Stack Influence began with a simple but frustrating problem: managing hundreds of small creators while running an e-commerce business. For William Gasner, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, that challenge wasn’t just theoretical, but personal as well.

“I was an Amazon seller for about 15 years,” William recalls. “We made millions of dollars on Amazon and our own Shopify sites, but finding, paying, and managing micro-influencers at scale was almost impossible.” 

That frustration became the foundation for Stack Influence, a Miami-based influencer marketing platform that automates collaborations between e-commerce brands and small-scale creators.

Today, the company is venture-backed, on pace to generate more than $5 million in annual revenue, and operates a global community of more than 600,000 creators. Its mission, as William puts it, is to “democratize the influencer industry,” to make it possible for everyday social media users with small but loyal audiences to work with brands just as easily as celebrity influencers do.

The Origin: From E-Commerce Frustration to Automation Vision

Before Stack Influence, William ran multiple e-commerce ventures, including a sustainable jewelry brand, OMstack, and a toy company, Stress Cube, as well as niche products such as teeth-whitening kits and cutting boards. Over time, he learned that micro- and nano-influencers often outperformed larger creators in terms of engagement and conversions.

“If you have a hundred thousand followers and 1% engagement, that’s a thousand likes,” he says. “But if you have 10,000 followers and 10% engagement, that’s also a thousand likes. I’d rather work with the person who has 10,000 followers. They’re cheaper, more engaged, and usually more aligned with a niche audience.”

The problem wasn’t in the strategy, but the scale. According to William, managing five celebrity partnerships was easy; managing a thousand micro-creators was not. “We wanted to figure out, instead of working with five or ten small creators, how we could do 100 or 1,000?” he says. “That became the real challenge: finding them, communicating with them, sending product, managing payments, and making sure they actually posted properly.”

To solve it, William and his co-founders built internal software to automate outreach, payments, and campaign tracking. As word spread among other online sellers, requests to use their internal tools poured in, and Stack Influence was born.

Solving the Micro-Influencer Challenge

From the start, William saw three main barriers: discovery, consistency, and management. “Finding micro and nano influencers was hard,” he explains. “You could find someone with 10,000 followers, but did their aesthetic align with your brand? Were they actually interested in promoting your product? Did they post brand-friendly content?”

Even when the right creators were found, maintaining relationships across multiple campaigns proved nearly impossible. “The platforms back then were just CRMs [Customer Relationship Management systems] with influencer emails,” he says. “You had to start from scratch every time.”

Stack Influence took a different approach, building not a database, but a community. The company developed a mobile and web app that allowed creators to opt in, follow consistent posting guidelines, and participate in recurring campaigns. 

“We now have 600,000 people in that community,” William says. “We also have data on about 21 million social profiles that could be a good fit, but the 600,000 are the ones doing things consistently. That’s what sets us apart.”

Scale Through AI and Automation

What began as a homegrown solution for e-commerce sellers has become a full automation system. Stack Influence enables brands to define campaign goals, upload product information, and set posting guidelines in minutes. “The entire campaign process is automated,” William says. “Brands sit back, track progress in a dashboard, and collect assets. They don’t have to lift a finger.”

As the company grew, automation became its competitive moat. “We’ve integrated AI so that communications, operations, and post-submission analysis are streamlined,” he explains. The platform automatically checks influencer posts for FTC [Federal Trade Commission] compliance, verifies that tags and product placements are correct, and ensures content appears on the intended social platform.

This infrastructure has allowed Stack Influence to scale beyond typical influencer software. “We can guarantee volume,” William says. “If a brand wants 3,000 influencers a month, we can actually deliver because we have data showing who consistently performs.”

Reaching Milestones and Building a Marketplace

Stack Influence bootstrapped its way to $1 million in revenue with just $1,000 in initial investment, a milestone William describes as “huge.” The company later raised a seed round led by Collab Capital and angel investors, validating its model.

Another key turning point came when the platform hit critical mass among creators. “Once we reached about 300,000 influencers, network effects kicked in,” he says. “Creators referred friends, brands saw us tagged in promotions, and growth became organic.”

