Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara

This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Sherri Langburt, founder of BabbleBoxx, for an unscripted conversation about what influencer marketing actually looks like when the budget is small and the sale is the metric.

Most small business owners hear the word “influencer” and immediately assume two things: that it is for beauty brands, and that it costs a million dollars. Sherri Langburt has spent fifteen years proving both assumptions wrong. She founded the influencer marketing agency BabbleBoxx in December 2010 — before the word influencer was even in common use — bootstrapped it with no outside money, landed it on the Inc. 500 in 2018, and was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New Jersey finalist in 2021.

Her answer to “why should we trust you” tells you most of what you need to know about her posture. Female founder, bootstrapped, Canadian living in the States. And why that last part matters less than the middle one:

“When you bootstrap a company, it’s your own sweat, and every penny I make goes back into the business. I’m very sensitive to other small businesses because I did this myself.”

— Sherri Langburt

BabbleBoxx describes itself as an influencer marketing agency with solutions for everyone, not just the big brands — productized influencer marketing for any kind of business. People assume it is beauty, cosmetics, and food. They work in every industry.

Small local brands have the biggest opportunity — and the biggest fear

Asked how a local service business — an inground pool builder like Backyard Resort Pools, say — should think about creators at all, Sherri did not hedge: “I think the small local brands have the biggest opportunity.”

The thing standing in the way is not budget. It is fear and panic. Not every influencer charges a million dollars. Small brand, small influencer. You do not have to go with the biggest name first, and — from the owner of an influencer agency — you certainly do not need to hire an agency to start. You can reach out to creators yourself. At the local level, she says, there are lots of opportunities.

Awareness creators and conversion creators are not the same hire

The most useful distinction in the entire episode is the one small businesses skip. Some creators are awareness and top of funnel and are never going to move a unit. Some will. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is not follower count.

“Selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara.”

— Sherri Langburt

So if the sale is your primary metric — and Sherri notes that for small businesses, the sale almost always is — there is a specific question to ask before you sign anyone: do you have any trackable data on sales? Reach and engagement are easy to produce. Attributed sales are not. A creator who can show you the second number is doing a different job than one who can only show you the first.

For a high-consideration purchase like a pool, a remodel, or an HVAC system, that may mean hiring for awareness deliberately and measuring it as awareness — rather than hiring for reach and then being disappointed by revenue.

Get your own house in order before the first post goes live

Jeremy brought a cautionary tale from a MozCon talk in Seattle: a brand hired a dozen influencers to push pink pants, the e-commerce site ran out of stock in the first ten minutes, and Google delisted the out-of-stock listing and surfaced competitors instead. The campaign cost millions and handed away a large slice of its own revenue.

Sherri sees the same failure constantly, and she has a rule for spotting it:

“If it’s happening to the influencer, it’s happening to the consumer.”

— Sherri Langburt

Her example: a brand tells creators the product is available in these ten stores in this geo. The creators drive place to place to place and cannot find it. That is not a creator complaint to be managed — it is a live report on what every customer chasing your campaign is about to experience.

Her pre-launch checklist is unglamorous on purpose:

• Know your criteria. What is this campaign actually for — sales, ratings and reviews, awareness? Each one implies different creators and different measurement.
• Verify your inventory and your geos. Do not send creators to stores that do not have the product.
• Check every landing page. The destination has to exist and has to match the message.
• Make the promo consistent. If creators are advertising a discount, consumers have to be able to find that discount.
• Get the teams talking. Product rollouts, promos, and creator briefs routinely contradict each other. Any groups that need to be talking to each other should be talking to each other.

There is a search dimension to this that Jeremy raised and Sherri agreed with: social platforms do not give you clickable hard URLs, so people go to Google to find the thing the creator was wearing. Your organic search result is the silent dependency of every social campaign you run.

“The universe is your CRM”

Back in 2013–14, Sherri launched one of the first SaaS influencer marketing platforms on the market — a creator repository that also managed campaigns. Her team still uses it internally. But the way she frames discovery today is much simpler:

“The universe is your CRM.”

