How it works

This page walks through the whole Distribution Club system once, from a brand paying for a campaign to a creator being paid into their bank account. It follows one made-up example the whole way: Acme Notes, a note-taking app for developers made by a solo indie developer in Berlin, and a creator called Priya. Every rule and number comes from the Product spec; the example only shows those rules in action.

Draft v0.1 · Last updated 19 September 2026

On this page

1. 1. The whole flow in twelve steps
2. 2. Brand side, step by step
3. 3. Matching and dispatch
4. 4. Creator side, step by step
5. 5. Review
6. 6. Posting
7. 7. Tracking and payment
8. 8. Wallet and payout
9. 9. What Acme sees at the end
10. 10. When things go wrong
11. 11. All the timers in one place

1. The whole flow in twelve steps

A few words first, because the rest of the page uses them. A brand is the paying customer. A creator is the person who makes and posts a video. A campaign is what a brand creates from four inputs: product, budget, audience and distribution preference ("more posts", "fewer, bigger posts", or "auto", the brand's only lever on the mix of creators used). It comes with a brief, a checklist of up to 10 items the brand writes, a fund (the money the brand deposits) and some settings. As soon as a fund is deposited, 20% of it becomes Distribution Club's revenue at once, fixed and never refunded; the other 80% becomes the creator pool the brand's gigs draw from. A gig is one unit of work for one creator inside a campaign: one video, one post. An offer is a notification about a gig that a creator can accept or decline. Dispatch is the process of sending offers. Expected earnings is the creator's median views times their CPM (cost per 1,000 views), the amount a gig is expected to pay; the CPM itself is set by the creator's audience geography, the platform, the campaign category and the creator's league (see Rate cards). A floor is the 20% of expected earnings released once the posted link passes the platform's four checks (section 6.2). The maximum payout is expected earnings, the most a single post can earn, unless the brand has switched on an optional bonus of up to 1.5 times expected. Earnings above the floor follow views, refreshed by the platform's official API (section 7), and land in the creator's wallet, their balance inside the app. A payout moves wallet money to the creator's bank account. Ops is Distribution Club's own operations team, who review videos, check for fraud and handle support.

The example. Acme Notes is a made-up note-taking app for developers. It funds a $6,000 campaign for a "US developers" audience, on Instagram Reels, in the Developer tools category, one of the ten V1 categories. Priya is a creator with a median of 10,000 views per post on Instagram Reels and an audience mostly in the United States (Tier 1), which makes her a Bronze 1 creator; she makes developer-productivity content and can live anywhere, since matching is on her audience, not her location. Here is the whole path in twelve steps. The rest of the page explains each step in detail.

