"Who do I even email?"

That's the question I hear more than any other. You pull up a brand on LinkedIn and there are 20 people on the marketing team. Brand manager. Growth lead. Partnerships coordinator. Which one actually controls the budget?

Then comes question number two. Okay, what do I say so they actually respond?

And then question three, the one that keeps you stuck before you even start. Which brands would even want to sponsor me?

Here's the thing. I've answered these three questions hundreds of times. On coaching calls. On this podcast. In my book, Sponsor Magnet. But the answers all required hours of manual digging for every single brand.

So I spent the last year building a tool to do the digging for you.

It's called Sponsor Mole. Moles go underground and dig. That's the whole idea. A cute little mascot that's out there digging on your behalf.

And here's something you might not know about me. I went to school for computer science. The early part of my career was programming. So I built this whole thing myself, and it's been a blast to marry those old technical skills with everything I've learned from 550+ brand deals.

Find the Decision-Maker in Seconds

Let's start with question one.

You type in the brand's name. If it's a niche brand, you can add their website for extra accuracy. Then you click one button.

I tested it live with Ridge, the wallet company. It pulled up two decision-makers almost instantly. No scrolling through LinkedIn. No guessing which of the 20 marketing titles matters.

But here's what I noticed after launch.

One of the first people to sign up lives in the Netherlands. And they pointed out something I hadn't fully considered. The person who handles a brand's partnerships for the Netherlands probably doesn't live in the Netherlands. They own all of Western Europe, and they're sitting in France or Germany.

So if you only search your own country, you miss them.

Now you can choose the region you want to search, not just your home turf. That came straight from user feedback, and it's one of my favorite small features in the whole tool.

Pitch What They Already Have Budget For

Okay, you've got the contact. Now what do you actually say?

Here's the thing. Brands don't have budget to pay random people who email them asking to "partner." They have budget for their own initiatives. The new AI feature they're launching. The event they're hosting. The holiday campaign they run every year.

That's where the money is.

If you've read Sponsor Magnet, you know I'm obsessed with researching what a brand cares about before you pitch. But in the book, it's a manual process. Go read their blog. Check their press releases. Scroll their socials.

Sponsor Mole does that research for you and hands you pitch angles.

When I ran Ridge, it found that they ran a big Black Friday campaign in November 2025. Think they're running one again? Probably. And if you're sitting in early Q4 while they're planning it, that's exactly when you should pitch it.

It also flagged that they just launched Wallet 2.0. Every angle links to its source, so you can click through and see where it came from.

The sneaky job posting trick

Sponsor Mole also searches job postings. This one's my favorite.

Say a brand is hiring an influencer marketing manager. That job post will often spell out exactly what they're trying to accomplish with creators this year. You can literally use their own words to pitch them.

There it is. They told you what they want. You just have to read it.

A pitch that actually sounds like you

When you pick an angle and a contact, the tool writes a custom pitch script.

How does it know about you? When you sign up, you "train your mole." You drop in your YouTube channel, your podcast, your website, and it builds a profile of your business. You can add off-limits topics, brands you'd never work with, things to always mention, and how you sign off.

You can also choose between two types of pitches. An influencer pitch means you're creating content for your own platforms. A UGC pitch means you're creating content for the brand to use on their website, socials, or ads.

If you have a YouTube channel, it'll even suggest specific videos to link or screen share as proof.

And you'll notice the structure of every pitch follows my ROPE method from the book. It's relevant to a campaign they're running. It's organic, showing your audience already has an affinity for the brand. It includes proof of past results. And it's easy to execute, with a clear idea of exactly what you'll do.

Don't Send AI Slop

Now, I need to say something that might sound strange coming from someone who just built an AI tool.

Don't copy and paste that pitch into an email and hit send.

You've gotten those emails, right? The ones that are so obviously AI-written you can feel it in the first line. What do you do with them?

You delete them. Or you just never respond.

So what do you think marketers are doing with yours?

Everyone has access to ChatGPT now. Everyone can write a "good enough" email. Which means good enough is invisible.

Here's what I recommend instead. Take the pitch script Sponsor Mole wrote and turn it into a short video pitch. Walk through the ROPE pitch on camera. Then send it over LinkedIn or email.

You don't need fancy gear. Your phone works fine. I use a tool called Tella, but use whatever you have.

Look, no judgment if you've tried blasting hundreds of AI pitches and gotten crickets. A lot of creators have. But that's exactly why I'm being so prescriptive about this.

Here's my hot take. Use AI to automate the research, the parts that are tedious and repeatable. But the last mile, the actual touch point with the brand? That has to feel bespoke. That's where you still get to stand out.

