Personas

Every feature in this doc set should trace back to one of these people. When in doubt about whether to build something, ask which persona needs it and why.

1. Influencer / Creator personas

1a. Priya — Nano/Micro Influencer (8K Instagram followers, lifestyle/food)

• Situation: Has a day job, creates content as a side hustle. Gets occasional brand DMs offering free products "for exposure."
• Goals: Turn content creation into real, predictable income. Be taken seriously despite a small following (nano/micro creators often have better engagement rates and cheaper, more authentic-feeling content than macro influencers).
• Pain points: Doesn't know what to charge. Has no leverage in DM negotiations. No way to prove her engagement is real, not bought. Gets asked to do free "trial" work that never converts to paid.
• What she needs from HireForGig: A rate card that structures her offering, a way to get discovered by brands actively looking for her niche/size (not just chasing follower count), and payment protection so she stops working for exposure.

1b. Arjun — Full-time Mid-tier Creator (85K YouTube subscribers, tech reviews)

• Situation: Content creation is his primary income. Juggles multiple brand deals simultaneously, currently tracked in a personal spreadsheet.
• Goals: Reduce time spent on business development/negotiation so he can focus on content. Build a repeatable, professional client pipeline instead of one-off deals.
• Pain points: Scope creep on deliverables. Brands who ghost after delivery or delay payment 60+ days. No easy way to show a prospective brand his track record with other brands.
• What he needs: A public portfolio/rate card, structured briefs that lock scope before he starts, escrow so payment isn't a chase, and a review/reputation system that compounds his credibility over time.

1c. Studio Nine — Small Creator Collective/Agency (manages 12 creators)

• Situation: A boutique agency representing a roster of micro/mid creators, negotiating deals on their behalf.
• Goals: Get their whole roster discovered as a package, manage multiple simultaneous campaigns without losing track of deliverables/payments per creator.
• Pain points: No tooling built for "represents multiple people" — most platforms assume one person = one profile.
• What they need: A rep/agency account type that can create and manage multiple linked creator profiles, with campaign and payment tracking rolled up in one dashboard. (Scoped as a v1.x feature — see roadmap.md; v1 can work around this with clearly documented multi-profile support even if the "agency dashboard" polish comes later.)

2. Hirer personas

2a. Meera — D2C Brand Marketing Manager (skincare brand, ₹2Cr/yr revenue)

• Situation: Runs influencer marketing as one channel among several (paid ads, SEO). Currently sources influencers via Instagram search + DMs + a shared Google Sheet of "creators we've worked with."
• Goals: Scale influencer campaigns without scaling headcount — run 20 creator collabs a month instead of 3, without 20x the manual coordination effort.
• Pain points: Discovery is the biggest time sink. Verifying a creator isn't running bought followers. Chasing creators for deliverables and usage rights paperwork.
• What she needs: Filterable creator search (niche, engagement rate, price band, location), bulk outreach/gig posting, a single dashboard to track every active campaign's status, and a paper trail (contract terms, delivered content, usage rights) she can point to later.

2b. Rohan — Solo Founder (bootstrapped SaaS, needs one-off marketing push)

• Situation: Not a "marketing person" — wants to hire 2–3 LinkedIn creators to talk about his product launch. Has never run an influencer campaign before.
• Goals: A low-friction way to find relevant creators and get a deliverable, without needing to become an influencer-marketing expert first.
• Pain points: Doesn't know market rates (risk of being wildly over- or under-priced). Doesn't know what "good deliverables" look like as a spec. Small budget, so every wasted rupee matters.
• What he needs: Guided gig-posting (templates, suggested rate ranges by follower tier), transparent pricing so he's not negotiating blind, and low minimum campaign sizes (a single-creator, single-post gig should be a fully supported first-class flow, not an edge case).

2c. Kavita — Agency Account Manager (runs campaigns for 5 retained clients)

• Situation: Manages influencer marketing for multiple brand clients simultaneously, reports results back to each client.
• Goals: Run parallel campaigns across clients without mixing up budgets, creators, or deliverables. Produce clean reporting for client-facing updates.
• Pain points: Needs strict separation between client budgets/campaigns while still benefiting from her own accumulated creator relationships/history on the platform.
• What she needs: Multi-campaign/multi-client workspace support (v1: multiple concurrent gigs cleanly separated in her dashboard; true multi-tenant client billing separation is a later-phase feature — see roadmap.md).

3. Platform personas

3a. Admin/Trust & Safety Ops

• Situation: Internal HireForGig team member reviewing flagged accounts, disputes, and verification requests.
• Goals: Resolve disputes fairly and fast, keep fraud (fake followers, fake brands, payment fraud) off the platform, keep the marketplace's trust intact.
• What they need: Admin dashboard for flagged content/users, dispute case management with full communication/deliverable history attached, tools to suspend/ban, manual verification override tools.

3b. Growth/Ops (internal)

• Situation: Owns marketplace liquidity — making sure there are enough active creators and enough active gigs that both sides find matches quickly.
• Goals: Track and improve match rate, time-to-first-response, time-to-hire, repeat usage rate.
• What they need: Marketplace health dashboards (see 04-features-admin.md and 11-roadmap.md for the specific metrics).

Cross-cutting notes

• A single person can hold multiple roles. A creator might also occasionally hire other creators for a collab video. Account type (Creator / Hirer / Both) should be a flag, not a rigid signup fork — see 02-features-influencer.md / 03-features-brand.md for the account-model implications.
• Trust asymmetry is the core design constraint. Hirers risk their money; creators risk their time/content. Every feature in 07-trust-safety.md and 08-payments-escrow.md exists because one side or the other is exposed at that step of the flow — always design with "who's exposed right now, and how do we protect them" in mind.