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 erick@cherrybowl.xyz 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.
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that final human review is what we'd want as a final check.
The pain-point we really want to solve is the back and forth communication between creators and reviewers where creators are waiting around for feedback because reviewers are too busy focusing on other stuff ultimately dragging out campaigns. By the time a reviewer checks it out, it shouldn't have any major brand or compliance issues aside from the human aspect, checking if it sounds genuine or similar issues like that, which hopefully the creator be owning that
That ordering makes sense. One thing that would compound it: show the creator the automated pre-flight before they submit, not the reviewer after. Creators self-correct when the checklist is theirs, so the queue shrinks at the source; first-pass approval rate is the number that tells you it's working.
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.
Definitely agree here, ultimately most brands would like some control over final approval but the goal is to raise the bar of the video submitted, ultimately reducing round-trip time of a campaign video review!
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.
We're taking different aspects of the video such as running specific models on the audio, video frames, and spoken content. This will get better over time as we fine-tune those models but idea will be, pick out a guideline doc and run some LLM API against a specific layer of the video
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.
Yep, automatic approval is something most brands won't like, however we see some usecases there when a brand may want to run high volume campaigns and guideline are looser.
I think to the validation part, that's something we want to validate too as we talk to more marketing teams
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.
We're targeting agencies for now, however we want to expand to larger parts of the campaign lifecycle too which would also be useful for some brands down the line.
Pricing model is still something we're going back and forth about but if you have any suggestions, would love to hear you out
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?
Ultimately it comes down to the brand. Some brands want to run high volume campaigns with looser requirements, and some will have stricter requirements and wants some human eyes on before giving the green light!
That makes sense. It sounds like the bigger question may be where brands are actually willing to hand over decision authority, not whether they use AI at all.
Curious if you've seen that boundary become clearer from the brands you've spoken with so far.
For us, it's too early to tell. We've talked to some bigger brands and generally have a sense that they'd still want a manual final review, however it seems that most are open to incorporate some AI in their workflow
That makes sense. The gap between being open to AI and being willing to hand over the final decision is the part that caught my attention.
I'd be interested in continuing the conversation by email if you're open to it. What's the best email to reach you on?