The Four Decisions, Answered Before Anything Else
Here is the answer up front, because the most common failure in a first campaign is spending a week planning and never sending anything. A first outreach campaign requires exactly four decisions and about thirty minutes of setup. Everything else is iteration that can only happen after the first invitations go out.
The four decisions, in the order you need to make them: whether to lead with samples or commission, whether to run one commission rate or a tiered structure, what number will tell you the campaign worked, and how many creators go in round one. That is the full list. Product selection, message copy, and creator sourcing all follow from these, and all three are cheap to change later.
This is written for the operator doing this for the first time: running a storefront in the US or Southeast Asia, somewhere between 10 and 50 SKUs, with no agency and no dedicated partnerships hire, who has been putting off outreach because it feels like it requires a plan. It does not require a plan. It requires four answers and a first batch of invitations.
Theo sells home organization products out of Denver, Colorado. Fourteen SKUs — drawer dividers, under-sink racks, cable management kits, a closet system. He spent eleven days reading about creator programs before sending his first invitation, and describes those eleven days as the least useful part of the whole project. What actually taught him anything was the third batch of messages, because by then he had replies to compare against.
Decision 1: Samples or Commission-First
This is the first decision because it determines who you can recruit and what your cash exposure is.
Lead with samples when your product is cheap to ship relative to its price, when the creator’s audience needs to see it to want it, and when your catalog is small enough that you know which single SKU fits each creator. Samples produce a higher reply rate from creators under about 30,000 followers, who are generally motivated by product.
Lead with commission when your unit cost makes broad sampling expensive, when the product is well understood and does not need demonstration, or when you are recruiting at higher follower tiers where creators expect to be paid on performance. Commission-first also scales faster, because there is no shipping step between yes and first post.
Run both if your catalog spans price bands — samples for the low-cost SKUs, commission-only for the expensive ones. This is the most common eventual structure and there is no reason not to start there if your catalog clearly splits.
The constraint worth naming: samples have a real failure mode that commission does not. Creators accept product and never post. Theo’s first batch had a no-post rate near one in three, and the only mitigation is tracking shipment against publish date rather than trusting that an accepted sample becomes a video. He tracks it in DAMI sample management, which holds the shipment date and the publish date on the same record — the alternative, a spreadsheet maintained by hand, is exactly the kind of second job that makes a solo seller stop doing outreach after three weeks.
The second constraint is that samples need a decision rule. A creator who accepts product and goes quiet for three weeks should not receive a second shipment, and without a rule that decision gets made emotionally. Theo’s rule: one sample, one follow-up at day ten, no second shipment unless a post appears. DAMI sample management makes the rule enforceable because it shows which creators are holding unposted product.
Decision 2: One Commission Rate or Tiered
A single rate is simpler and, for a first campaign, usually correct. One rate lets you learn what your category’s market rate actually is, because every reply is responding to the same number.
Tiered rates make sense when your creator pool spans a wide follower range and you intend to recruit at both ends. A structure as simple as two tiers — a base rate for creators under 50,000 followers and a higher rate above it — prevents the common failure of overpaying small creators and losing large ones.
What a first campaign should not do is build a complex tier structure with volume bonuses and performance accelerators. Theo watched another seller in his category launch with four tiers and a bonus ladder, and the creators could not explain the offer back to them. An offer a creator cannot restate in one sentence does not get accepted.
Decision 3: What Counts as Success
Pick one number before sending, because “see how it goes” produces no decision at the end of the month.
| Metric | Reasonable first-campaign target | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Reply rate | 20–30% on a relevance-filtered list | Whether targeting and copy work |
| Sample-to-post rate | 60%+ of accepted samples | Whether your creators follow through |
| Orders per active creator | Varies hugely by AOV | The only number that validates the program |
| Cost per order | Below your paid-ads equivalent | Whether to scale at all |
Theo’s honest read: he picked reply rate first, which was a mistake. A 34% reply rate felt like success and produced six orders. Reply rate measures whether your message was read; it does not measure whether anyone bought. For a second campaign he switched to orders per active creator and the program changed shape immediately, because that number exposed which creators were conversational and which were commercial.
The 30-Minute Sequence, Minute by Minute
Once the three decisions are made, setup itself is mechanical.
| Minute | Action | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 0–8 | Pick the one or two SKUs to lead with | A single product per creator tier |
| 8–15 | Set the commission rate and any tier split | A rate you can state in one sentence |
| 15–22 | Build a 30–40 creator list filtered by recent shoppable content | A relevance-filtered shortlist |
| 22–28 | Write one message with a per-creator opening sentence | One template plus one custom line |
| 28–30 | Set a daily sending cap and send the first batch | 8–10 invitations out |
The sending cap in the last row is not optional. Starting at eight to ten invitations per day and raising it weekly based on reply rate is the difference between building sending trust and losing it. Sellers who have a tool capable of sending hundreds generally send hundreds, and that is the single most common way a first campaign ends in a restriction rather than a learning cycle.
