Collabstr
👤 Clayton Rannard & Kyle Dulay (BCIT classmates; a viral fake-follower audit (10k scans in 7 hrs) proved creator-economy demand they turned into a marketplace.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
Two BCIT students turned a viral fake-follower checker into the largest bootstrapped marketplace for hiring creators.
Will it work? · our read
Programmatic SEO. The marketplace itself is lightly defended — 10% fee, easy off-platform contact. What actually compounds is the programmatic-SEO buyer funnel, not network lock-in.
01How the money moves
Programmatic SEO ranks a page for each niche + city
→
Brand books a creator; payment held in escrow
→
Collabstr keeps about 10% of each booking
02The numbers
8 figuresEstimatereported revenue, $0 raised
2026-03
GMV isn't disclosed; at about a 10% take, 8-figure revenue implies roughly 9-figure GMV [our read]. Early Stage Journal
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- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026 · 1 figure here has no cited source
Early Stage Journal — bootstrapped to 8 figures, 900k+ users, $0 raisedForbes — 13,000 content pieces exchanged in a year; 66% micro-influencersCollabstr pricing — marketplace fee (10% free / 5% premium) + plansCrunchbase — Collabstr, founded 2019, $0 funding, VancouverCollabstr 2024 Influencer Marketing Report (first-party data)
Revenue: multiple outlets (Early Stage Journal, echoed elsewhere) report Collabstr bootstrapped to "eight figures in revenue" with $0 funding, attributed to the company — but we could not confirm it from a filing or dashboard, so not independently confirmed and tagged Stated. GMV is NOT separately disclosed; at a roughly 10% take, 8-figure revenue would imply about 9-figure GMV [our read] — do not read the revenue figure as GMV. User counts (1M+, 120+ countries), $17B+ industry size, and the 13,000 content-exchanges figure are company/press-stated. The programmatic-SEO wedge and the viral-audit origin are founder-described; the Google-dependency and disintermediation risks are our read, not founder statements. We never score you.