1. Acme signs up on the brand dashboard. Ops runs a brand-safety check within 2 business hours. A developer note-taking app is not on the prohibited list, so Acme is approved.
2. Acme creates a campaign with four inputs: product (URL first: Acme enters acmenotes.dev, AI reads the site and drafts the campaign name, a short brief with a key message and a checklist, and Acme edits them; plus the destination link and a promo code), a $6,000 budget, an audience ("US developers," category Developer tools), and distribution preference "auto". Everything else, Instagram Reels, a 72-hour deadline per gig, no sample, no go-live date, keeps the platform's defaults.
3. Acme, a Berlin company, pays the euro equivalent of $6,000 by card through Razorpay, at the day's rate: the form states plainly that Distribution Club's 20% share ($1,200) is taken from the deposit at once, with no separate fee line, leaving a $4,800 creator pool. Razorpay holds that pool. The planner turns Acme's budget, audience and "auto" preference into a league mix behind the scenes, internally about 46 Bronze gigs (a blend of Bronze 1 and Bronze 2 creators) and about 24 Silver 1 gigs, and shows Acme a range: "Expected: 752,000 to 940,000 views" across about 70 posts, never a single promised number, at about $6.38 per 1,000 views.
4. Dispatch builds a ranked list of matching creators and sends wave 1: about 92 offers for the 46 Bronze slots and 48 offers for the 24 Silver 1 slots, 2 offers per open slot, the default wave size while a category and league has fewer than 50 offers of history. Each offer expires after 30 minutes. Unfilled slots go to later waves for up to 48 hours.
5. Priya's availability window is Monday to Friday, 6 pm to 11 pm. At 6:15 pm on Monday 8 February 2027 an offer appears on her phone: Acme Notes, Developer tools, $5.00 CPM, $50.00 expected earnings, no bonus, 72-hour deadline, no sample, Instagram Reels. She taps Accept at 6:20 pm. Her deadline is now Thursday 11 February 2027 at 6:20 pm.
6. Priya reads the brief and the checklist, films a 34-second vertical video, uploads the MP4 file, writes a caption and taps Submit at 9:40 pm on Tuesday 9 February.
7. AI verification transcribes the audio, describes key frames and checks each item of Acme's checklist, pass or fail, within 24 hours (by hand at MVP). An ops reviewer then confirms, within 48 hours of submission. All nine items pass, so the gig is approved on the morning of Wednesday 10 February.
8. With no go-live date, the app hands Priya the approved package straight away: the exact video file and caption, with "#ad" and the branded-content label already in place. She posts it herself to her Instagram account and pastes the link. The platform runs four checks: the post is public, it carries the ad label, it carries the campaign hashtag and brand tag, and the video matches the approved submission. It stores the post ID and URL. The floor, 20% of her $50.00 expected earnings, releases $10.00 into her wallet as Pending.
9. The platform refreshes the view count from Instagram once a day for 14 days. Each refresh releases earnings to date, views divided by 1,000 times her $5.00 CPM, minus what was already released. After 14 days her post stops earning; it has 9,000 views and she has earned $45.00 in total.
10. Each release sits as Pending for 48 hours while fraud checks run, then becomes Available.
11. On Monday 1 March 2027 the monthly payout run sends $45.00 to Priya's verified bank account. Her wallet now shows $45.00 Paid.
12. Acme's dashboard shows every post live with its link, views (against the expected range shown at planning time), clicks, cost per 1,000 views for the campaign, per platform and per post, and the money tiles Fund, Spent, Pending, Balance and Reserved. Unspent money stays in the fund balance for Acme's next campaign; deposits are not refunded. Acme downloads a CSV report. Acme never sees Priya's league, CPM, or what the platform paid her.

2. Brand side, step by step

2.1 Sign up and the brand-safety check

Acme's marketing lead goes to the brand dashboard, which is a website; there is no brand app. Sign in is with Google, or with a work email and password (a magic link by email works instead of typing the password). Sign up then asks for six things: the work email, the company name, a website or social handle, the country the brand operates from, a billing address, and a tax ID, which is optional.

Before Acme's first campaign can go live, ops does a brand-safety check, within 2 business hours. The check confirms the brand is real and is not in a prohibited category. At MVP the prohibited categories are: alcohol, tobacco and vaping, gambling and real-money gaming, crypto and unregulated investment products, political and religious content, adult content, prescription drugs, and weapons. Brands in these categories are declined at sign up. A developer note-taking app is none of these, so Acme passes. In the example, Acme signs up at 9 am on Monday 8 February 2027 and the check is done by 11:15 am.

2.2 Creating the campaign, field by field

Campaign creation asks for four inputs. The table shows what Acme entered.

Everything else is an advanced option, and Acme left almost all of them at the platform's default. It did open advanced options once, to untick YouTube Shorts, TikTok and X, leaving Instagram Reels as the only platform. It edited the AI-drafted checklist once, changing the call-to-action item to name the promo code (section 4.3), and kept the default 72-hour deadline; no sample required (Acme Notes is downloaded, not shipped); no go-live date; and the bonus off. Usage rights are included on every post, so there was nothing to add.

