ChatInfluencers, manually curated TikTok Influencers Database

A month ago, I set a goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months. They’re all minimum viable products, built to test a hypothesis and see if they can get a market fit in a month. I often have 1 or 1.5 hour max a day to work on this.

This month I built the 2nd startup. It’s called ChatInfluencers and it gives you access to a carefully manually curated list of TikTok influencers and their data + contact information. So that you can chat instantly with influencers and get your product in front of the right audience fast.

I took a screenshot when I finished the pricing page of ChatInfluencers and shared it with the #buildinpublic community on Twitter and for some reason it got a lot of traction.

Before my posts would barely get 100 views and a couple of likes. So to me this felt as if it went semi-viral..

So the same evening/night, I continued to work on ChatInfluencers as I wanted to finish the MVP asap as the inspiration and momentum were there.

It was 04:30AM and I finished the MVP and deployed it straight away so that I could share it the next day. But I was still feeling the adrenaline and was not ready to sleep, ideas were still flowing through my head!

The Problem

Digital solopreneurs and indie hackers are already fully occupied by building MVP’s and new features. Which leaves little time for marketing. By the looks of it, it seems that TikTok is the big platform where solopreneurs go to now.

But the problem is that these solopreneurs often do not have the time to prioritize marketing. Let alone do market research and spent hours into a new platform and learning the nifty tricks on how to gain traction on every platform.

The Solution

This is not a big problem but nevertheless I thought this would be interesting to manually handpick the top influencers for different niches. Scratching my own itch at the same time.

I did some research and found other people who used the TikTok API to compile a list of influencers. Could this be a business, I think so as it would be interesting for solopreneurs to have all the top influencers with their analytics and contact information in one spreadsheet.

So I started out by researching and adding influencers and their data in an AirTable spreadsheet. I could have done the same in Notion or a Google Spreadsheet but I never tried AirTable out and wanted to give it a shot.

Front-End

I think that most of the visitors will get their first impression on their smartphone so it was important that the user interface is mobile friendly. There are still some improvements I need to do after receiving some feedback on Twitter: need to add an embedded view or at least a screenshot of how the database looks like and what information will be accessible.

Flow

As of now I am doing a one time payment to get access to the TikTok influencers database and this is done via LemonSqueezy. After payment is done, the user will get an email with a read-only link to the database spreadsheet.

So that is quite simple for now, as I think the main focus point should be getting people to my website aka distribution.

So for now it is just one time payments, but later I might if there is enough demand I’ll put a one time payment with a monthly fee to get access to the monthly updated database.

Conclusion

My second startup! I’m excited and curious how the community will respond to this. I got a lot of positive feedback on one of the first Tweets about this, but we’ll see in a month when I’ll update you on how this went!

Fingers crossed!🤞

If it works, I can extend and add different kinds of influencer databases, think of bloggers, streamers, Instagram, Youtube and so on.

Try it out

It’s live now, so go check it out, see if you like the website and the product and get your own access to the TikTok influencer database. Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas to improve it. I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or andrewtjongio at gmail.com. If you’d like to write about it, please do so, I need any press and mentions I can get!