— Sherri Langburt

If she is in South Orange, New Jersey and needs a cooking influencer who is also a teacher, she can find someone in proximity just by searching TikTok, Instagram, Google, or asking an AI tool. Finding people is no longer the hard part.

Which is exactly why the SaaS platform became an agency. The work is hands-on — “at the end of the day, it’s humans dealing with humans.” Sending 200 creators a pre-made tile with a BOGO code for a local restaurant is platform work: easy, and you should use software for it. Creative video is not. That takes briefs, messaging, and creative approval, and there are humans behind the scenes doing a lot of it.

Choose the channel your audience is actually on

Sherri watches brands chase whichever platform is in the news. “Just because everyone’s on TikTok or Instagram doesn’t mean that’s where your audience lives.” Some clients — government accounts in particular — are not even permitted on TikTok, and may never be.

Her rough guide to format fit:

• YouTube — instructional, longer-format, more complex video. She does a lot of this with camera companies, battery companies, and technology brands.
• TikTok — faster moving and hook-based; speaks to a different demographic than most people assume, and to more audiences than they expect.
• Instagram — the reliable sweet spot for brands wanting a combination of educational and inspirational content.

And the piece most brands skip: test other channels and other audiences deliberately, to find out whether there is a consumer group you have never tapped.

The channels almost nobody books

Asked whether influencer marketing means anything beyond the big three, Sherri listed the ones sitting unused:

• Podcast platforms — an entire creator ecosystem most brands never brief.
• Amazon reviewers — “they have all these new programs that no one even knows about. There’s Amazon reviewers. You could launch an Amazon reviewer campaign.”
• Pinterest
• Twitch
• LinkedIn — especially if you want subject-matter experts and lean B2B.
• Substack — which she flagged separately as a creator format seeing a huge uptick.

Her summary: find your lane, or try to go where no one else might be.

Every marketer books the same tent poles

What still surprises Sherri about marketing is not a technology. It is a calendar.

“Every marketer looks at the same tent poles and doesn’t go beyond those tent poles.”

— Sherri Langburt

From her years in the weight-loss industry — she was a founding member of WW Online and general manager of WW Canada before starting BabbleBoxx — the example that stuck with her is November 1st. The day after Halloween, when every single person has just eaten a pile of chocolate and candy, nobody runs a diet promo. The calendar says it is already holiday season, so nobody is supposedly on a diet. Her question: why not try it?

She has watched the same reflex kill audience testing. A client selling golf tickets insisted the buyers were men, men, men. They tested women. “Holy cow, women buy golf tickets. Who knew?” An optical company was equally certain its audience was women. Her response is always the same one word: try.

Can AI just replace the influencer?

Sherri gets calls and emails constantly telling her influencer marketing is about to be wiped out by AI. She sees the opposite happening.

“You could certainly create AI people, but at the end of the day, isn’t that just an ad unit?”

— Sherri Langburt

A synthetic creator is not influence — it is a display ad with a face on it. What makes an influencer worth paying for is precisely the part that cannot be generated: they are human, they interact, they emote, they hold real relationships with their audiences, and they can physically show up at your event.

Jeremy’s framing on the show was the wave of AI slop that marketers unleashed once the tools got cheap to scale — or, as his friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing puts it, the kind of output that leaves a fingerprint no humanizer can scrub. Sherri’s answer is the same one from the other direction: the tell is the missing human.

She is not anti-AI. She calls the tools amazing. Her worry is focus: “I fear that our brains are gonna stop working.” The tools hand you so much that your head goes in ten different directions, a campaign idea snowballs times ten, and you have to keep pulling yourself back to — wait, this is what we need to accomplish.

Jeremy put a sharper edge on it: every business now has an unreliable employee doing customer support that it never hired and does not pay — ChatGPT, Claude, whichever assistant is answering questions about you right now. Matt Brooks and his team have been making the case that this is a support channel you are already staffing whether you manage it or not, and nobody is auditing what it says.

Brutal first years, and a lifestyle business on purpose

Sherri is blunt about what building this actually took. “Those first years were brutal. I mean, they’re hard. I loved it, but they were brutal.” There were many times she thought it would never work — partly because BabbleBoxx was doing influencer marketing before the category had a name, “so people in the beginning laughed at us.”

