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Why we built Calyo

Stephane Monmarson ·
New category

The problem no one was solving

Every influencer marketing platform works the same way: a database of creators, a set of filters, and a dashboard to manage campaigns. They digitized the spreadsheet, but they didn’t remove the manual work.

Brands still spend 40+ hours a month searching for creators, writing outreach emails one by one, tracking replies in Gmail, and screenshotting posts to prove ROI. The tools changed. The workflow didn’t.

Why existing tools fall short

Most platforms are built around a static database. You get access to millions of profiles with follower counts, engagement rates, and audience demographics. But there are two fundamental problems:

  1. Databases go stale. Creators change niches, lose engagement, or stop posting. A profile that was relevant six months ago might not be today.
  2. Filters don’t capture context. You can filter by location and category, but you can’t filter by “creators who post about clean beauty and shop at Erewhon.” That requires understanding content, not just metadata.

The result? Brands spend hours sifting through irrelevant profiles, send generic outreach that gets ignored, and lose track of campaigns across spreadsheets and email threads.

What we set out to build

We didn’t want to build a better database. We wanted to build an AI agent that does the work for you.

The idea was simple: what if you could describe the type of creator you want in plain English, and an AI would go find them, write personalized outreach, handle the negotiation, and track every post - all without you touching a spreadsheet?

That’s Calyo.

How it works

Calyo operates like a dedicated team member who never sleeps:

  • Discovery: You describe your ideal creator - “LA-based moms into clean beauty who post about Erewhon” - and Calyo searches Instagram and TikTok in real time. No database. No filters. Just natural language.
  • Outreach: For each creator, Calyo writes a personalized email that references their actual content. “Loved your Erewhon haul reel” performs very differently from “Dear creator, we’d love to collaborate.”
  • Negotiation: When creators reply, Calyo handles the back-and-forth. Rates, timelines, deliverables - it manages the conversation until you need to step in.
  • Tracking: Every Story, Reel, and Post mentioning your brand is automatically detected and pulled into one dashboard. No more manual screenshots.

The results speak for themselves

Early users are seeing:

  • 92% profile relevance (vs ~40% with traditional databases)
  • 35% response rate on outreach emails (vs 5% industry average)
  • 3x more creator content per campaign
  • 40 hours saved per month on manual work

These aren’t incremental improvements. They’re a fundamentally different way of working with creators.

A new category

We believe influencer marketing is entering a new era. The old model - database access + manual work - is being replaced by AI agents that execute entire workflows.

Calyo isn’t a better tool in an existing category. It’s a new category: the AI agent for influencer marketing.

We’re just getting started, and we’re excited to build this with the brands and creators who believe the way we work with influencers should be as smart as the content they create.

See the system in action: the Creator Operations Playbook walks through every step from discovery to program management. Or compare Calyo to the platforms we’re replacing.

Ready to see Calyo in action? Start for free or book a demo.