Stop Waiting for Brands to Find You

That brings us to question three. Which brands would even want to sponsor you?

Sponsor Mole gives you three ways to answer that.

The first is simple. Click "suggest potential sponsors" and it surfaces brands based on everything you told it when you trained your mole. For my business, it came back with Headspace, Zoom, DJI, Liquid Death, and NordVPN. Not bad.

The second gets smarter over time. As you search for brands manually, it builds a map of how those brands relate to each other. Similar industries. Similar audiences. Then it starts recommending brands proactively. For me, that meant Shopify and Notion.

The third is the weekly research email. Every week, it finds brands that are sponsoring other creators in your niche. One week it flagged that Adobe Video had partnered with Hillyard Smith. You can click through and watch the actual ad read, see what the campaign was probably trying to accomplish, grab pitch angles, and save it to your tracker.

And every search you run is saved in your history. So if you research a brand, decide not to pitch them yet, and come back three months later, it's all still there.

I built all of this for one reason. To take away every excuse to sit on your hands and wait for brands to come to you.

The Money Is in the Second Deal

I think the deal tracker is sneakily going to be the best feature in the whole tool.

Here's why. It's so much easier to convince a brand that already hired you to hire you again than it is to convince a new brand to hire you once.

That's why my eight-step sponsorship process is a wheel, not a straight line. When you hit step eight, analyze, you go right back to step one and pitch them the next idea.

The tracker follows every deal around that wheel. When a deal wraps, you move the brand straight back to the pitching stage.

And I tried to make it painless. When a deal gets to the contract phase, you upload the contract or brief, and it fills in everything for you. Dates, rate, usage rights, deliverables. No more manually typing in a dozen deadlines.

At the top, there's a "needs action" bar. It tells you when you haven't sent a pitch yet. When drafts are due. And when your usage rights are about to expire.

That last one? That's free money. The rights are ending, so you repitch the brand and ask if they want to extend.

Most creators finish a deal and move straight on to the next piece of content. They forget about it completely. And they leave a ton of money on the table by not sweating the small stuff.

Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal.

Proposals in Minutes, Not Hours

I'll admit it. I went a little sicko mode on this next feature.

You know the feeling. You get off a great call with a prospective sponsor. You talked through their goals, maybe even budget. And now you have to turn your messy notes into a proposal.

I used to dread it. I'd sit there dragging my feet because it felt like so much work.

So I built a proposal generator. You drop in a call transcript, an email thread, or whatever notes you have. It builds the whole proposal for you, following the structure I recommend.

I ran it on a real call with Apollo, hopefully a future partner. It pulled their logo, a screenshot of their site, and their goals. Then it laid out how I work with sponsors and suggested packages. Want package one at $15K and package two at $25K? Tell it, click regenerate, and you've got a new version.

You can download it as a PDF or PowerPoint, with Canva editing coming soon.

Profiles and team access

If you have more than one asset to sponsor, you can create up to five separate profiles and train your mole differently for each. I have one for my Creator Wizard business and a separate one for our in-person event, Sponsor Games. I pitch those very differently. But all the deals still show up in one tracker.

You can also add up to two team members, like a virtual assistant or ops person. They get their own login and do the research, and you can see everything they do.

The game-changer

Now for the feature I'm most excited about. The Sponsor Mole MCP server.

If you're not familiar with MCP, it lets you use a tool's features inside your AI assistant, like Claude or ChatGPT. You connect Sponsor Mole once, and then you can just ask.

"Find me the sponsorship contact at Ridge."

"Research pitch angles for Ridge."

Or drop in a call transcript and get a proposal back. Everything gets saved to your Sponsor Mole history. It was still in beta when I recorded this, but the feedback has been incredible.

And once you start connecting it to your other tools, like your email, the possibilities get a little wild.

The Tool I Wish We'd Had

When my wife and I started on social media more than 15 years ago, we had no idea what we were doing.

No manager. No agent. No network. Nobody in our corner we could ask, "Who should I talk to? What should I send?"

We learned everything the hard way.

Sponsor Mole is the tool I wish we'd had back then. The fact that it can be a shortcut for you is honestly one of the most fulfilling things I've ever built.

And this is the worst it's ever going to be. I've already shipped a bunch of new features since launch, and I have a long roadmap of what's next.

If you want in, use code POD25 for 25% off your first year of Sponsor Mole on an annual plan. If you want more sponsorship breakdowns like this in your inbox, grab my free sponsorship newsletter.

Now let me ask you something.

What's the one brand you've been meaning to pitch for months but never did because you didn't know who to email?

Go find out. Today.