Her warning is aimed squarely at the genre of podcast where someone launches a brand in a weekend with AI: those are the one in a million. It is still a business. It still takes years. Launching is easier than it used to be; you are still starting from scratch.

She is also not chasing an exit. She heard a podcast ask why people dislike the term “lifestyle business” — the mental image being a woman at home sewing something (her own grandmother was a seamstress, “so no offense to sewers”). Her version of the term: “There’s 20 of us, and we don’t answer to anyone.”

When an RFP came in from someone who was clearly going to make the team miserable, and a team member got upset about it, Sherri told him they did not need it. She believes the company could be ten or twenty times bigger.

“I will not compromise my team’s happiness or my integrity to do it.”

— Sherri Langburt

Remote since before remote, and no monitoring software

BabbleBoxx has been distributed for years — long-time Skype users until it was shut down, now on Slack all day across multiple channels, with team meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. An internal 360 assessment flagged how connected the team is for a remote business, which Sherri attributes partly to size and partly to the fact that they were virtual before most people were virtual.

She will not install desktop-monitoring software. “I am gonna know if you’re at Disneyland and you tell me that you’re at your desk.” And the signal does not reach her first — it reaches the team. There has to be that trust, she says, and it goes both ways, because her team knows it goes both ways.

What she is excited about: the physical is coming back

BabbleBoxx does not only do posts. It does the tangible side — boxes, kits, and merch for creators — and that is where Sherri sees the trend heading. People want physical again. Mail in the mailbox. What her team calls “mailbox moments.” A return to events.

Not massive festivals — she was clear she does not mean Burning Man. Just physical connection. Underneath the whole thing, she thinks, is one motive:

“People are craving, and brands are craving, and consumers are craving community.”

— Sherri Langburt

Jeremy agreed from the search side: a town the size of Cookeville, Tennessee supports three or four different websites just to promote local events. As much as we stare at our phones, a lot of us want to put them down and go do something.

Why agencies should stop staying in their lane

Asked what question nobody ever asks her, Sherri turned it into a challenge to her own industry: how do agencies work together better? BabbleBoxx only does influencer. There is a protectiveness between agencies that she does not think serves anyone. Jeremy made the same argument from the SEO side — keyword research and blog production was a great business, but with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude competing in Google’s space, “we have to be much less standalone.” The pink pants campaign failed precisely in the gap between the influencer team and the organic team.

Key Takeaways

• Match the creator to the purchase, not to the follower count. Awareness creators and conversion creators are different hires — “selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara.”
• Ask for trackable sales data before you sign a creator, if the sale is your metric.
• Small brand, small influencer. Not every creator costs a million dollars, and you do not need an agency to start.
• Run a pre-flight check: criteria, inventory, geos, landing pages, promo consistency, and internal teams actually talking to each other.
• Creator friction is customer friction. “If it’s happening to the influencer, it’s happening to the consumer.”
• Your search results are the silent dependency of every social campaign — social has no hard URLs, so people go Google it.
• Discovery is not the hard part anymore. “The universe is your CRM” — the briefs, creative, and approvals are where the real work lives.
• Pick the channel by audience and content format, not by which platform is in the news.
• Book the channels nobody books: podcasts, Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch, LinkedIn, Substack.
• Test past the tent poles. The date nobody promotes — November 1st — and the audience everyone rules out are both uncontested.
• AI cannot be the influencer. “Isn’t that just an ad unit?” The human relationship is the product.
• Physical is the next wave: boxes, kits, merch, mailbox moments, events, community.
• A lifestyle business is a strategy, not a consolation prize. Being able to turn down the wrong client is what self-funding buys you.

Connect with Sherri Langburt

• Website: babbleboxx.com — “BabbleBoxx with two X’s”
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sherri-langburt
• Case studies and trend reports — including research on AI and influencers, and a merch report — are available by emailing team@babbleboxx.com

Hear the full unscripted conversation and browse the rest of the library at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com — founders, owners, and operators of every type and variety, all of it unrehearsed.