Substack · Deep-diveRavi Mehta
“Turn product guessing into product validation”
The long-form essay and deep-dive video — the anchor asset every other placement was cut from.
Read on Substack →Case study · Dazl · 2026
Inside a B2B SaaS creator campaign. Start to finish.
An influencer-marketing invoice mostly buys things you can’t see on it. The reporting and scheduling are the thin slice. The strategy, the briefs and hooks, the judgment, and the read on what the numbers mean — that’s the work. Here is one real campaign, scrappy start to finished assets.
The short answer
Resonant ran an end-to-end creator campaign for Dazl, a spec-driven AI prototyping tool, with two product-leadership creators, Ravi Mehta and Dan Olsen. One Substack deep-dive was cut down across LinkedIn video, X, and a 21,000-member Slack community. Seven organic placements produced 35,000–40,000 impressions, 15,000–20,000 people reached, and 35–40 hours of watch time — with roughly half the audience in software, tech, or IT, and three-quarters at 11–500-person companies.
- Client
- Dazl — spec-driven AI prototyping (dazl.dev)
- Category
- B2B SaaS · developer & product tooling
- Buyer
- Hands-on product managers who choose their own tools
- Creators
- Ravi Mehta, Dan Olsen
- Channels
- LinkedIn, Substack, X, a private Slack community
- Deliverables
- 2 Substack pieces, 2 LinkedIn videos, 1 X post, 1 Slack walkthrough, 1 hosted landing page
- Timeline
- A quarter of sustained presence — seven placements released in waves, across three time zones
- Model
- End-to-end — strategy, sourcing, contracting, creative, launch, measurement
01 — The results
What one creator campaign delivered: seven placements, two creators.
Figures are banded — the exact per-post counts belong to the client and the creators. Everything below is organic, before any paid amplification, in a deliberately narrow product-management niche.
35–40k
Impressions
Across every organic placement — two LinkedIn feeds, a LinkedIn group, X, and a 21,000-member Slack community.
15–20k
People reached
Unique members, not impressions. Roughly half of them sat in software development, tech, or IT services.
12–15k
Video views
About a third of all impressions turned into a video view — a ratio that held steady across both creators.
35–40
Hours watched
Cumulative watch time. How long people stayed is what separated the two posts below.
About half
of the audience sat in software development, technology/internet, or IT services — squarely the market Dazl sells into.
Roughly three-quarters
worked at companies of 11–500 people: the startup-to-scale-up band where a PM can adopt a tool without a procurement cycle.
Nearly eight in ten
were senior or entry-level individual contributors — the hands-on PMs who pick their own tooling rather than approve someone else’s.
Named engineering orgs
showed up in the reached audience — Atlassian, Google DeepMind, GitHub, Wix — alongside Dazl’s own team.
02 — How it came together
How a creator campaign comes together, in five moves.
A quarter of sustained presence, three time zones, and a long tail of decisions that never appear on an invoice.
Dazl × Resonant
how it actually came together
seven placements · released in waves · three time zones
Discovery & strategy
It starts with a conversation
Working sessions to turn a vague goal into a campaign with a shape: audience, deliverables, attribution.
Their first angle wouldn’t have landed. We reframed it before a dollar was spent.
Sourcing & briefing
We find the right voices
Two creators matched to the audience, vetted, and briefed on the product until they could speak to it for real.
Contracting & rights
The paperwork nobody sees
Agreements, usage rights, IP, cross-border payments. We’re the single point of contact for all of it.
Get the rights wrong and the asset becomes a liability.
Concept & creative
Then the actual craft
Concepts, revision rounds, edits across formats, every asset kept pointed at the strategy.
Most of the work, and most of the judgment, lives here.
Launch & amplification
Launch, in sequence
A waterfall rollout across every format, then paid boosting alongside the client’s media agency.
We caught missing UTMs before go-live that would have broken attribution for the whole launch.
a real exchange from the project
DDazl × ResonantLanding page
Dazl
Looks great, but it reads like a blog post, not a landing page. A soft CTA won’t drive sign-ups, will it?
14:02Resonant
On purpose. Host it on your domain and you own the traffic, retarget every click from LinkedIn, and it builds your search visibility.
14:09Resonant
A hard CTA backfires on LinkedIn. We want the hand-off to feel organic. Easy to add a top-of-page button if you’d rather.
14:09Dazl
Makes sense. Let’s keep it.
14:25This is what you’re paying for: the reasoning behind the asset.
03 — What we shipped
How one Substack deep-dive became four channels.
The Substack deep-dive was the anchor. Everything else is that same argument, re-cut for where a different slice of the audience reads.
LinkedIn · VideoRavi Mehta
“The hardest UX debates aren’t won in meetings.”
The long-form piece, cut down for social. The reach engine of the campaign.
View on LinkedIn →X · PostDan Olsen
The same story, cut for a different audience — with the tracked link baked in.
View on X →Slack · CommunityDan Olsen
The eight-minute product walkthrough, dropped straight into the room where the buyers already talk to each other.
Shared in a PM community on Slack with 21,000 members
Two creators, four channels, all cut from the same anchor asset.
04 — The read
Why audience fit beat reach: two posts, same campaign.
