How We Find Creators by Scrolling a Real TikTok Avatar

I find creators by scrolling. There is no substitute for it if you want the people going around in your niche this week.

I scroll on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube under a fresh account if I’m marketing a new product. I try to put myself in my ideal customers’ shoes and linger, save, like, and comment as if I were my ideal customer.

Once my algorithm is trained, I do the following.

Finding the right creators

Whenever I see a relevant video that has tons of likes and comments, I check out the creator’s profile and scroll down to see the amount of views they roughly have. Ideally over 50k average views. Below that $700 a post for 1k views. That’s a money sink.

Then I randomly click around on their videos to see the comments. People making inside jokes are a very good sign. Emojis are a bad sign.

An avatar is just a specified customer: the problem in their mouth, what they already quit, the videos they already watch, language, region. “Women 18-34” is a media plan. “Someone who already bounced off streak-based habit apps and watches ADHD morning-routine videos at 11pm” is an avatar. You can scroll as the second. You cannot scroll as the first without lying to yourself.

Two phones that both liked three climbing videos last month will still diverge. That is useful. Matching is about who that customer is being shown this week, not who bought a tag in 2023.

Why a real phone

A lot of “we scrape TikTok” marketing is either a licensed dump of public metadata or a fantasy. Public metadata still is not a For You page. The For You page is a device, a login, a watch-time pattern, a language, a region.

JumpTrend’s public description is specific: AI on real phones, in the avatar’s niche, on TikTok and Instagram. That is slower than querying a giant catalog. It is also the point. You do not want every creator who exists. You want the ones who keep showing up in a live session.

If you try this at home, you will contaminate your personal algorithm and you will only see one bias (yours). Dedicated sessions exist so the founder of a climbing log is not training TikTok that they are a 34-year-old who likes compiler memes. Doing it by hand is kind of soul-crushing. That is why I built the product.

What you should not hear in “real phones”: hacking someone else’s account, stuffing credentials, or building a pirate mirror of TikTok. Public feed, operated devices, business-inquiry contacts creators already publish. ICP feed scraping, in this cluster, is slang for that observation loop, not unauthorized access.

What the list is for

A feed-qualified list is short on purpose. Eight to a few dozen names a founder might actually email. Each name should survive a stupid test: if I handed this handle to my user, would they say “oh I know them” or “who?”

You still have to outreach. Matching is not a booked campaign. Scout is $1,500/month for the list, because some founders will write the emails and should. Outreach is $2,500 because most will not follow up. Dealmaker is $5,000 because Spark rights do not live in a handshake. Creator fees are extra in all cases. No demo. No guaranteed views. You approve every creator and every rate.

The list will not tell you who will go viral. Viral is a tail. The list tells you who is already in the room. Hundreds of creators a day because the market is not efficient. Some dumb startup paying thousands for hundreds of views. If one creator does not budge, you move on.

Hashtags, marketplaces, and other honest tools

Hashtag search is a weak prior. Use it to learn vocabulary, not to build the roster. People tag what they want brands to find.

Creator databases (Modash-class products) are good at scale, filters, and email unlocks. They answer “who exists that looks like this.” Grin-class CRMs are good at running a roster you already have, especially if you sell physical goods. Influencer Hero-class tools are good at volume outreach into an index, often for Shopify. None of those sentences are insults. They are different jobs.

Feed-as-avatar discovery is the job “who is my customer being shown this week.” If you already have a coordinator and 200 active ambassadors, you may need the CRM more than you need another discovery method. If you are a solo iOS founder, you needed the method first.

How to write an avatar that is actually scrollable

1. Name the problem in the user’s mouth, not your category.
2. Name adjacent content they already watch (not “tech,” but “screen time shame videos”).
3. Name what they already tried and quit.
4. Narrow geography and language if your store listing is English-only or US-only.
5. Do not pack five ICPs into one phone and then complain the list is messy.

Weird niches help. A narrow session produces repeating faces. A wide session produces the same celebrities everyone else is pitching.

What this pillar is not

It is not a tutorial for evading platform terms or automating logins you do not own. It is not a claim that AI “understands” your user better than they understand themselves. It is a claim that watching the feed as the customer is a better way to find creators than watching a hashtag index.

If you want the one-page definition, see Avatar algorithm. If you want the product, see JumpTrend. If you want the argument against catalogs, see Creator marketplace vs feed discovery.

You already built the app. The feed is where your customer is. Scrolling it as them still only works if you can describe the person in a sentence a phone could learn.