How to Find TikTok Influencers for Your Startup (2026 Guide)
To find TikTok influencers, start inside TikTok: search the hashtags and phrases your customers use, note the creators who show up repeatedly, and check their last 10 videos rather than their follower count. When you need more than a couple of dozen names, use TikTok One (TikTok's official creator marketplace) or a paid creator database such as Modash. AI agents help most on the open web around TikTok: creators' own sites, media kits, press and agency rosters. TikTok's terms prohibit automated scraping of the platform without its written approval, so keep agents off TikTok itself unless you have that approval.
Building a growth tool on the live web? Apply to TinyFish for Startups: free TinySearch and TinyFetch at 4x rate limits, plus up to $12,000 in value.
We're TinyFish, the web agent company, so we'll be clear about where agents fit and where they don't. Prices below are from each vendor's site as of October 2026.
At a glance
| Method | What it costs | Best for | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search TikTok yourself | Free, plus your time | Your first 10 to 20 creators | Slow, nothing to export |
| TikTok One Creator Marketplace | Business account; you pay creators | Official data and outreach | Region and eligibility limits |
| Influencer databases (Modash, HypeAuditor) | Modash from $199/month billed yearly; HypeAuditor by quote | Filtering large creator lists | Expensive before you know what works |
| AI agent on the open web | Cents per run with TinyFish | Creator sites, media kits, press and agency rosters | Must respect each site's terms |
Before you search: define the creator you want
A short brief saves hours of scrolling. Write down:
- Who buys from you. Country, language, age range and the problem you solve. A B2B tool for accountants wants a very different creator from a snack brand.
- The kind of content that sells it. Tutorials, honest reviews, day-in-the-life, before-and-after. Look at which formats your competitors' best-performing sponsored videos use.
- Creator size. For most startups, smaller creators (roughly 1,000 to 100,000 followers) are cheaper, answer their own email and often have closer audiences. Start there and move up once a format works.
- Your budget per post, and whether you'll offer product, a flat fee, an affiliate commission or a mix.
Method 1: Search TikTok yourself
How it works. Use TikTok search and hashtag pages for the words your customers would type: the problem ("budget meal prep"), the category ("ai note taker"), local phrases ("review đồ ăn" for Vietnamese food reviews) and competitor names. Open the creators who appear more than once, and save the promising ones to a sheet with their handle, follower count, median views on recent videos and a link to their best relevant video.
Tips that make it faster:
- Search the problem, not your category. Customers rarely search for "productivity software"; they search for the thing that's annoying them.
- Read comments on competitors' sponsored posts. The creators who get real questions there are worth a look.
- Check each creator's last 10 videos, not the top one. A single viral video says little about what your post will get.
- Note who already labels paid partnerships. They know how branded content works.
Where it falls short. It's slow, you can't export anything, and TikTok's personalised feed means two people searching the same thing see different results.
Verdict. Do this first, even if you later pay for a tool. You'll learn what good looks like in your niche.
Method 2: TikTok One Creator Marketplace
What it is. TikTok One is TikTok's official hub for brands to find and work with creators. It replaced the standalone TikTok Creator Marketplace in 2025 (TechCrunch). You search creators who have opted in, see first-party performance data, and invite them to campaigns from inside TikTok.
What you get. Data that comes from TikTok itself rather than estimates, creators who have chosen to be contacted by brands, and a built-in way to brief and pay them. You pay the creators you work with, plus any ad spend if you promote their videos.
Where it falls short. Only creators who have joined appear, availability depends on your country, and creators have to meet TikTok's eligibility and branded content rules. Smaller niche creators are often missing.
Verdict. The safest route for outreach at any scale, because it's the one TikTok supports. Check whether it's available in your market first.
Method 3: Influencer databases
These tools index creators across platforms and let you filter by audience country, size, engagement and topic.
Modash
What you get. Search across creators on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube with audience filters, plus campaign tracking and creator payments. The Essentials plan is $299/month, or $199/month billed yearly ($2,388 a year); Performance is $599/month, or $499/month billed yearly. There's a 14-day free trial with no card (Modash pricing).
HypeAuditor
What you get. Creator discovery with a strong focus on audience quality and fake-follower checks. Pricing is by quote after a demo (HypeAuditor pricing).
Where they fall short. Both are priced for teams running influencer marketing every month. For a startup testing its first 5 creators, the yearly commitment is hard to justify.
