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How Spacegoods Created the Halo Effect: Building an Influencer Community That Drives CAC Down
Spacegoods went from 200 monthly product gifts to 1000+ creator partnerships that generate revenue and content for Meta ads. See how they built a self-funding influencer program with a team of 2.
Contents
Most DTC brands spending six figures on Meta hit the same wall: creative fatigue. You need fresh, authentic content constantly, but branded shoots get stale. The obvious answer is influencer marketing - except most brands get stuck in the mass gifting trap. Send hundreds of products monthly, hope for posts, repeat. It's a hamster wheel that never compounds.
Spacegoods, a UK wellness brand making mushroom-powered drinks, was caught in this exact cycle in early 2024. An external agency was shipping 200-300 free products monthly. Posts trickled in. Awareness spiked. Then nothing. No relationships. No measurement. No way to prove ROI.
Nine months later →
- They’re running 1000+ active influencer partnerships with a (part time) team of two people.
- Partnership content makes up their highest Meta ad contribution.
- The affiliate program generates revenue that funds paid partnerships.
- And creators engage with each other organically, creating social proof that looks completely authentic.
Watch the full interview with Dan,Stevenson, their Influencer Marketing Lead, on how he built a self-sustaining system.
The Problem: When Influencer Seeding Becomes a Dead End
When Spacegoods brought on Dan in March 2024, he came from a role where he managed 300 affiliates and 40-50 paid partnerships with a team of four people. The work was hands-on, manual, and required constant firefighting.
At Spacegoods, the situation was messier.
"We weren't really doing anything in terms of paid influencer spend. Pretty much everything was mass gifting. There was no longevity or relationship focus. Everything was just 'How do we get as much product out the door as possible.'"
This is textbook foundational influencer marketing - seeding products to build awareness.
In our Predictable Influence Pyramid, seeding sits at the base. It's here most brands start. You send free product, creators post, you get eyeballs. It works great for discovery.
But Spacegoods had already moved past the discovery phase. They didn't need more awareness - they needed conversion and content at scale.
The challenge: if they wanted to 10x their influencer program, they'd need to 10x the team. That math didn't work.
The Strategic Shift: Climbing to the Affiliate Level
The decision was clear - stop seeding entirely and move up the pyramid to affiliate partnerships.
This is the second tier: systematic relationships with commission structures that create repeatability.
Why did Spacegood choose affiliates over continued seeding?
Three reasons:
- Every partnership has a code. Every code has revenue attached. The measurement problem reduces.
- Relationships compound. Send someone free product once, you might get one post. Turn them into an affiliate with commission potential, you get posts for months.
- And most important for Spacegoods - affiliates create a sustainable content engine for their Meta ads.
But there's a psychological problem with the word "affiliate." It sounds transactional, like you're just trying to get free advertising. So they reframed it entirely.
Positioning: Community, Not Affiliate Program
Instead of "Join our affiliate program and earn commission," the pitch became "Join our community of wellness creators."
"The way that we initially position our affiliate program is we don't set deliverable expectations. We don't put contracts in place. We try to position it as a community rather than an affiliate program."
No mandatory posts. No contracts. No pressure. Just: here's your code, post when it makes sense, earn when you do.
This positioning shift matters. Creators don't want to feel like affiliates. They want to belong to something.
However, positioning alone doesn't solve the scale problem.
To manage 1000+ partnerships with two people, they needed automation everywhere.
How SARAL Automation Unlocked 3x Scale With Half the Team
At Dan’s previous job, managing 300 affiliates required a team of four. At Spacegoods, the budget was smaller but the ambition was bigger. They needed to manage 1000+ partnerships with minimal headcount.
The solution was to automate everything that didn't require human judgment.
"When I first reached out (to SARAL), I asked, how can we automate everything? How can we make it so it's really, really streamlined? How can we make sure everything's talking to Shopify? So I don't really have to do anything on the backend and just streamline that whole process, which has really been a massive time saver."
