Your own people should find your creators. A founder, intern or VA who knows your brand beats any database at fit, and a database only adds filters. If you're a Shopify brand gifting 20 to 500 creators a month and your team finds the creators, you don't need a discovery platform like GRIN or Modash. You need a gifting-operations tool for everything after yes.
This post is the method for the finding half, with no software required. The second half of the post is about the part that actually eats your week, because that is where most small brands lose their hours.
Finding is judgment work, running is ops
Most brands think their influencer problem is finding creators. Finding is the fun part and it needs taste. Running is everything that happens once a creator says yes, and it is mechanical. Treat them as two jobs with two different tools.
| Finding (keep it human) | Running (automate it) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Taste, brand fit, a DM in your own voice | Product pick, size, address, order, tag, ship, follow up, track the post |
| Who is good at it | Someone who knows your brand and your customer | Software |
| What a database adds | Filters and follower counts. It doesn't know if they fit you. | Nothing |
| What eats the hours | Not much, and you can time-box it | Nearly all of it, per creator, every time |
| Tool | Instagram and TikTok search, your tagged posts, your customer list, an intern | A gifting-operations tool such as Seed |
Five places to look that a database can't see
The basic tactics (niche hashtags, competitor tag tabs, location tags) are already covered in how to find creators to gift products to, how to find Instagram influencers and how to find micro-influencers. I won't repeat them. These five are the ones a database structurally can't search, because the signal lives in places only a person looking at your brand will check.
1. Your own inbox, tagged posts and story mentions
Open the message requests folder on your brand account, your tagged tab and your story mentions. People who reached out unprompted have already told you they like the product. Log them first. They are the warmest names you will ever have.
2. Customers who sent a photo or video
Filter your reviews for the ones with a photo or video and look up the reviewer on Instagram or TikTok. A customer with a modest audience who has already filmed your product is a better first gift than a stranger with ten times the followers.
3. The comment sections under your competitors' Reels
The tag tab shows who posted about a competitor. The comments show who watched and cared enough to reply. Open the three most-watched Reels from a competitor one size up from you and read the comments for accounts that look like real people with their own content. This is a different list from the tag tab, and it is smaller and more engaged.
4. The following list of a creator you already like
Creators follow other creators in their niche. Take one account that is a perfect fit and scan who they follow and who follows them back. You are using their taste as a filter, which is exactly what a database cannot do.
5. A trained feed
Spend a week deliberately searching, saving and liking posts in your niche from a clean account. Both Instagram and TikTok will start suggesting similar creators, including small ones that no filter would rank. Check the suggested accounts each time you open the app and log the good ones.
Run gifting on Shopify with Seed
Send one link. Creators pick their products and address. A draft order lands in your Shopify admin.
What to check before you DM
A three-minute check is enough for a gifting pool. Open the profile and ask five things in this order:
- Does the last month of posts look like your customer's feed, not just your category?
- Have they posted in the last 30 days, and do they post regularly?
- Do the comments on three recent posts read like real people talking?
- Is there a way to reach them (DM open, email in bio)?
- Do they ship to a country you ship to?
Anything that fails goes in the log as a no with a reason, so nobody re-checks it next week. For the engagement benchmarks and a scoring rubric, read how to select influencers and micro-influencer scoring. For bought-follower patterns, see avoiding influencer gifting fraud.
How long finding takes
I'm not going to quote you a stopwatch figure I haven't measured. What I can tell you is the shape of it. Finding is a batch task. You can put a fixed block in the calendar, say two or three sessions a week, and stop when the block ends. The list grows at whatever rate your searching produces, and you can see the rate in the log. If a session yields no new vetted names, change where you are looking, not how long.
A good week of finding produces a list that is longer than your gifting capacity. That is the point where finding stops being the constraint.
