A year ago today, Emily Freeman and I announced that we were founding a startup together.

They say the best startups are built to solve a problem you’ve personally experienced. In our case, we suffered from not one but two problems.

As hands-on technical creators with followings and reputations in our own right, we saw how challenging it was to manage sponsors for our work. But as professional tech marketers, we also found it prohibitively difficult to administrate a large influencer program through traditional corporate procurement channels.

We realized we’d both been longing for the same thing: a turnkey service that would deliver high-performance influencer marketing for the industry we understood best — enterprise tech.

So we went out and built it.

With one full year under our belts, here are a few of the numbers from this year that we’re most excited about.

33% of Tech’s Fortune 100

We’re proud to be partnering with 33% of the tech companies in the Fortune 100, and counting.

Our team has more than 100 years of combined experience at Google, AWS, Microsoft, Gartner, RedMonk, and more. We don’t view enterprise tech as boring or passé. We think it deserves the same level of love and creativity as the coolest indie hacker project.

Of course, we love working with startups and scaleups too!

That’s why some of our proudest moments from this past year include both:

• Temporarily knocking over a Fortune 50 company’s webinar platform due to overwhelming signup demand.
• Driving so much hype for a Series B unicorn’s AI launch that we not only got the product trending on X, we had to throttle back influencer posts because the product team ran out of GPUs.

When great products meet great influencers, you get magic (and possibly a bit of operational panic.)

You can book a meeting to build a sustainable, high-performing influencer marketing program with us.

$1.7 Million to Creators

One of our pie-in-the-sky goals when starting this business was to share $1 million with the tech creator community in our first full year of operation. As of today, we’ve paid out more than $1.7 million and counting to amazing technical creators and builders around the world, at a rate that’s still accelerating.

We’ve built relationships with hundreds of amazing technical influencers by living up to a simple code:

• We bring the best tech brands in the world directly to your inbox.
• We take 0% from you in fees; once we’ve negotiated a market rate with you, you get paid 100% of it, just like when you work with brands directly. We even cover wire transfer costs!
• We pay immediately (this is surprisingly differentiating).

We’re always looking to welcome more amazing folks into our influencer community. You can have an established audience or just be starting out. If you have professional tech experience and a desire to share your knowledge with the world, we’d love to meet you. Please get in touch with us!

10x Improvement in Lead Gen

It’s not that influencer marketing is a perfect solution for driving high-quality leads into a sales pipeline; it just happens to perform startlingly better than traditional paid media spend.

Jeff Haines, CMO at Archera, found that “Freeman & Forrest generated 10x the amount of qualified and motivated leads as the equivalent spend on our Google and LinkedIn ad campaigns.”

The reality is that technical decision-makers tune out display ads and marketing-speak. They’ve had lots of practice doing that. But they do appreciate hearing recommendations from peers they trust.

115x Boost In Awareness

Again, it’s not that influencer marketing always delivers surgically perfect audience targeting, or that every influencer placement sets the world on fire. But when done with care and skill, it works better than any other awareness channel.

Here are real numbers from a publicly traded tech company ($14.5B in market cap). In Q1 2025, they tested Freeman & Forrest’s influencer program alongside their traditional brand and developer advocate social media posts.

Over a 90-day period, the results were startling:

As a former US politician used to say, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Our customers have seen over and over that a professionally-managed influencer program outperforms every other channel available to brand marketing teams.

13 Amazing Employees, $0 in Funding

It took about two months for Emily and me to realize that the little lifestyle business we’d started was quickly mushrooming into something much bigger. As of today, we’re proud to have a diverse and talented team of 13 full-time employees, distributed across 7 US states and 4 timezones. Our employees support our customers, influencers, and community while building state-of-the-art automations that help us deliver even more value.

And we’re still growing fast. We've started work on our future platform, which will connect our clients with the best content creators in tech, even more seamlessly.

Though we’re not ruling out accepting investment in the future, so far we’ve stayed 100% bootstrapped. Everything you see in front of you was built in 12 months from a standing start. To us, that’s incredible validation that this work is useful, valuable, and worth continuing to scale. Freeman & Forrest is here for the long haul, and we couldn’t be more excited about the year to come.