“Everyone will come to me — hey, we should work with this person, they have a million followers. I don't care. Followers means nothing to me… Why am I going to pay for a million followers when only a thousand people saw it?”
App Marketing by App Masters · September 2026
Castillo runs growth for the calorie-tracking app Cal AI and calls this one of the company's contrarian takes. He buys on average views per video rather than audience size, and says the arbitrage is in creators going viral from brand-new accounts who haven't yet learned to charge influencer rates. Brands that price on followers, he argues, are paying for people who never watched the video.
Transcript
…like 10 followers and my video just pops up as people are scrolling. Like no one's following me, but my video pops up as people are scrolling through their For You page. And it'll just like, and that's why you got to play the algorithmic game and hope that your video is viral and hits their algo.
I can go forever with you, Jake. So you just stop me. But is there a minimum follower count that you see for influencers?
…million followers. Like, I don't care. Followers means nothing to me. What matters is how many views they get on average per video. Because let's say there's a creator that has a million followers, but gets a thousand views per video. So it's not like if he posted a video for Cal AI, he's not speaking to his million followers. He's speaking to the thousand people that watched his video. So like, why am I going to pay for a million followers when only a thousand people saw it? And vice versa. There are creators and like these are the ones you want to work with where they are already successful, but time just hasn't caught up yet because like they're averaging a million views a video, but they only have like 500 followers because they're a brand new account and they're just going mega viral and resonating with people really strongly. Like those are the people like, you…
i see i love that i love the contrarian views so how are there any tools that you like to use and i like i have a few that i can point out too but that show the average views are you just looking at now point out i love i'm a big an fl fan and so i follow this meme account but are you just looking…
do i look at what i call the worst case scenario average view so i'm looking at like they're like let's say if we're looking at the 20 there are 20 recently posted videos okay i'm looking at the like the 10 worst performing videos or the five worst performing of those 20 and like of those five…
i mean they're pretty good dude like the word i saw was maybe 500 000 right here but yeah and