Note what is not in the table: no lengthy brief, no content guidelines document, no contract. Those are second-campaign artifacts. Theo wrote his content guidelines after seeing what his first twelve creators actually produced, which is the only point at which you know what needs guiding.
The fifteen minutes allocated to list building assume you have a sourcing method already. If you do not, spend a day on it before you start, and use that day in the DAMI creator library rather than in creator search — filter by country, then category, then recent shoppable content, and read the post histories. That single afternoon is the one part of a first campaign that genuinely cannot be compressed into thirty minutes, because a bad list makes every downstream number unreadable.
What a 30-Minute Setup Cannot Do
Stated plainly, because a fast setup has real limits.
It cannot tell you your market rate. Your first commission number is a guess. It will be wrong, and the first twenty replies are how you find out. Accept that the number is provisional and be willing to move it mid-campaign.
It cannot produce a representative result from thirty creators. A thirty-creator round produces directional signal — enough to reject an offer that nobody accepts, not enough to conclude that a rate is optimal. Treat round one as a test of the mechanism, not of the market.
It assumes you already have a relevant way to find creators. If you have no sourcing method, the fifteen minutes allocated to list building will not be enough, and that is the one step worth spending a day on before starting. Everything else genuinely is thirty minutes.
Setting the Four Decisions Up in DAMI
The four decisions map cleanly onto the workspace, and the reason to use one tool for a first campaign is that it keeps the decision and the evidence in the same place.
| Decision | Where it gets set |
|---|---|
| Sample vs commission-first | DAMI sample management, or commission-only invitation flow |
| Commission rate and tiers | DAMI targeted plan management |
| The 30–40 creator shortlist | DAMI creator library, filtered by recent shoppable content |
| Sending pace | DAMI bulk invitations with a daily cap |
| Whether it worked | DAMI store data view, orders by creator |
DAMI targeted plan management is where the commission decision lives, and keeping it there rather than in a document means the rate a creator sees is the rate you decided — a spreadsheet rate and a live rate drift apart within about two weeks. DAMI sample management handles the other branch: it tracks what shipped and what got posted, which is the only reliable way to learn your own sample-to-post rate, and it enforces the one-sample rule described earlier without anyone having to remember it.
The DAMI creator library builds the shortlist in the fifteen minutes the sequence allows, because the country, category, and recency filters are applied in one pass. DAMI bulk invitations pace the sends against the daily cap, and DAMI AI message generation produces the body of each message once the opening line is written. The DAMI store data view answers decision three honestly, because it shows orders rather than replies — the distinction that cost Theo his first month of false confidence.
Worth stating what this does not do: none of it tells you whether your rate is right, and no amount of DAMI configuration substitutes for twenty conversations with creators who tell you what they are being offered elsewhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many creators should the very first batch include? Eight to ten invitations on day one, building to 30–40 across the first week. Small enough that a targeting mistake is cheap, large enough that you get replies to learn from.
Should I set up a formal brief before contacting anyone? No. Write the brief after your first dozen creators post, based on what they actually produced. A brief written in advance describes content you have not seen. The one thing worth deciding in advance is the commission rate, and it belongs in DAMI targeted plan management rather than in a document, so the rate a creator sees cannot drift from the rate you decided.
What if nobody replies? Check relevance before rewriting copy. A sub-10% reply rate almost always means the creator list was built from self-described categories rather than from creators who have demonstrably sold in your category.
How long before I know whether the campaign worked? Two weeks for reply and post rates, four to six weeks for orders. Judge the mechanism at two weeks and the economics at six; do not judge economics at two. Theo reads both in the DAMI store data view, which is the only place replies and orders sit next to each other — reading them in separate tools is how he spent a month believing a 34% reply rate was success. The general DAMI data dashboard KPIs are useful background for the order-side metric.
Can I change the commission rate mid-campaign? Yes, and you probably will. Changing the rate invalidates comparison between early and late creators, so track which cohort saw which rate.
Decide in Thirty Minutes, Learn for a Month
The sellers who get value from a first campaign are not the ones with the best plan, they are the ones who sent early enough to run a second round. See how DAMI holds the commission decision, the shortlist, and the sending pace in one workspace on the product page, or create your account to send your first batch today.
