From FlowUs to Buildin: After Reaching 300,000 Organic Users, the Team Started to Feel Anxious

Zhaofei Wang has a very clear founder vibe. He does not like to wait.

After more than a decade building productivity tools and SaaS, he has an almost instinctive way of separating “this works” from “this is not enough.” “This works” means you have found real demand. “Not enough” means you still have not found speed.

When he talks about how he started, it is straightforward. He began focusing on productivity tools and SaaS in 2012 and noticed that tools in China had long been fragmented: notes were for notes, docs were for docs, collaboration was for collaboration. Each was strong on its own, but there was no all in one workspace. Notion existed abroad, but there was a gap at home. So in 2021, he jumped back into building, aiming to make “knowledge management plus team collaboration” a more complete product. Flowus launched in early 2022. It grew through organic adoption and word of mouth, with user migration and sharing happening gradually.

Precisely because they had already lived through that “slow and steady” phase, they launched Buildin in 2024, targeting overseas markets, and grew organically to nearly 300,000 users in one year.

But once they reached that scale, the team started to feel anxious. They had tried SEO and social content, but Zhaofei Wang categorized those as “long cycle efforts” that could not support a much bigger growth target for the year. If they wanted significantly more growth this year, they needed a more efficient lever than relying on internally produced content. That is the logic that put influencer marketing onto the main growth track.

Buildin’s growth engine: making sharing the default behavior

It is easy to lump Buildin into the same category as tools like Notion or Craft. But the team prefers to explain it through user behavior. It is not just a place to write docs and collaborate. It puts “build and share” at the center.

There are two layers to this differentiation.

1) Build and share: making “beautiful, complex pages” a default capability

Zhaofei Wang put it like this: “Users can build a structurally complex page with strong aesthetics inside the product, then share it externally.” For them, “a page that looks good and can be shared” is the core growth mechanism. Once sharing happens, the conversion loop starts naturally: someone sees it, gets curious, and tries it.

That loop defines Buildin’s organic growth model. Content created inside the product becomes a distribution node, and user sharing becomes the growth action.

2) Layer monetization on top of sharing: paid knowledge base subscriptions make sharing more motivated

On top of “build and share,” they added a more direct path to user monetization: paid knowledge bases or subscriptions plus a revenue share mechanism. Users can build a knowledge base, share it publicly, and set paid subscriptions. For users who want to monetize, the product lays the groundwork early by making “content monetization” part of the workflow.

This creates a key “self growing” user segment: people already selling templates, teaching others how to build templates, or producing knowledge content in the Notion ecosystem. They naturally move across tools and distribute across platforms. They are both content producers and distributors, with a built in micro viral effect.

With product differentiation, user driven sharing, and community self organization, including users who independently set up and run Telegram groups, Buildin grew organically to nearly 300,000 users in a year.

Organic growth driven by irregular sharing spikes can be volatile. When the team wanted “bigger growth this year,” they needed faster feedback cycles and a more efficient growth lever. That is when influencer marketing entered the picture.

First time running influencer marketing: not rookie chaos, but strategic experiments

Buildin had not done influencer marketing before. The marketing lead, Dajin, previously relied mainly on her own content. This time, it was almost their first real run, and they went straight to AhaCreator. They did not go through an agency, and they did not build an in house outreach workflow as a transition.

Dajin described the first round as a sense of relief after finally getting the motion right. They did not spend much, but they did not have to manually email creators or go through the tedious process of finding people one by one. Their first round budget was $5,000 with a target of 25 pieces of content. Small steps first, then gradually scale.

After running a small batch of influencer collaborations, they built repeatable learnings in AhaCreator that they could reuse long term.

1) Selection criteria: market fit plus content fit plus price

In the beginner stage, they did not look for “the strongest” creators with the biggest audiences. They looked for the most controllable outcomes.

Market first: they leaned toward more developed countries with stronger willingness to pay. For markets like India, where volume is high but does not match the team’s stage goals, they passed for now.

Content fit: they clicked into profiles and checked prior content. If it was in productivity tools, templates, learning, or close to the Notion ecosystem, they moved quickly.

Price threshold: they leaned toward smaller creators. Average pricing was around $100 to $200, and generally not above $300 unless the account was larger.