The team also solved what William calls “the equilibrium problem,” i.e., the challenge of balancing supply and demand in a two-sided marketplace. “You might have thousands of influencers, but not enough brands, or vice versa,” he explains. “Once we reached scale on both sides, retention skyrocketed.”

Today, Stack Influence runs campaigns for both global corporations, such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and smaller e-commerce startups. “We serve both ends,” William says. “Our system lets brands that couldn’t previously afford influencer marketing now do it efficiently.”

The Campaign Process

Many of Stack Influence’s success stories come from online marketplace sellers, particularly on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop. “A marketplace is like a search engine,” William notes. “If you’re not on page one, you won’t make sales.”

By running influencer campaigns that drive external traffic to a brand’s listing, Stack Influence helps sellers signal to algorithms that their product is popular and relevant. “We’ve seen 13x ROI [Return on Investment] growth from these campaigns,” William says. “One brand went from 50 sales a month to 500 just by hitting the first page.”

One standout example involves AlterMe, a DNA health & fitness product. “We’ve seen some really great results with some of our partnership ads,” William says. The team also helps brands repurpose influencer content for paid media. “We’ve had clients who spent thousands on professional photo shoots, but an iPhone video from an influencer outperformed those ads by five times.”

Despite impressive results, not every campaign succeeds, and William is quick to acknowledge it. “Not every product works for influencer marketing,” he says. “We’ve run campaigns where we couldn’t reach a critical mass. Male-focused products are harder, because about 75% of creators willing to do promotions are women.”

Extremely niche or sensitive products also present challenges. “Someone selling a Tesla hubcap or an athlete’s foot cream. Those are tough,” he says. “People don’t want to go on social media and say, ‘Check out my foot fungus.’”

Stack Influence has responded by focusing on scalability and data. “Our minimum campaign size is 100 influencers,” he explains. “If you only work with five, the algorithm might bury those posts. But at scale, even if some underperform, you still get a strong ROI.”

The Balancing Act

Stack Influence’s model rests on a paradox of scaling influencer marketing without losing its essence. For William, that balance starts with how creators are onboarded. “When an influencer first collaborates with us, we only compensate them with a product,” he explains. “If you’re willing to do a post just for the product, you’d better like it. That’s the most authentic form of promotion.”

Once creators prove engagement and quality, they enter a tiered system with cash bonuses, commissions, and affiliate opportunities. “We’re not against paying creators,” he says. “People deserve to be paid for their work. But we want the first interaction to be honest; a real product testimonial, not just a paycheck.”

It’s an approach that’s helped the company maintain quality while operating at scale. “Authenticity breaks through the noise,” William says. “Especially now, when AI content is flooding feeds, genuine posts are more valuable than ever.”

Quality, AI, and the Next Phase

Heading into 2026, Stack Influence is preparing for a full brand refresh and a slate of new projects. “We’re revamping our website, but we’re also working on improving creator quality,” William says. “Quality means different things to different brands; some value aesthetics, others storytelling. We’re developing AI tools to analyze what actually performs best.”

Those tools will analyze captions, hooks, and visual elements to identify what drives content success. “Sometimes a blurry video of a dog sells more dog food than a perfect, polished ad,” he notes. “We want to give creators the data to become better and help brands get better results.”

The company is also expanding beyond initial collaborations into what William calls “syndication systems,” or repurposing content for ads, affiliate programs, and brand websites. “The idea is to get more long-term value from every campaign,” he says. “If creators succeed, brands succeed and vice versa.”

For William, the journey from small-town entrepreneur to tech founder has been shaped by one enduring lesson: community is the hardest thing to build and the hardest to replicate. “It’s easy for someone to say they have 20 million influencers in a database,” he says. “It’s hard for someone to say they have hundreds of thousands of people in a real community.”

That community, powered by automation, guided by authenticity, and grounded in data, is what Stack Influence hopes will define the next phase of influencer marketing. As William puts it, “We’re on a mission to make the creator economy accessible to everyone, and to do it at scale.”

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