Influencer Discovery: Finding Influencers at Scale With Lookalike Search
Early on, they manually searched for influencers by keyword on SARAL - "mum creators" or "coffee”. This worked for the first 50-100 partnerships.
Now, they use SARAL's lookalike feature (powered by SIA!) . They take their best-performing paid influencers, drop them into the tool, and it finds 100+ similar creators in minutes.
This completely changed their discovery process. Instead of spending time manually hunting for influencers, they batch discover hundreds of qualified prospects in one sitting.
Influencer Outreach: Sending 100+ Personalized Emails in Minutes
Once they have a list of 100+ creators, SARAL's email automation handles the outreach. They queue personalized messages and the system manages follow-ups automatically.
"I can sit there at nine o'clock at night and pump out 100 emails without having to think about it. It's been a massive time saver."
This is the efficiency unlock. At his previous job, Dan spent a minimum of 12 hours per week on partnerships with a team of four. Now at Spacegoods, despite managing more partnerships, the time investment per creator is significantly lower.
"Every little bit of efficiency we can bring in is better."
Influencer Management: Zero Manual Work With Shopify Integration
The final piece is eliminating all administrative work.
Every affiliate automatically gets a code through Shopify integration. Every redemption automatically tracks to that creator. Payments flow through without manual reconciliation.
"SARAL enabled us to automate as much of the backend as possible. The system required as little input from me."
No spreadsheets. No manual tracking. No payment reconciliation. The system runs itself.
Measuring What Matters: CAC Over Vanity Metrics
Most influencer programs track reach, impressions, engagement rates - metrics that look good in reports but don't answer the question founders care about: is this lowering our CAC?
Spacegoods ignores vanity metrics entirely. They track three things:
- New customer volume from influencer codes
- CAC from organic influencer activity
- Meta contribution (percentage of ad spend going to partnership content)
With SARAL's performance dashboard, you can highlight metrics that show the a more holistic picture →
Measuring impact via direct attribution is not enough. There's another layer happening that's harder to quantify but equally valuable.
The Self-Funding Model: How Affiliate Revenue Fuels Paid Partnerships
Most brands treat affiliates as a standalone revenue channel. Spacegoods sees it differently.
"We do measure them for sales generation - but we see our partners as a way to offset some additional paid spend rather than as performance on their own channel. The idea of the affiliates is to try and de-risk the paid spend."
Here's how the model works:
Affiliates generate revenue through their codes - let's say $50K per month.
That's $50K Spacegoods can reinvest into paid influencer partnerships without touching their core marketing budget.
The affiliate program funds its own expansion and the expansion of their paid partnerships.
This creates a flywheel: affiliates fund paid partnerships → paid partnerships become case studies for affiliate recruiting → more affiliates join → more revenue to fund paid partnerships.
But the revenue is almost secondary to the content value.
The Real Value: Influencer Content as Meta Creative Strategy
Spacegoods runs significant Meta budgets. And increasingly, their best-performing ads come from creator content.
According to their paid media agency, Spacegoods has the highest partnership content contribution.
Why does creator content outperform? It doesn't look like an ad. It's someone real, in their kitchen, making their morning routine. It's authentic in a way branded content can't replicate.
To make this work at scale, you need a constant pipeline of fresh creator content. The affiliate program isn't just generating revenue - it's a content engine feeding their Meta ad account with high-performing creative.
This is the halo effect in action.
Affiliates drive direct revenue through codes, create content for Meta ads, and build social proof. The combined impact is larger than any single metric can capture.
The Results
- 1000+ active partnerships managed by 2 people
- 100+ new affiliates signed monthly through automated outreach
- Partnership content = highest Meta contribution
- Lower CAC through creator-driven acquisition
- Self-funding model: affiliate revenue offsets paid partnership spend
The system gets more efficient as it grows. More affiliates mean more content, which improves Meta performance, which drives more awareness, which attracts more creators who want to join the community.
It's predictable. It's scalable. And it runs on a team of two.
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