How Sunsama Built a 600+ Influencer Army to Beat Big Funded Competitors With SARAL

When you're charging a 3x premium in a market with competitors like Asana and ClickUp, you have a perception problem. How do you justify premium pricing when customers can get "similar" functionality for less?

Sunsama, a digital planner and productivity tool designed for busy professionals, faced this exact challenge.

As a premium productivity app competing against billion-dollar companies with massive marketing budgets, they needed more than just great features, they needed brand presence and social proof to justify their higher price point.

They turned to influencer marketing. And what happened next changed their business.

Over four years, Sunsama build an Owned Influencer Community of 600+ active ambassadors that contributes to a significant portion of their annual revenue, discovered new market segments, and created the authentic social proof needed to command premium pricing against industry giants.

The Challenge: Why Influencer Marketing?

By 2021, Sunsama had built a solid Facebook ads operation. They were competing against like Notion, Asana, and ClickUp for ad space, but their superior creatives and targeting were winning auctions despite being the smallest player.

Then, iOS 14.5 happened.

"Our ads just went down, revenue kind of plateaued. We were competing in a space where we're going up against Notion for Facebook ads. It's very, very hard to win an auction when you're being out-bid by big competitors"

The privacy update hurt their performance and made their weekly results incredibly unpredictable.

Early Signs of Potential

But, Sunsama had something special: organic word-of-mouth. Customers were already posting about the app without any prompting, especially sharing screenshots of Sunsama's unique "done for the day" screen when they finished work.

That insight - reallocating paid media budget toward amplifying existing word-of-mouth, became the foundation of their strategy.

The Strategy: Building the Program

Initial Approach - From First Principles

The first decision was philosophical: this wouldn't be traditional influencer marketing with flashy campaigns and celebrity partnerships. Instead, they'd focus on authentic word-of-mouth from real users.

"We didn't even start it as influencer marketing," the team explains. "It was just like, how do we get the community to talk about us?"

This approach influenced everything from partner selection to creative freedom to commission structure.

High Commission Strategy

Here's where most brands would play it safe with a 10-15% commission. Sunsama went bold: they offered almost 50% of their annual pricing for every customer referred.

"The bet was that the customer stuck around until the end of the LTV to make us profit. And that bet paid off."

The lesson for other brands: If you have high retention rates and know customers won't churn quickly, front-loading acquisition costs can work brilliantly.

Instead of offering a percentage that might only be $4-6 per sale, offer a flat rate that makes influencers excited to promote you.

For example, a $100 flat per order commission gets attention in a way that "10% of $20" simply doesn't.

The Tool's Journey: From Manual to SARAL

Like many growing companies, Sunsama tried everything:

• Manual spreadsheet logging
• Sales CRMs for managing relationships
• Every influencer marketing software in the market
• Manual prospecting with VAs

None of these tools were built specifically for influencer relationship management. General CRMs don't understand the unique workflow of influencer marketing.

The SARAL Solution

When they switched to SARAL, two main problems got solved immediately:

Influencer discovery became exponentially faster

What used to take 4-5 hours of manual prospecting for 100 leads now takes 20-25 minutes.

"Even if we hire a VA, that costs like $40-50 per 100 leads. Discovery saved a lot of my time and effort."

Influencer relationship management finally made sense

With 600+ ambassadors, manual tracking becomes impossible. SARAL's tagging system and relationship board let them segment creators effectively and run targeted campaigns.

"I have 40+ email sequences. There's activation sequences for one segment, other outreaches for different personas, different kinds of campaigns. The tagging system where we segment the creators has saved a lot of my time." - Ambuj Vats, Influencer Manager at Sunsama

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Current Influencer Program Structure

The Pyramid Strategy

Today, Sunsama runs a three-tier influencer system:

Base level: Seeding and new ambassador recruitment

Middle tier: Active ambassador program with standard commissions

Top tier: VIP ambassadors who get additional incentives

Every month, they identify the top 5-7 performers and offer them VIP status with an extra $$$ per trial on top of the base commission.

This approach rewards performance while keeping the program manageable.

Instead of negotiating individual deals with hundreds of people, they have a clear tier system that creators can aspire to. This helps them predictably get influencers talking about them every single day.

How Sunsama Expanded To New Markets With Influencers

One of the most fascinating aspects of Sunsama's journey was discovering market segments they never knew existed.

Originally focused on productivity and self-improvement audiences, they stumbled into the ADHD community almost by accident.

"ADHD is not related to productivity at all. You don't even think about ADHD when you think about a productivity tool," explains the team.

But when they gave creators creative freedom instead of scripted content, something interesting happened. An influencer who happened to have ADHD started talking about Sunsama through that lens. The response was immediate and strong.

This led to partnerships with major ADHD creators, including How to ADHD (one of the biggest ADHD Youtubers)

The key insight

When you let creators speak authentically instead of forcing your messaging, they'll often find audiences you didn't know you had.

No competitor was targeting the ADHD community, so Sunsama had this entire market segment to themselves.

Results and Impact

Time Savings with SARAL

The operational improvements alone justify the tool cost:

• Discovery time: From 4-5 hours to 20-25 minutes for 100 prospects
• Overall program management: Cut from 30 hours to 15 hours per week
• Enabled scaling: One person can now manage 600+ relationships part-time

Program Scale

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 600+ total ambassadors onboarded across all platforms
• 4-6 pieces of content received weekly

Halo Effects

The indirect benefits might be even more valuable than direct attribution:

• Other channels continue performing well: Google Ads and Meta Ads maintain effectiveness
• Organic brand awareness growth: More people know about Sunsama without paid promotion
• Content repurposing opportunities: Creator content can be adapted for other marketing channels

The fact that Sunsama continues running other paid channels successfully suggests the influencer program is creating broader brand awareness that helps all their marketing efforts.

Lessons Learned

Premium commission structure: Paying a big chunk of annual revenue per customer upfront sounds crazy until you see the results. High commissions create genuine excitement among creators.

Creative freedom for influencers: Instead of forcing messaging, let creators speak authentically. They'll often find audiences you didn't know existed.

Diversification from paid media dependence: Moving from only Facebook ads to a balanced channel mix creates much more stable, predictable growth.

Systematic approach to relationship management: With proper tools and processes, one person can manage hundreds of creator relationships effectively.

Ready to Build Your Own Influencer Army?

From Facebook ads dependence to a thriving 600+ ambassador program - things didn't happen overnight - but it happened systematically with the right strategy and tools.

If you're a brand looking to:

• Diversify beyond paid ads
• Build sustainable growth channels
• Cut influencer discovery time from hours to minutes
• Scale relationship management without scaling headcount

Book your SARAL demo and see it in action.

Join 250+ brands already using SARAL to build scalable influencer programs that drive real business results.