He lets creators brag about views, then puts a lower number in the contract

Alfie Dickens, the growth marketer who built the influencer operation behind the calorie tracking app Cal AI, learned not to argue when a creator talked up their own reach. When a creator told him they could easily get a million views, he agreed with them.

His line was, in his words: "Let's maybe just put a minimum view clause on it of 800,000, because you can easily get a million."

The clause was the point. It was a written guarantee of how many views the creator had to deliver to get paid in full, and Dickens usually set it well under whatever number the creator had just volunteered. If a creator claimed one million, he would suggest 700,000 or 800,000 instead, a level he had already checked against their past posts and priced so Cal AI would still make money.

He sold the discount as kindness. He told creators the lower number, in Dickens's words, would mean they would "hit it every month without fail and it's not stressful for you." Since they had just insisted a million would be easy, he argued, they had little room to object to 800,000.

Asking creators how many views they could get turned the boast into something he could use. One take offered in the conversation was that creators, praised by audiences all day, answer with pride and name a big number. Once that number was on the table, Dickens could propose a lower floor that still felt like agreement to both sides. The creator kept confidence that the clause would never matter, and Dickens got a safety net that kept the price per thousand views, the basic math of online ads, profitable even when the video underdelivered.

By the time he was done, the boast had become the budget.