In 2013, Lemmonet was an idea — audacious, maybe naive — to turn all this noise into something that felt human. A bridge between voices and visibility. Between commerce and creativity. But by the time I joined, ten years in, it was no longer enough to be a bridge. The world had moved. Creators were evolving, audiences fragmenting, brands demanding more. The platform had to grow from a connector into an ecosystem. One that could hold tension without simplifying it. One that could honour the intimacy of influence, and make it measurable without reducing it to numbers alone.

We began, as always, by listening. Not to the platform’s metrics or the investor decks — but to the people moving through it. Fifty in-depth interviews with creators, from nano to macro. A thousand survey responses. Observational research across three campaign cycles. We mapped creator journeys in detail, watching what happened before a collaboration began and long after it ended. The gaps were loud. Creators spoke of invisibility. Not the performative kind — the kind that sets in after the contract is signed, the metrics reported, and the algorithm moves on. One told us, “I don’t know what happens after I post. I don’t even know if it mattered.” Another said, “Brands want my story, but they don’t stay for the ending.”

We weren’t just mapping pain points. We were tracing patterns of abandonment. A systemic failure to support creators beyond the campaign. Simultaneously, brands described the chaos of influencer selection — a messy, manual process stitched together across spreadsheets, DMs, and gut feelings. They wanted reach, yes — but more and more, they wanted alignment. Resonance. The unteachable quality of being right for a message. But there was no shared language. No way to name or see that kind of fit. Influence had become a commodity. Everyone wanted it. No one could define it.

So we reframed the problem. Influence isn’t a number. It’s a relationship — built over time, through shared context, honesty, and trust. And our job wasn’t to optimise performance. It was to design for trust at scale.

The first thing we redesigned wasn’t a feature. It was a posture. We slowed down. We took our raw research into cross-functional rooms — product owners, designers, sales leads, even the legal team. We told stories, not just summaries. Played audio clips. Built composite personas that held real contradictions: creators who loved what they did and felt exploited by it. Brand managers who wanted to champion emerging voices but were judged on quarterly ROI. These weren’t user types. They were people. And people don’t neatly segment.

From this, a new roadmap emerged. One that centred three needs: visibility for niche creators, clarity for brands, and mutual support across the life of a campaign.

We prototyped carefully, but not timidly. A new advanced search tool let brands filter not just by follower count or category, but by tone, style, and audience micro-demographics. We introduced tagging systems that allowed creators to self-define — not by what they sold, but by how they saw themselves. A mother. A cultural translator. A community builder. These became searchable traits. Brand managers described it as “like finding a voice I didn’t know I needed, but now can’t unhear.”

Campaign management was next. We mapped it like a living system — not just the UX flows, but the emotional spikes: the stress before launch, the blackout period after posting, the awkward silence that often followed. We built tools to make those moments visible. Automated touchpoints. Live performance dashboards with emotional context: not just impressions, but sentiment. Not just reach, but resonance. Creators could track how their content moved — not just who saw it, but how it landed.

Support structures followed. We redesigned creator profiles to feel less like résumés and more like self-portraits. Highlights of previous work. Testimonials. A place to express purpose. We added an onboarding experience tailored to experience level — creators just starting out received different guidance than those with media kits and teams. We included self-assessment tools, allowing them to reflect on their own growth over time, on their own terms. Some used it weekly. Others used it once. But nearly all said the same thing: “I feel seen.”

The data spoke, eventually. A 40% increase in niche creator participation. A 30% drop in campaign management time. A 25% rise in creator satisfaction, measured through post-campaign surveys and retention rates. But the real outcomes were less numeric. A creator told us, “For the first time, I felt like the brand picked me, not just my numbers.” A brand manager wrote, “We’ve built longer-lasting partnerships in the last six months than we did in the previous three years.”

It wasn’t smooth. Early on, we made flawed assumptions — that brands wanted full control over messaging, that creators preferred independence to support. The reality was subtler: brands wanted creative partnership, but needed clarity; creators craved structure, not restriction. Legal constraints slowed certain features. Internal tensions flared around priorities. But we documented every tension, every false start. Not to blame — but to remember. Because iteration without memory is just repetition.

We ended the year not with a launch, but with a shift. Lemmonet had become something different. Still a platform. But now also a practice — a way of working that puts people before performance, relationships before reach. We designed not for virality, but for longevity.

There was a moment, late in the process, that still returns to me. A campaign manager called to thank us, not for the dashboard, but for the silence it removed. “Before, the hardest part was not knowing — if the creator was happy, if the brand felt seen. Now, we don’t guess. We talk.” And that, in the end, may be the most powerful feature we designed: a reason to talk. A structure that held space for conversation in an industry built on metrics.

Lemmonet is still evolving. We’re testing predictive analytics — not to automate human judgment, but to inform it. Exploring new markets where creators aren’t yet visible, but already essential. Building monetisation tools that don’t just extract value, but return it. But the core remains: technology in service of real stories. A product that listens. A business model that trusts. A platform that remembers what influence truly is — not numbers in a dashboard, but a message that lands in the right moment, from the right voice, and stays.

And maybe, after everything, that’s the real transformation: not in the features we shipped, but in how we chose to see the people using them. Not as “users,” but as narrators. As collaborators. As the ones writing the next chapter.