Building a tool to kill the days-long influencer video review cycle
Hey IH, building CherryBowl! Sharing early and looking for feedback.
The video part of influencer campaigns is never the slow part. It's 60 seconds, you watch it, done. What eats the week is everything after: writing notes, getting people to agree on feedback, emailing it back and forth, waiting on a reshoot, repeating if the revision still misses the brief.
CherryBowl checks creator submissions against your campaign brief and brand rules automatically. Approves what passes, writes feedback on what doesn't. No relay, no waiting on whoever's turn it is to review.
Still early, only the waitlist is live right now: https://cherrybowl.xyz/?utm_source=indie_hackers. If you want to see it actually review a video first, email me at [email protected] and I'll send access.
Would love to know if this is a real pain point for you, or if your review process already looks different.
Real pain, and I'd push on what the auto-check should actually own. The most expensive thing in creator content isn't tone or brand voice, it's compliance: a missing or vague ad disclosure, and unsubstantiated claims. That's where a brand gets burned, and it's exactly the check a human skims past because it's boring. In the EU it isn't even one rule, Germany wants clear "Werbung"/"Anzeige" labelling, the US has the FTC endorsement guides, and a health or finance claim raises the bar again. If CherryBowl flagged "this post has no clear disclosure" or "this claim needs a substantiation source" against the brief, that's the part a campaign manager is genuinely relieved to hand off, more than the reshoot-notes relay. The first commenter's right that final approval should stay human, but disclosure and claims flagging is the one place machine-first beats human-first, because the human is the one who lets it slide.
This is a real workflow pain, not a nice-to-have. The value is not “AI reviews video” it is removing the back-and-forth that slows campaigns after the creative is already done. I would care a lot more if it can turn a brief into consistent pass/fail decisions and save a real person from doing the same review comments over and over.
Curious about the mechanism behind the automated brief-check, since that seems like the hardest part to get right: how do you turn a written creative brief and brand guidelines doc into rules CherryBowl can actually check against a video? Is it structured fields the brand fills in up front, or an LLM reading the raw brief PDF/doc each time? The failure mode I would worry about is a vague brief ('keep it upbeat and on-brand') that a human reviewer interprets correctly from context but that does not reduce cleanly to a checkable rule.
This is a real pain, but automatic approval is the part I’d be careful with. Brands will tolerate AI helping with first-pass review; they may not trust it to approve public-facing content without a human checkpoint.
The strongest version may be: flag likely violations, map each issue to the exact brief or brand rule, draft creator feedback, and let the campaign manager approve or edit it in one place. That still removes most of the back-and-forth without asking users to surrender final control.
I’d also validate where the bottleneck actually sits. Is it detecting brief violations, getting internal stakeholders aligned, or communicating revisions to creators? CherryBowl needs to dominate the most expensive part, not merely automate the easiest part.
The pain point is real - most campaign friction is async feedback loops, not production. But I'm curious about your TAM angle: are you targeting agencies managing dozens of creators per campaign (where automation is ROI-positive), or smaller brands where the time sink is real but maybe doesn't justify a subscription? The pricing model here feels critical - one wrong tier and you miss both segments.
The workflow pain is clear: reducing the back-and-forth after creators submit content.
What would convince you that brands are willing to trust automated review decisions, rather than seeing the AI feedback layer as just another step before human approval?