Running a campaign on Qolab takes seven steps, and the first one takes 30 seconds. This is the complete brand-side walkthrough: what you do, what the platform does, what it costs (one flat 10 percent, nothing else), and what you get at the end, which is a report you can put in front of a CFO without rehearsing excuses first.
Step 1: Create your brand workspace (30 seconds)
Sign up at qolab.in as a brand, then enter your company name and industry. That is the whole onboarding. Budget range, GSTIN, and website are optional fields you can fill later; the GSTIN becomes useful at booking time because invoices generate automatically. There is no sales call, no demo booking, no procurement dance. You are in the creator search within a minute.
Step 2: Search creators with filters that mean something
The search is where Qolab stops resembling an agency spreadsheet. You filter by category, city or state, language, follower band from nano to mega, engagement rate, price range per reel, and Qolab Score, the 0-100 authenticity rating that catches bought followers before they catch your budget. Every number behind those filters comes through Meta's official API and refreshes daily.
A practical pattern we see work: filter for your niche and target cities first, set a Qolab Score floor of 75, and only then look at follower counts. A 15,000-follower creator in the right city with 6 percent engagement will usually outsell a 300,000-follower generalist for a local product, and the filters are built to surface exactly that creator.
Step 3: Shortlist and send the brief
Shortlisting creates your campaign: a shortlist and a campaign are the same object on Qolab, which keeps the mental model simple. From there you send each creator an invitation with the brief: which deliverables you want (reel, story, post, or combo), the posting deadline, and your offer price, which you can also leave open and let the creator quote.
Step 4: Negotiate without the awkwardness
You see every creator's ask price before you send anything, so there is no fishing expedition. If your budget and their ask disagree, counter-offer inside the invitation thread; they can counter back, accept, or decline, and the whole history stays in one place. Contact details stay masked while you negotiate, which protects both sides and keeps the deal on the record.
Step 5: Pay into protection, not into hope
When a creator accepts, you pay to confirm the booking, and this is where Qolab's one fee appears: a flat 10 percent on top of the creator's rate. No subscription, no retainer, no percentage-of-media-spend agency math.
Your money does not go to the creator on payment day. It is held safely by Qolab while the content gets made, and it is only released after Qolab verifies the post is actually live. You are never in the position of having paid for content that does not exist, and the creator is never in the position of having worked for a payment that might not come. Both sides behave better because neither is exposed.
Step 6: Content goes live, with tracked links
If your campaign points anywhere (a store page, an app listing, a landing page), set the destination once and Qolab issues each creator a unique short link. Every link counts unique humans: repeat taps deduplicate, and bots and link-preview crawlers are filtered out rather than flattering your numbers. Creators post, the clicks attribute per creator, and 'which of the five creators actually drove traffic' stops being a debate.
Step 7: Read the report
Every campaign builds its own report from the real data: total reach and views matched from creators' synced Instagram metrics, engagement rate, cost per engagement and per view, the funnel from reach to link clicks, audience demographics across the creators you booked, and a per-creator leaderboard that scores performance independent of audience size, so you know exactly who to rebook next quarter.
One thing the report will never do is decorate. Where a metric is not available, it shows a zero or a dash instead of an invented number, because a report you cannot defend is worse than no report. Honest beats impressive, especially in the meeting where next quarter's budget gets decided.
