Influencer Marketing Was Broken. Here’s What It Took to Make It Perform Again: Tanya Sardana, Flyshot CEO Interview

There was a moment when influencer marketing felt inevitable.

Mobile-first audiences, tribal communities, creators with trust. It should have worked as a performance channel. Instead, it became a vanity channel.

Likes, comments, followers, engagement rate and metrics that were easy to inflate and impossible to tie to revenue. Marketers poured millions into campaigns and walked away unable to answer one basic question: what was the return?

Tanya Sardana, Flyshot CEO, saw this firsthand.

At L’Oréal, she ran multi-million dollar influencer campaigns. When leadership asked for conversion data or ROAS, there was no real answer. Tracking links helped, but the user flow was broken: promo codes required memory, attribution relied on assumptions and regression models, fraud was rampant, followers could be bought, engagement could be faked.

Influencer marketing had scale, but it didn’t have accountability.

That gap became Flyshot. The Core Problem: The Click Was the Bottleneck

Traditional influencer campaigns rely on links: “Link in bio.” “Swipe up.” The user leaves the content, enters a new flow and friction begins, then drop-off follows.

Tanya’s insight was simple: the user flow itself was broken.

Instead of optimizing tracking links, Flyshot eliminated the click entirely.

The company developed a patented, patent-pending system that encrypts data directly inside an influencer’s image or video. No visible code, no QR block. The promotion is embedded in the visual itself.

The call to action is behavioral, not navigational: take a screenshot.

When a user screenshots the influencer’s post, opens the advertiser’s app, and grants one-time photo access, Flyshot’s “social promotion window” scans the image and automatically unlocks the in-app offer. The influencer’s image reappears inside the app, reinforcing context. The promotion is applied seamlessly. No manual code entry, no broken redirect, no guessing attribution.

The interaction becomes native to how users already behave.

From Vanity to CPA

Flyshot doesn’t sell impressions, it runs CPA-based influencer campaigns.

Advertisers define the conversion event: signup, subscription, in-app purchase. Influencers are paid on performance. Flyshot charges only when the defined event occurs.

No CPI, no payment for installs. Only for measurable actions. That changes incentives across the system.

Advertisers get:

• Clear attribution down to in-app purchase ID

• Revenue-level reporting per influencer

• Discounted CPAs versus major paid channels

• Free installs until conversion events happen

  
  

Influencers get:

• Direct proof of conversion performance

• Data they can use to negotiate future brand deals

• Payment tied to actual transactions, not popularity
  

The KPI moves from engagement rate (likes divided by followers) to conversion rate tied to real transactions. That metric cannot be faked.

Why This Resonates 

Marketers have seen inflated engagement numbers, paid for reach that didn’t convert, struggled to defend influencer budgets internally.

Flyshot’s pitch is almost disarmingly simple: “CPA campaigns for influencers.”

That line alone generated inbound from major brands: Fetch Rewards, Checkout 51, Skillz and others signed letters of intent even while the platform was still in development.

If Facebook performance campaigns can be optimized to ROAS, why not influencer campaigns?

The Conversion Psychology

The product works because it aligns with user behavior. People already screenshot content they want to remember. The act feels natural, not forced. The promotion is unlocked inside the app, in context, with visual confirmation of the influencer post.

Average first-event conversion after users see the social promotion window sits around 22%. Campaign ROAS has averaged 150% or more, supported by CPAs discounted relative to other paid channels. More importantly, the model removes risk.

Advertisers only pay for defined conversion events. Influencers are incentivized to drive real action. Flyshot is incentivized to maximize conversion because revenue is tied to it.

Micro, Nano, and the End of Size Obsession

Influencer marketing historically obsessed over audience size, but engagement rate (likes divided by followers) can be manipulated on both sides of the equation. Conversion rate tied to transactions cannot.

A nano influencer with a deeply aligned niche audience may outperform a celebrity in driving purchases. For the first time, that performance can be measured precisely.

The conversation shifts from: “How many followers do you have?” to “How much revenue did you drive?”

That reframes the entire market.

Focus and Scale

Flyshot is focused on mobile apps because transaction-level tracking is clearest there. iOS and Android subscriptions, in-app purchases and internal payment flows provide granular attribution.

The team is small (11 people), but expanding rapidly. 

A significant seed round is underway. Headcount is expected to grow by at least 25% before 2020 year-end.

The Broader Implication

When you tie creator compensation to verifiable transactions instead of vanity metrics, you professionalize the channel. You give serious marketers a reason to reallocate budget. You give serious creators a way to prove value.

Replace the broken user flow. Replace the vanity KPI. Replace the guesswork with transaction data.

Suddenly, the channel doesn’t look experimental anymore and looks accountable.

Watch the full interview