Verdict. Worth it once you know which creator profile converts and need to find many more like them.
Method 4: AI agents on the open web around TikTok
Most creators who take brand deals have a footprint off TikTok: a link-in-bio page, a personal site, a media kit with rates, a talent agency roster, interviews and "best creators in X" round-ups. That open web is where an AI agent saves you hours, and where you can use one without touching TikTok's platform rules.
What an agent can do here:
- Find candidates. Search the web for round-ups, agency rosters and press about creators in your niche and country, and return a deduplicated list with sources.
- Enrich your shortlist. For creators you've already found by hand, read their public website or media kit and pull out the business email, rate card, audience stats they publish and past brand partners.
- Monitor. Watch a creator's media kit page or an agency roster for changes, or set a topic monitor for new round-ups in your niche.
With TinyFish, that's TinySearch to find pages, TinyFetch to read them (both free), and TinyAgent when a site needs clicking through, at $0.016 per step (TinyFish pricing). A good goal is specific about fields and limits, and tells the agent what not to do:
Search for agencies and round-up articles listing Vietnamese food and travel creators on TikTok.
For each creator mentioned, return: display name, TikTok handle as written on the page,
the source URL, and any business email or media kit link published on the creator's own site.
Inspect no more than 15 pages. Do not visit tiktok.com. Mark anything not published as
"unavailable" and do not guess.We wrote that goal in the same shape as one of our internal demos: name the exact fields, cap how many pages the agent inspects, exclude what doesn't qualify, and tell it to mark missing data as unavailable instead of estimating. In that demo the run took a few minutes and cost $0.176.
What about running an agent on TikTok itself? TikTok's US Terms of Service say you must not "scrape, crawl, export or otherwise extract any data or content in any form, for any purpose, from the Platform using any automated system or software, including automated 'bots,' except as approved in writing" (TikTok Terms of Service, updated July 15, 2026). So unless you have TikTok's written approval, do your on-platform searching by hand or through TikTok One, and use agents for the open web.
Where it falls short. Off-platform pages are often out of date, and published follower counts or rates may be old. Treat agent output as a shortlist to verify, not a final list.
Verdict. The fastest way to turn 20 hand-picked creators into 20 contactable, enriched leads, and to find creators who are already set up for brand work.
Building an agent that researches people or companies on the web? TinyFish for Startups gives Tier 2 teams 50% off TinyAgent and TinyBrowser for 24 months.
How to vet a creator before you reach out
| Check | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Audience fit | Comments come from people who could buy from you, in your countries |
| Recent activity | Posted in the last 2 weeks, and posts regularly |
| Typical views | Median views on the last 10 videos, not the one viral hit |
| Engagement | Real comments and questions, not just emoji replies |
| Brand safety | Nothing in recent videos you wouldn't want next to your logo |
| Past sponsors | Labels paid posts clearly; no direct competitor deals right now |
| Contact route | A business email, media kit or TikTok One profile, never DMs at scale |
How to reach out
- Lead with why them. Name the specific video that made you think of them.
- Say what you want and what you'll pay. Format, number of posts, timeline, and a fee, product or commission. Vague asks get ignored.
- Give creative freedom. Creators know what works for their audience. Give them the two or three points that must be true, not a script.
- Ask them to label it. Paid posts must be disclosed. TikTok's terms point creators to its Branded Content Policy and, in the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides.
- Track each creator separately. A unique link or code per creator tells you who actually drove sign-ups or sales.
Mistakes to avoid
- Picking by follower count. Median views on recent videos predict reach better than followers.
- Mass DMs. They read as spam and rarely get answers. Use business email, TikTok One or the creator's agency.
- One big creator instead of five small ones. Early on, you're testing which message and format work. Five tests teach you more than one.
- Collecting personal data you don't need. Keep only public business contact details, and follow privacy laws such as GDPR if you work with creators in the EU.
- Skipping the contract. Agree on usage rights (can you run their video as an ad?), deadlines and payment terms in writing.
Build your growth stack on the live web. Apply to TinyFish for Startups for free TinySearch and TinyFetch at 4x rate limits and up to $12,000 in value.
Keep reading
- ChatGPT for Startups: 10 Workflows That Use the Live Web
- Best AI Tools for Startups in 2026
- How to Track Competitor Prices Automatically
- How to Build an AI Agent: A Founder's Guide
- What Is a Web Agent?
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