Where the real hours go: everything after yes
I run a DTC water-purifier brand doing about $2M a year, and I built Seed because our own store needed it. The finding was never the problem. What eats the week is the list of tasks that repeat for every creator once they say yes. In our experience, per creator, that is:
- 3 to 8 DM round-trips to get the product choice, the size and a complete address
- 5 to 10 minutes to hand-type each Shopify draft order
- Spreadsheet updates as the status changes
- Address fixes after the courier flags a missing unit or postcode
- Follow-ups to find out whether they posted
None of this needs judgment, and it multiplies with every creator you add. Finding 30 great creators is an afternoon. Running 30 gifts by hand is a week.
That is the gap a gifting-operations tool fills. With Seed, you send the creator one branded link. They pick the product and variant, with images and live stock, and type their own address. A real $0 Shopify draft order lands in your admin, tagged by campaign. Nothing becomes an order until a person approves it, and because it is a normal Shopify order your 3PL or fulfillment flow doesn't change. It does not find creators for you, and it is not meant to. For the full address-collection side, see how to collect creator shipping addresses.
If your team is thinking about handing the finding to an intern or a VA, the influencer sourcing SOP for interns and VAs is a copy-paste version of everything above. If you are starting from zero on Shopify, the first-30-days plan puts the finding and running halves in order.
When a database is the right call
I'm not against databases. Modash, Upfluence and Heepsy are good at what they do, which is filtering a very large pool by follower range, location, audience split and engagement. They are the right call if you need thousands of creators in a niche you don't know yet, if you are entering a new country, or if you have nobody on staff who can spend time looking. Modash also does Shopify-connected gifting now.
GRIN, CreatorIQ and Traackr bundle discovery with contracts, payouts and reporting. They fit brands running hundreds of paid deals with a full-time influencer team. GRIN was listed at $0 to $1,500 a month when we checked on 2026-08-19, and several others don't publish prices. If your business looks like that, buy one of them.
If it doesn't, pay for the half that is eating your week. Social media influencer databases compares the options in more detail.
Who should not pick Seed
If you gift fewer than about five creators a month, do it by hand. A DM and a hand-made draft order in Shopify admin is fine at that volume. If you want a tool that finds creators for you, Seed isn't it: we have no discovery database, no contracts and no affiliate payouts. If you run hundreds of paid deals with usage rights, you want an enterprise platform.
Seed is for the middle: a Shopify brand gifting 20 to 500 creators a month whose own team finds the creators. See pricing (Starter $79 a month for 50 gift orders, Seed $199 a month unlimited, 7-day free trial) or the Shopify App Store listing, where we have 5.0 stars on a small number of reviews.
The three kinds of influencer software, and which one a brand your size needs: discovery tools vs gifting operations tools.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find influencers for my brand for free?
Start with people who already touched your brand: accounts that tag you, customers who left photo reviews, and people who comment on your competitors' posts. Then spend a time-boxed block each week on Instagram and TikTok search, and log every candidate in one sheet with a link, a niche note and a yes or no on fit.
Do I need an influencer database to find creators?
Not if someone on your team can spend a few hours a week looking. A database gives you filters such as follower range, location and engagement, but it cannot tell you whether a creator fits your brand. It earns its price when you need thousands of names in a niche you don't know yet, or have nobody to do the looking.
Who should find influencers: the founder, an intern or a VA?
Whoever knows your brand and customer best should write the brief, and an intern or VA can do the looking against it. Keep the final yes with a person who has seen your best customers. See the sourcing SOP for interns and VAs for a copy-paste version.
How many creators should I find before I start contacting anyone?
Build a list of about 20 vetted names, contact the best 10 to 15, and learn from the replies before you widen the search. A small, well-matched first batch teaches you more than a long list you send to all at once.
What takes the most time in influencer marketing, finding or running it?
In our experience, running it. Finding is a batch task you can time-box. After a creator says yes you still have 3 to 8 DM round-trips for product, size and address, 5 to 10 minutes to hand-type each draft order, spreadsheet updates, address fixes and posting follow-ups, and that repeats for every creator.
