When Aris Yeager and Philip Davis quit their jobs at influencer marketing software company Lefty to start their own business Storytime in 2024, they weren’t sure whether they were about to raise venture capital—or get sued.

The co-founders had met one year earlier, when Davis hired Yeager as an influencer marketing specialist on his team at Lefty. While working for the Paris-based startup, they saw how luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Sephora manage influencers with huge budgets, 100-person teams, and software that costs about $1,500 a month.

At the same time, Yeager was running into friction as he engaged with local brands as a content creator. The 25-year-old had begun cultivating a flamboyant internet persona—known as Louis to his audience—about three years earlier while attending Northeastern University. Today, he has roughly 3 million followers across TikTok and Instagram and regularly commands five-figure brand deals.

Yeager tells Inc. “there was no easy way” to communicate with the brick-and-mortar businesses he visited daily. That sparked an idea: “I was like, ‘Okay, this needs to be more automated—this whole space.’”

Betting on the power of hyperlocal influencers

About a year and a half ago, Yeager and Davis launched Storytime, an influencer marketing platform that connects local content creators with 450 businesses across 1,000 New York City locations, from restaurant chains to jewellery brands to coffee shops. The startup has so far raised about $1 million in pre-seed funding that values it at $15 million. And while Storytime only began monetizing last April, Davis expects to make anywhere from $2 million to $3 million in revenue by late summer.

For brands, the set-up is simple. After downloading the app, they can tailor campaign details, select reach tiers for influencers, and set offer amounts. Storytime takes over from there.

Any Instagram user with at least 2,000 followers can apply to join the platform as a creator, but not everyone gets accepted. Only those with strong local reach—which Storytime measures through audience city demographic data it collects via Instagram’s API—actually make the cut.

Here’s how the math works: a creator with 50,000 followers might draw 5,000 views on a post, but if only 10 percent of that audience is in New York, that translates to about 500 local views, according to Davis. Meanwhile, a smaller creator with 5,000 followers could see 2,000 views per post, with half that audience based in New York—or roughly 1,000 local views. “Their local reach is actually going to be twice as high as the much larger influencer,” he says.

Small business success stories

Most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to use the Storytime app. It costs as little as $150 for 15 Storytime creators per month for smaller brands, while larger brands pay about $5 per influencer collaboration, or roughly $2,500 for 500 collaborations.

That predictable pricing appealed to Ana Luisa, a jewellery brand accustomed to expensive influencer partnerships with murky returns. Storytime allows the Brooklyn-based company to keep its influencer spend under $500 each month and reward creators with gifts ranging from a $30 store gift card to a custom, solid-gold charm bracelet.

Ana Luisa measured a 30 percent increase in internal foot traffic metrics during its first two weeks of working with the startup. Eve Gertzman, the brand’s marketing director, says those gains have held steady in the slower seasons: “For us to be able to maintain pretty strong levels of foot traffic, even in these cold New York weathers, we can heavily attribute that to Storytime.”

For Joe and the Juice, Storytime’s value extends beyond foot traffic. Global brand manager Raania Hammoudan says the platform gives her the ability to dictate how local creators post about Joe and the Juice, including which products they feature, during campaigns like its collaboration with tennis star Novak Djokovic last fall. “That is so valuable to us,” she says.

The bigger picture

The shift towards brands working with hyperlocal influencers has been building for about two to three years now, according to creator economy expert Keith Bendes. “The more reach is harder to achieve organically without paid media, the more you’re trying to niche down to find the loyal pockets,” he says.

The question now is whether Storytime’s local-first model can scale. Yeager and Davis say they’re planning to expand into new cities, including Miami, in the near future. The co-founders are also planning to enter industries beyond food and beverage and add more features like paid campaigns across TikTok and Instagram.

The marketplace they imagined almost two years ago is just getting started. “My vision with it is to make it a ClassPass for creators,” Yeager says. “Every single business that’s on ClassPass, I believe could be on Storytime.”