Reaching non-tech customers - how do you find influencers and not use affiliate marketing as a dirty word?

I have this thing. It's called Ricordi. It's not something that might be of much interest to you (unless you're a parent or know a parent - if you do, reach out to me, I'll cut you guys a great deal), but it seems I have a small hit on my hands :D

People love it. Ricordi is a digital time capsule of memories, letters, photos and videos that parents get to send in, completely securely and privately, only for those to be compiled into a private timeline website of the child's life that's delivered to the kid on their 18th birthday.

It addresses a couple of the issues new parents and their friends share - loss of photos and videos which have not been backed up (you'd be shocked how many people do not backup) and managing of a time capsule (a lot of parents do offline time capsules for their kids - you'd also be shocked how many people lose these shoeboxes in moves). It's also a fantastic gift for parents of newborns. If you've never had to buy such a gift, you have no idea how difficult it is :D

Anyways, it's taking off. So far a LOT of sales are coming from word of mouth, proving that parents need this, and I've dabbled with some ads but with not much success. I want to expand this reach and have a few ideas, but need your help.

This is, obviously, a B2C product. There's much discussion here of growth for B2B products and some towards highly tech-focused B2C products, but not much for non-tech B2C products. I want to lean heavily into influencer marketing with this. I believe that this is a perfect fit for this product. I'm also ready in the beginning to not take any profits and only take what is needed to run the service from every subscription sold.

This means that I would be able to give $150 per sold subscription to influencers. My thinking is give them $50 as a discount for their audience and another $100 as an affiliate fee for the influencer. This does not seem that bad.

However, I've run into a couple of issues:

• it's very very difficult to get influencers to work with you on an affiliate basis. most, if not all, demand money up front, don't want to consider an affiliate program and obviously do not believe they can sell a product to their audience :D
• it's difficult to find influencers. weird, I know. you can find lists and lists of "momfluencers" with dozens of millions of followers. This is, unfortunately, not for me. I need to find a list of momfluencers with 15-50.000 followers. That's the sweet spot. There are agencies that promise to put you in contact with influencers, but they are way out of my budget for now
• affiliate marketing has become a dirty word and a synonym for a pyramid scheme. I tried joining a bunch of FB affiliate marketing pages, but these are borderline culty places that have a strong smell of MLMs. same thing happens when you try to google affiliate marketing programs. Yeah, there are a few legit programs out there, but they also charge steep prices for entry. I'm not there yet. And they don't want to do a revenue share model :D

So, here are my questions for the community:

• how do you reach out to influencers and affiliates? do you do it manually, searching through Instagram, or have you found something to alleviate this process?
• have you, perhaps, been able to find a directory of bloggers that could become affiliates? there are a bunch of blogger directories, but most of the data is outdated (yeah, i know, there's another opportunity :D)
• have you had success with affiliates? especially affiliates that you reach out to instead of them taking your link to push it around?
• is there an alternative to AppSumo for B2C products? That would rule

I guess what i really want, after this long ramble, is something like Get Cyber Leads, but for bloggers and influencers :D

I'm open to all ideas how to move forwards with this