Both creators posted the same argument to LinkedIn. A dashboard ranks them one way. The campaign read them the other way.
| Post | Share of impressions | Avg watch | Engagement rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| The broad-reach post | ~90% | Under 10s | ~0.2% |
| The narrow, on-audience postWinner | ~7% | 20s+ | ~2% |
A dashboard ranks the broad post first: it carried about nine in ten of the campaign’s impressions, more than ten times the narrow post’s. But the narrow post held attention twice as long and engaged its audience at roughly ten times the rate, because nearly everyone who saw it was the buyer. Same argument, same week, same platform.
So the move is to keep the broad post for top-of-funnel and branded-search lift, put budget behind the narrow post’s creator and format, and stop optimising for views. That reallocation is worth more than any screenshot.
05 — What you’re paying for
What a creator campaign buys you: six things, none of them ops.
They show up in every campaign we run, in the same order.
01 · Messaging lens
A sharper read on what lands
A stronger sense of what will convert than the brand or the creator has alone.
02 · Creator selection
The right voices, on purpose
Creators chosen for audience fit and depth, not follower count.
03 · Experimentation
Built to teach you something
Hooks and formats designed so the campaign tells you what worked, and why.
04 · Orchestration
Held together end to end
Briefing, contracting, rollout, and amplification, across three time zones.
05 · Interpretation
A read on what the numbers mean
What the figures say about your buyer, and what to do next.
06 · Less to own
Off your team’s plate
The whole load handled, so you stay on the product.
06 — In-house
Should you run creator marketing in-house? What that really means.
You can do all of this. The question is whether it’s the best use of your team, and whether you’ll catch the things that only show up once.
What has to happen
- Turn a goal into a creator-ready brief with hooks that scale.
- Source and vet creators for real engagement and audience fit.
- Get each one deep enough on the product to be convincing.
- Draft and mirror agreements: usage rights, durations, IP.
- Run revision rounds without bruising the relationship.
- Sequence the rollout, enforce UTMs, wire up attribution.
- Coordinate paid boosting, then read spend against pipeline.
What can go wrong
- The angle is wrong, and you find out after it’s live and flat.
- A shoutout doesn’t convert, and you’ve already paid.
- Loose usage rights or FTC disclosure turn an asset into a liability.
- A missing UTM means you can’t tell what worked.
- Assets all drop the same day and cannibalise each other.
- A creator pushes back, delivers late, or under-delivers.
- You get vanity metrics and no idea what to change.
Every one of these happened, or nearly happened, on the campaign above. Most you’d never see, because catching them is the job.
“Ops” was never the product. The product is the strategy that set the angle, the judgment in every concept and contract, the orchestration that held a multi-wave launch together. Then the read that turns a flat dashboard into a decision.
— The bottom line
Common questions
What brands ask about this campaign.
What does a B2B SaaS creator campaign actually involve?
Strategy and messaging, creator sourcing and vetting, product briefing deep enough that the creator can speak to the tool unscripted, contracting and usage rights, concept and revision rounds across every format, a sequenced multi-channel rollout with UTMs enforced before go-live, paid amplification, and a read of the results. On the Dazl campaign that ran across three time zones over a quarter of sustained presence: waves of placements rather than a single drop.
What results should a B2B SaaS company expect from one creator campaign?
The Dazl campaign produced 35,000–40,000 impressions, 15,000–20,000 unique people reached, 12,000–15,000 video views, and 35–40 hours of cumulative watch time from seven organic placements by two creators. Those are organic numbers before paid amplification, in a narrow product-management niche. Volume scales with creator size and channel count. Audience quality is the number that predicts pipeline.
Why does audience quality matter more than reach in B2B creator marketing?
Because the buyer pool is small. On this campaign about half the audience sat in software development, technology, or IT services, roughly three-quarters worked at 11–500-person companies, and nearly eight in ten were hands-on individual contributors who pick their own tools. A post with a fraction of the reach but the right audience beats a post with far more views and the wrong one — and on this campaign, the smaller post held attention more than twice as long and engaged its audience at roughly ten times the rate.
Should we run creator marketing in-house or with an agency?
You can run it in-house — the question is whether it is the best use of your team and whether you will catch the failures that only show up once. Briefing, sourcing, rights, revision rounds, rollout sequencing, UTM enforcement, and interpretation are all real jobs. On the Dazl campaign we caught missing UTMs before go-live that would otherwise have broken attribution for the whole launch, and we reframed the client’s original angle before any money was spent.
Which platforms work for B2B SaaS creator campaigns?
LinkedIn, Substack, X, and YouTube carry the builder audience, with private communities (Slack and Discord) as a high-trust fifth surface. The Dazl campaign ran a Substack deep-dive as the anchor asset and cut it down for LinkedIn video, X, and a 21,000-member product-management Slack community. Instagram and TikTok rarely reach a B2B software buyer at the moment they are choosing tooling.
Who were the creators on the Dazl campaign?
Ravi Mehta and Dan Olsen — both established product-leadership voices with genuinely technical audiences. Both are part of the Resonant roster, matched to Dazl for audience fit and product depth rather than follower count.
Want a campaign that runs like this one?
Let’s talk strategy. We’ll walk you through what this looks like for your category.