Late one night in their dorm, BCIT computer science students Clayton Rannard and Kyle Dulay were scrolling Reddit when they realized they should post about the latest product they built: an app that analyzed Instagram accounts for fake followers and engagement.

The next morning, they woke up to a spike in traffic and the start of a costly server bill. The thread went viral: 10,000 audits in seven hours. That’s when the two recognized there was a need for better tooling in the creator economy and that what they created was only one part of a much bigger gap.

Six years later, following that signal led to building Collabstr, the world’s largest influencer marketplace connecting brands with creators. It has over 900,000 registered users across more than 120 countries and is used by leading startups to organizations and Fortune 500 compa ...