SARAL founder & CEO Yash Chavan explains how the platform disrupts the status quo and transcends follower counts by tapping into the strength of brand-creator bonds.

All-in-One Platform

Yash’s journey began with frustration. While running an influencer marketing agency, he needed to improve on existing tools for managing campaigns efficiently. 

“Our workflow was all messed up. I was working 16-hour workdays trying to get results for clients because the tools were so [limiting],” he says.

This experience revealed a market opportunity. While established platforms catered to large enterprises, smaller brands were left underserved. 

Yash explains, “There was this gap where the platforms that served the market were serving the high end of the market. But the market needed these smaller brands who needed an affordable, simpler solution.”

Unable to find a suitable solution, Yash created his own bootstrapped SaaS startup, SARAL. 

SARAL aims to be the go-to platform for e-commerce brands seeking influencer partnerships. Yash believes this shift is crucial as traditional advertising becomes less effective. 

“People don’t trust ads anymore,” he notes. “[Their] attention is moving from ads to creators, and you want to reposition your marketing to work with those creators.”

The platform streamlines the entire influencer marketing process, from discovery to payment.

“To run ads, you have the Facebook or TikTok ads platforms,” he explains. “[Similarly], you need a platform to find influencers, reach out to them, ship products, track performance, send them payments.”

SARAL’s mission extends beyond software. Yash emphasizes education as a key focus, hoping to demystify influencer marketing for brands new to the space. 

“We want to build the simplest influencer marketing platform,” he tells us, noting that ‘Saral’ means ‘simple’ in Sanskrit.

Launched 18 months ago, SARAL has quickly gained traction. It now boasts 250 brands and facilitates deals with over 30,000 influencers.

Simplifying Influencer Marketing 

SARAL distinguishes itself through simplicity, support, and flexible pricing. 

Yash highlights the platform’s user-friendly design, comparing it to “the difference between using a Nokia versus an iPhone.”

The company offers hands-on support to clients new to influencer marketing. 

“My team will help you sort of find influencers, write your outreach scripts, and make sure you’re doing good deals with them,” Yash explains. 

SARAL’s pricing model also differentiates it from established players. 

“While everyone else charges $30 to $50,000 per year for their software, we are a simple $499-a-month free trial subscription,” Yash states. 

The goal? To allow brands to test the platform without long-term commitments, paying only if they find value in the service.

The platform mainly serves e-commerce brands, focusing on the U.S. market. However, its reach extends globally, with customers in the UK, Brazil, and Australia. 

SARAL offers two primary services: the core platform and a matchmaking service that connects brands with experienced influencer managers.

Yash notes that many brands are switching to SARAL from older platforms due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and favorable terms. 

“We don’t tie anyone to annual contracts,” he says, highlighting the flexibility that appeals to many clients.

How User Feedback Shapes SARAL’s Feature Set

SARAL’s approach to product development is firmly rooted in customer feedback and demand.

“When we started SARAL, we didn’t even have the search engine I spoke of,” Yash reveals. “It was just a CRM board.” 

The platform’s features have been incrementally added based on user requests. 

For example, the search functionality was implemented when customers asked for a way to find influencers. This was followed by email campaign capabilities when users needed a way to reach out to influencers.

Yash highlights the importance of this customer-centric approach: “Whatever brands say that they want, and the majority of them want it, we end up building it.” 

This strategy has led to high satisfaction among new users. “Every time we onboard a new brand founder on the platform, they say, ‘This is all I wanted,'” Yash notes.

The next feature on SARAL’s roadmap is an influencer inbox, allowing users to manage all their influencer communications in one place. This development, like others before it, stems directly from user feedback.

Building Long-Term Creator Relationships

SARAL’s core is “creator relationship management,” a comprehensive system for tracking influencer interactions at every stage.

“It’s like one place where all of your creators – wherever they are in the funnel if you’ve reached out to them – are there,” Yash explains. “If you’ve onboarded them, you’re working with them, and they’re posting about you, they’re there.”

Yash advises brands to view influencer marketing as a long-term investment: “Influencer marketing is a three to six months long bet, minimum. And then when it works, it works.”

The platform incorporates features to encourage ongoing engagement, such as creator birthday reminders. 

“We have many of these smaller features that help push the brands towards getting friendlier with their creators so that it doesn’t feel like a business transaction,” Yash notes.

This approach has yielded success stories, like that of Gourmend Foods, a gut health brand that expanded its market tenfold through influencer partnerships facilitated by SARAL. 

The brand discovered a new, larger market segment by connecting with an influencer who found unexpected benefits from their products.

Yash emphasizes that such opportunities often arise from genuine relationships with creators: “Only through building that relationship that creators – chatting with him and receiving honest feedback – was he able to 10x his business.”

Breaking Down Barriers

Yash identifies two primary challenges brands face when integrating influencer marketing into their strategies: the need for more education and a cohesive system.

The relative novelty of influencer marketing as a professional channel means an established playbook must be established. 

“It’s hardly a five-to-six-year-old channel, professionally,” Yash notes. To address this, SARAL provides educational content through its blog, offering tactical advice on topics like influencer outreach and relationship management.

The second challenge is operational efficiency. Yash recalls his own experience: “It was working, it was successful, but it was frustrating. I was working 16 hours days.” 

SARAL aims to streamline these processes, with some brands reporting time savings of over 10 hours per week.

“SARAL is consolidating a lot of tools so you can do discovery in one place, outreach in one place, payments in one place, affiliate tracking in one place, social listening in one place,” Yash explains. 

The entrepreneur predicts a shift in brand-influencer relationships and anticipates a trend towards smaller, more curated influencer programs for larger brands to maintain authenticity. 

Conversely, he expects emerging brands to increase their focus on influencer marketing as traditional advertising loses effectiveness. 

“As a brand that sells to consumers, that’s where your marketing should happen and where your consumers’ attention is,” Yash concludes.

Vision of a Community of Brand Advocates

Yash emphasizes the need for brands to move away from transactional relationships with influencers and move towards building genuine, long-lasting partnerships.

“If there’s one change I want to see, it’s more brands building great relationships with creators so that those creators become almost a community of influential advocates around your brand,” Yash explains. 

He argues that a focused group of loyal influencers can be more effective than a vast network of casual partnerships: “If you have 100 influencers that are actively promoting you every week, your marketing problem is solved.”

Yash advocates for a win-win approach in brand-influencer relationships, criticizing practices where either party feels exploited. 

He suggests that influencers should work with fewer brands but focus on those they genuinely believe in: “You do lesser deals as an influencer, but you work with brands that you are affiliated with that you truly would vouch for even if they didn’t pay you for it.”

SARAL aims to serve what Yash calls the “Fortune 500,000” – emerging brands and smaller businesses looking to build influencer communities of 100 to 150 advocates. 

Yash encourages brands to adopt an experimental mindset when starting with influencer marketing. He advises testing different niches over several weeks to identify the most effective strategies, hinting that success often comes from unexpected areas.