Reaching the Developer Ecosystem: How Zeabur Used AhaCreator to Build a Efficient Influencer Collaboration Model

1. Getting to Know Zeabur: From a Graduation Project to a Global Product

Zeabur is an AI product that helps developers deploy their products faster. The goal is to let people who truly want to build products spend less time on complex environment configuration and operations.

Zeabur’s story is a special one.

The earliest prototype was founder Lin Yuanlin’s university graduation project. After finishing it, he shared the project with his classmates. One of them said, “You should submit this to MiraclePlus,” and that was how the entrepreneurial journey began.

In the early days, Zeabur was an extremely small team, with most of the progress driven almost entirely by Yuanlin alone. Today, the team has 11 people, 9 of whom are engineers. This strong technical DNA and product-first mindset also determined that their growth path would be very different from that of most AI products.

2. For Them, Influencer Marketing Is About Exploration, Not Scale

They have gone through several shifts in their ideal customer profile:

• At first, they believed the product was for traditional developers
• Then they pivoted toward no-code beginners
• With deeper data analysis, the team realized that beginners have limited willingness to invest in professional tools. Their target users shifted again—to people who can independently build products, but want to use AI to accelerate their workflows

One interesting moment came earlier this year:

“We knew that ‘fast deployment’ had real market demand, but we ourselves weren’t sure what the best use case was. Then an influencer discovered us, explained us in their own way, and it went viral.”

This experience helped the team realize that influencers, for them, are fundamentally a way to discover the best use cases. Yuanlin explained:

“We want to see how different people talk about us, who they attract, and then analyze how those users actually use our product.”

3. Doing Influencer Marketing on Their Own: It Worked, but Was Too Unpredictable

To find more creators to work with, Zeabur tried almost every possible approach:

• Working with multiple agencies
• Having the founder, the marketing lead, and interns all do outreach together
• Using scripts to send mass emails for “semi-automation”
• And of course, inbound requests from creators themselves

But no matter which method they used, they ran into the same problem. Yuanlin put it very plainly:

“Just imagine—one email takes a week to get a reply, one scripted back-and-forth takes half a month, content takes two or three weeks to produce, and it’s totally normal for one collaboration to drag on for one or two months.”

This pace simply couldn’t support sustainable user exploration. Collaborations became a matter of chance.

4. "The Key Is Having a Platform—We Click Once, and Everything Keeps Moving"

While looking for a more stable way to work with creators, the team noticed AhaCreator and quickly started using it. The first impression was very direct:

“We just go in, click once, and everything keeps moving.”

For an engineering-driven team with only one marketing person, AhaCreator took over the most time-consuming and fragmented work they used to struggle with:

• Communication is no longer fragmented: Before, they had to constantly switch between email, DMs, chat tools, documents, and contracts. Now, almost everything happens on one platform, reducing endless back-and-forth alignment.
• No need to re-align collaboration details with every creator: In the past, scripts, timelines, and formats had to be discussed from scratch each time. Now, everything is standardized, and the team simply follows established SOPs on the platform.
• Intern productivity increases dramatically: Yuanlin shared, “Before, one intern might close around ten deals a month. With you guys, they can reach five or even ten times that efficiency.” AhaCreator handles sourcing, outreach, follow-ups, and contracts, while the team focuses only on deciding whether to collaborate and reviewing content. A huge amount of time is freed from communication-heavy tasks.
• Significantly shorter collaboration cycles: Yuanlin noted, “The shortest time to go live was about one week—for a graphic content collaboration,” with many creators moving forward in parallel.

5. From Execution to Strategy: How Zeabur Approaches Influencer Marketing on AhaCreator

Unlike many teams, Zeabur has developed a highly rational framework for influencer marketing:

• Real interest matters more than exposure:

“Some creators have great reach, but it’s all in irrelevant audiences. If no one clicks, it’s meaningless.” As a result, they focus more on whether a channel has done developer-related content before, whether the audience matches the product, and whether the creator takes the collaboration seriously—judgments that AhaCreator has already helped pre-filter during creator matching.

• Larger samples, faster, enable better strategy: Only with enough reach can the team identify which communities respond well, which content angles convert better, and which countries show real potential. In this process, AhaCreator not only helps Zeabur execute collaborations faster, but also becomes a critical channel for collecting user feedback more efficiently.

At the end of the interview, Yuanlin talked about how AI fundamentally changes influencer marketing—by helping humans make better, more precise decisions.

“In the future, even user preferences that we ourselves can’t articulate, AI will be able to learn directly from the data.”

As he said this, Zeabur’s growth logic became clear. They aren’t chasing aggressive growth tactics—they’re looking for the people who truly resonate with the product’s value.

What AhaCreator does for them is make that search faster, lighter, and simpler.