At the selection stage, they wanted a cleaner sample. With limited budget, they put money behind creators who had a higher chance of “getting the story right.”

2) How to write the brief: if you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing well

If you try to communicate too many points, the influencer fit becomes worse, because each point maps to a different audience. For example, a “single mom making money” angle tends to attract creators drawn to an earnings narrative, not necessarily creators who match the product itself.

After adjusting the strategy, they focused the brief on features that are easy to show in the product and easy to communicate visually.

Prioritize what is easy to demonstrate: paid subscriptions, mind maps, and screen recordings that are instantly clear

Be careful with what is important but hard to perceive: self hosted deployment, which is not visible in product demos and is difficult for influencers to explain credibly.

There is a clear brand content rule behind this. It is not “say everything the product has.” It is “say what users can immediately understand,” especially in short form video where visual clarity often matters more than a fully complete logical explanation.

When the budget is small, reduce variables first: language, speaking style, content format, audience type. That is how you learn faster.

3) What influencers must say: something competitors do not have, and something visual

When asked what influencers must include, Dajin gave a very firm anchor point. The mind map feature must be included because competitors do not have it and it is visually obvious.

Buildin can look similar to Notion, so they had to highlight differentiation. Mind maps became the must mention point.

It is a standalone module. You can convert a mind map into a text or outline page, and you can also convert text or an outline back into a mind map. Notion does not have this. In influencer content, they required creators to show the in product screen and demonstrate the switching flow.

4) Content format choices: be cautious with text first creators who suddenly switch to video

They also hit a very specific but valuable pitfall. Some influencers usually do image and text posts, then switch to video for a paid deal. It can look like a bargain: you think you got video at a lower price. But the video quality often ends up poor because they do not have video experience.

So do not judge only by the nominal deliverable type. Judge whether the creator’s existing content structure fits. For tool products, explanatory ability and screen recording pacing matter a lot. Even among creators who already post video, you still need to screen for who can explain clearly, not just who can technically produce a video.

5) Channel strategy: with a small budget, do not spread thin, concentrate on TikTok and YouTube

After the first round, they preferred focusing spend on TikTok and YouTube. Video has stronger distribution power and is more visually engaging.

If you invest across every platform, you often get no results, and you also end up without enough samples on any platform to form conclusions. They also noted that TikTok had more “viral hit potential” in the initial trial, but they wanted to wait until all content was collected before making the next round of more granular adjustments.

As for scaling criteria, Dajin was clear: they ultimately looked at paid conversions and ROI.

Lower execution cost for influencer programs: AhaCreator helped the team stay focused on strategy and analysis

Dajin said her day to day workload on the platform was light. She spent about 30 minutes a day operating inside the platform. She timed herself and found that across a total of around 10 hours, spread over more than 20 influencers, the average end to end workflow per influencer from selection to content delivery took under 30 minutes.

That “controllable execution cost” is what gave them confidence to run small budget experiments, review results, and move into the next iteration.

For a beginner team, beyond removing the need to find influencers, do outreach, and negotiate pricing, two things were especially practical.

• Influencer progress is clear: confirmed influencers are organized by real progress stages such as in production, pending publish, and published. Draft review can be done directly in the platform, with feedback left in context. In the past, they had to track progress across Excel sheets, group chats, and email threads. Now the workflow is standardized, every step is visible, and the team has much stronger control over cadence.
• Performance review is much easier: once content goes live, they can see campaign performance in real time and track follow up data such as views, clicks, CPM, and CPC. They can filter by platform or drill down to each influencer’s performance. They no longer need to check each influencer across each platform and manually collect data on a schedule, which significantly improved efficiency.

Five reusable takeaways for teams building similar products

• Organic growth working does not mean it is fast enough. When your goal shifts from validating PMF to scaling acquisition, your channel mix has to change.
• The goal of your first influencer round is to buy learning. The budget can be small, but you need to run the full loop, collect the data properly, and reduce variables.
• A campaign brief is not a product manual. The broader you write it, the more generic your influencers become. Prioritize testing features that can be shown clearly on video.
• Creator capability is not the same as deliverable type. A text first creator is not automatically good at video. Decide deliverables only after reviewing the creator’s past content structure.
• Reduce variables to the minimum. Start with one or two platforms, one core differentiator, and one primary content format. Build a stable model first, then expand.