Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.

1. What is your company in 2–5 words?

AI CRM for influencer marketing.

2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Influencer marketing is now a core budget line for most brands, not an experiment. The industry is hitting $47B and the teams running these campaigns are still operating on WhatsApp and spreadsheets. AI finally makes it possible to automate the coordination layer that's been killing their time. Two years ago the AI wasn't good enough. Two years from now every big player will have copied it. Now is the window.

3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

It's just me right now, and that's actually the point. I'm not a developer who discovered influencer marketing. I'm an influencer marketer who learned to build. I've lived inside this problem for 6 years across 1,000+ campaigns and over $5M in spend. I know exactly what breaks, when it breaks, and why. Nobody is closer to this customer than I am because I am the customer.

4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Honestly? Still managing influencer campaigns and complaining about the lack of good tools. Brief exists because I got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.

5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

Right now, paying customers and retention. I care about teams that come back every month because Brief is how they run their business.

6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

Brief is the AI PM and CRM for influencer marketing teams. It manages campaigns from brief to invoice automatically, it simplifies creator partnerships and content approvals.

7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

I went from building the MVP in under a day, to spending over 100 hours using Lovable, I’m actually on their global 10% users. The speed of that, from idea to live product to first paying customer tells me the demand is real. The exciting part isn't the revenue yet. It's that every team I've shown it to has said the same thing: "I've been looking for this."

8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?

50 paying teams by end of year. Then opening the creator workspace, which is a completely different and much larger market. Every creator is running a business: brand deals, content, invoicing, contracts, analytics. Nobody has built the tool that treats it that way.

9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

First customer is a small influencer marketing team, exactly the profile Brief is built for. Over the next 12 months the goal is 50 teams at an average of $799/month.

10. What’s your biggest threat?

I don’t se competitors as threats, I study them, and learn from them. The answer to that threat is the same as it's always been: move faster, stay closer to the customer, and build the thing they actually need instead of the thing that looks good in a deck.

As an update: Brief was just accepted at LvlUp Labs Marketing Edge Accelerator, and secured initial funding.

This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.