Billo, a Lithuania-based startup once known for its simple user-generated content (UGC) marketplace, is now positioning itself as a data engine for predictable, scalable ad performance. Its promise: to turn creator videos into measurable growth assets for brands across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. 

When co-founder & CEO Donatas Smailys describes what his company does, he doesn’t resort to buzzwords. “It’s reels, ads, partnership ads as a system, not random actions,” he says. “Especially for those advertising on Meta. They know exactly what that means.”

The company’s repositioning reflects a broader shift in the creator economy: performance, not presence, now defines value. 

“Creative marketing today is a bunch of random actions,” Donatas says. “We wanted to make it systematic, to turn chaos into a loop that keeps getting smarter.”

Billo founders Tadas Deksnys & Donatas Smailys

From Startup Incubator to Startup Builder

Before launching Billo, Donatas spent years connecting ideas rather than selling them. As the CEO of Kaunas University of Technology’s Startup Space, he helped early-stage founders turn campus projects into companies. “I was the connector,” he recalls. “The guy linking labs and classrooms to real business.”

That experience, he says, built a hunger to create something of his own. After leaving the incubator, Donatas joined a friend in 2018 to develop a micro-influencer marketing platform. The timing coincided with the rise of influencer marketing as a new advertising frontier. But he saw a structural flaw: measuring performance was nearly impossible.

“It was very hard to measure results,” he says. “And why would brands only pay famous people to get good content? Why not let their own users create it?”

That insight sparked Billo’s founding idea: democratize content creation. The early platform allowed anyone to produce short videos for brands’ product pages or ads. The vision resonated, and Billo quickly became known for one thing: simple, affordable UGC at scale.

But, as competition grew, Donatas realized that a single service wasn’t enough. “We were the first niche platform to do this one trick,” he says. “Then copies started popping up everywhere. So how do you stand out?”

The answer, it turned out, wasn’t more creators. It was better systems.

Rebuilding Billo: From Marketplace to Stack

This year, Billo began its most ambitious transformation yet. The company redefined itself as a creator marketing stack, i.e., an integrated system that unites creative production, data, and performance insights under one roof.

“None of these platforms, including us, were sophisticated,” Donatas says. “Creator marketing was just random actions. So we asked ourselves: what could be the airplane for this industry?”

That question led to the development of CreativeOps™, Partnerships Hub, and Billo Labs: three interconnected layers forming the backbone of the new Billo platform.

CreativeOps™ functions as the platform’s AI-driven brain. It draws on data from more than 326,000 video ads, representing $505 million in purchase value and $269 million in ad spend, to guide every creative decision. Brands can paste a product link into the Brief Builder and instantly receive data-backed concepts, matched with top-performing creators in their category.

“Data can show you the direction. It can’t guarantee outcomes,” Donatas explains. “But direction matters. It’s the difference between guesswork and informed creativity.”

The Partnerships Hub extends Billo’s role beyond production. Brands can now collaborate with creators not just to make videos, but to post them organically, run partnership ads from their own handles, and even share in performance revenue. “The creator becomes a new point of sale for your business,” Donatas says. “It’s outcome-based collaboration instead of one-off transactions.”

Finally, Billo Labs serves as the company’s research arm, converting campaign data into benchmarks and public insights. These findings feed back into CreativeOps™, closing what Donatas calls the “compounding loop” between content, performance, and iteration.

“Our top clients were already doing this on their own,” he says. “Most had Excel sheets tracking creators, ads, and results. We just built the system to make that faster and smarter.”

Data Creativity

Billo’s approach challenges one of the biggest inefficiencies in digital advertising: the gap between creative production and performance insight. With social algorithms increasingly favoring volume and experimentation over static campaigns, Donatas believes brands now need constant streams of fresh content to test and iterate.

“The algorithms don’t care how many followers you have,” he says. “You post a video that performs, and it wins. That’s it.”

CreativeOps™ automates much of this trial-and-error process. The system benchmarks ads by return on ad spend (ROAS), click-through rate (CTR), and hook rate, generating next-step recommendations based on real outcomes. Top creators on Billo reportedly deliver videos that beat industry medians for ROAS, CTR, or hook rate in 68% of eligible campaigns, while brands see 31% lower Cost per ThruPlay and 19.5% lower cost per action (CPA) compared to industry averages.

Donatas describes the process as a “feedback loop that compounds.” Each campaign informs the next brief, improving not just individual ads, but the entire system. “It’s like a creative engine that gets smarter every time a video ships,” he says.

Still, he insists that AI serves only as an enhancer, not a replacement for human creativity. “AI is not a face,” he says. “It’s a tool. We’re not cloning creators. We’re helping real humans make better ads faster.”

Human-First in an AI Age

As AI-generated influencers flood social feeds, Donatas has grown skeptical of the trend. He worries less about automation and more about authenticity.

“For AI to pretend to be a human, it doesn’t exist, it’s dangerous,” he says. “I find myself scrolling the feed and thinking, is this real or not? It’s exhausting.”

He predicts a counter-movement is coming. “Give it three, six months,” he says. “There’s going to be human-only content again. There’s always a counter-reaction.”

His proposed solution is simple transparency: tag AI-generated personas and keep them separate from real creators. “If people know it’s fiction, fine,” he says. “I’d watch a character like The Witcher because I know it’s a character. But if it pretends to be real, that’s a problem.”

In the meantime, Billo continues to bet on authentic content. Every video on the platform is made by real creators sharing genuine experiences, a stance Donatas believes will become increasingly valuable as synthetic and human content mingle.

Building With, Not Just For, Clients

For Donatas, data and systems matter, but relationships still define success. After years of experimentation, Billo introduced a quarterly product-market fit survey inspired by Superhuman’s methodology. The goal: measure not just satisfaction, but dependency.

“We ask clients how disappointed they’d be if Billo disappeared,” he explains. “If it’s above 40%, you have product-market fit.”

That feedback loop now drives about 70% of the company’s decisions. “We build with our customers, not just for them,” he says. “But we also have to ask: what’s our airplane? What could change things significantly?”

It’s a balance of intuition and evidence, or what Donatas calls “a harmony of gut and data.”

“You’ll never have all the information to make a decision,” he says. “Seventy percent is enough.”

What to Expect from Billo?

The next phase of Billo’s development begins this month, when the first batch of top clients start using Billo 2.0. The broader rollout is expected in early 2026.

“The mountain we’re climbing is clear,” Donatas says. “Our dream is to be that fully functioning system, where brands and creators grow together through performance.”

That goal marks a turning point not only for Billo, but for creator marketing as a whole. As more brands treat creator campaigns as structured growth channels, budgeted alongside paid search or performance media, the demand for scalable, data-oriented systems is rising fast.

Donatas sees a future of long-term partnerships, not one-off collaborations. “Creators can define a brand’s tone of voice,” he says. “Their creativity and authenticity are what make people trust.”

And after six years leading Billo’s transformation, Donatas’s biggest lesson comes down to simplicity.

“Less is most of the time more,” he concludes. “It’s easy to add things, but so difficult to subtract.”

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