You have built something good. You have found a creator whose audience would genuinely want it. Then the video goes up, and your product is on screen for about as long as it takes to blink, wedged between the intro and a sponsor read for a mattress.
Nobody did anything wrong. The brief did.
The brief is the one part of a creator campaign you fully control. Everything after it belongs to the creator, and it should. So this is where your attention earns the most. Here is how we write ours, and what we have learned from the ones that went wrong.
Keep it to one page
A creator reads a brief on their phone, between edits, probably while something is rendering. If it runs to a second page, the second page does not get read. If it has an appendix, the appendix is decorative.
One page forces you to decide what matters. That is the point, and it is harder than it sounds, which is why most briefs are four pages of hedging. A brief is not a product document. It is a set of instructions for showing one thing to one audience, once.
Ours has seven parts, and they fit on a page with room to spare.
What goes in
What the product does, in a sentence a stranger would understand. Not your positioning line. Not the pitch deck. If your mum would need a follow-up question, rewrite it.
The one thing to show. Not three things. One. The feature that makes someone lean towards the screen. If you cannot choose, you do not have a brief yet; you have a wish list. Pick the moment where the product does something the viewer could not do before, and write down exactly what that looks like on screen.
The moment it clicks. Most products have a step where a new user goes from polite to interested. Tell the creator where it is, so they can build the demo towards it rather than wander past it.
What not to say. Claims you cannot support. Comparisons with other tools. Anything a lawyer has told you to avoid. Creators are not trying to get you in trouble; they just do not know where the lines are unless you draw them.
Where the link goes. A page built for this audience, with the creator’s code if there is one. Not your homepage. Not a sign-up wall that asks for a card before the product has appeared.
The disclosure. The exact wording the platform and the law require. Written out, not “please disclose as appropriate”.
Dates and deliverables. What is being made, how many, when it posts, and who approves what. If you want to see a cut before it goes live, say so here, and say how fast you will turn it round.
What to leave to the creator
Their voice. Their opening. Their jokes. Their opinion of your product, including the bits they do not love.
This is the part founders find hardest, so it is worth saying plainly: the creator’s audience is there for the creator. If the demo sounds like you, it will be skipped. If it sounds like them, it will be watched, even when they are mildly rude about your onboarding.
That includes the format, within reason. If you have briefed a short and the creator thinks the product needs a longer walkthrough to make sense, listen. They know what their audience watches to the end; you know what the product does. The brief is where those two kinds of knowledge meet, and it should be clear about which is which.
A good creator will usually find a better angle than the one you would have written. Give them the facts and the boundaries, then get out of the way.
The three mistakes founders make
Writing the script. You will be tempted. Resist. A script written by the founder reads like an advert, and the audience can tell from the thumbnail. Give talking points, not lines. If a creator asks for a script, that is a signal about the creator, not a reason to write one.
Briefing the whole product. Every feature, every integration, every plan. The creator cannot show it all, so they show none of it well. The demo becomes a tour of a menu. Choose one thing. If the product is big, run more than one creator with a different thing each, and let the campaign do the covering.
Briefing features instead of the problem. “It has an agent mode” means nothing to a viewer. “You describe the spreadsheet you want and it builds it while you watch” means something. Lead with the moment someone’s day gets easier, and let the feature name come second, if at all.
A quick test before you send it. Read the brief aloud to someone who has never seen the product. Then ask them to describe, in one sentence, what they would expect to see on screen. If their sentence matches the one thing you chose, send it. If it does not, you have found the problem before the creator did, which is cheaper.
Then trust the brief, trust the creator, and let the demo show your product. That is what the page was for.