Some notes on the choices. In V1 the category must be one of ten: AI tools, SaaS and web apps, developer tools, productivity apps, fitness apps, health apps, lifestyle apps, education apps, kids apps, or games (see Product spec); the full list of 21 individual categories that creators pick their up-to-3 interests from (see Rate cards) stays as the roadmap for later. A campaign has exactly one category. The brief is limited to 300 words of plain language, plus links, product images and one "key message" line; the key message is what creators must say in their own words. The checklist is the brand's own: AI drafts it from the product URL and the brand edits, removes or adds items, up to 10 in total; only the format items are written by the platform (Product spec). With no sample required, the 72-hour deadline starts at acceptance rather than at sample delivery. With no go-live date, each approved post is published as soon as it is approved. Usage rights are included: Acme may use any post in paid ads and on its own channels for 12 months. There is no brand approval step, so Acme sees each video for the first time when it is live. Acme never chooses leagues, formats or platforms unless it opens advanced options; the planner turns its budget, audience and distribution preference into a league mix behind the scenes (section 2.3).

Acme's campaign uses the default format, short vertical video. A campaign has one format: short vertical video, image slideshow or carousel, or a text post, each with its own format items in the checklist and its own review path (Product spec); the effect of format on what a gig pays internally is never shown to Acme.

2.3 Paying the fund

The fund is the money Acme deposits to pay for gigs. The minimum is $100 per platform the campaign runs on, picked from steps of $100, $500, $1,000, $2,500, $4,000, $6,000, $8,000 and $10,000. As soon as the deposit lands, 20% of it becomes Distribution Club's revenue at once, fixed and never refunded; the other 80% becomes Acme's creator pool. Behind the scenes, the creator CPM that sets what each gig pays is built from geography, platform, category and league (see Rate cards), but Acme never sees that breakdown or the league mix. Acme sees a range for the whole campaign, never a single promised number: "Expected: 752,000 to 940,000 views" across about 70 posts, and an effective cost of about $6.38 per 1,000 views. The running cost is inside that one number and is never shown as its own line. There is no separate fee line; the campaign form and the billing page state plainly that 20% of the deposit, $1,200, is Distribution Club's share, taken at deposit, and that the other $4,800 pays creators. Acme never sees the creator's CPM, what each creator is paid, or the league mix, only its own expected range of posts and views and the cost per 1,000 views. Prices are in US dollars; Acme is charged in its own currency at the day's rate of the US-dollar price, euros for a Berlin company (an Indian brand would pay in rupees), through Razorpay. GST does not apply to Acme, a brand outside India (the platform's share is an export of services, zero-rated); an Indian brand would see GST at 18% on the platform's 20% share on the invoice.

Acme pays by card at 10:30 am, through Razorpay; UPI and net banking are also options where the brand's country supports them. Razorpay is the pay-in partner because Distribution Club is an Indian entity; Stripe Connect, the common marketplace payments product, is not available to new businesses in India today. Razorpay Route holds and splits the money (see Payments). Distribution Club never holds brand money in its own operating account: holding customer money and later paying it out to creators is regulated money transmission in most countries, a state money transmitter licence in the United States, a payment aggregator authorisation in India, and similar elsewhere, so a licensed payments partner holds the money under its own licence instead. This is the marketplace model: Acme's creator pool pays for the creator's supply to Acme, Distribution Club only supplies facilitation, and Route holding the 80% creator pool is what keeps GST on the platform's own 20% cut rather than on the whole $6,000 (Payments). Collection cost is about 1.1% of the deposit, blended across Cashfree's rates for UPI, cards and net banking, and Distribution Club absorbs that rather than passing it on.

As soon as the fund is received, the planner works out how many gigs the fund buys. This is the platform's internal planning; the breakdown below is never shown to Acme. Each league's take from the fund is expected earnings plus the $2 running cost, divided by 0.8: about $65.00 for a blended Bronze gig, $127.50 for a Silver 1 gig (see Rate cards for the CPM and expected earnings of every league). The "auto" distribution preference spreads the $6,000 fund evenly across the league mix the planner builds, so $3,000 goes to each group in this example.

These about 70 gigs are open slots, not commitments. Money is committed to a gig only when a creator accepts it: accepting reserves that creator's expected earnings from the pool. If a gig is later cancelled, its reserved amount goes back into the remaining creator pool. Distribution Club's 20% cut was already taken from the whole $6,000 deposit the moment it landed ($1,200), not gig by gig; what each gig actually draws from the $4,800 creator pool is its expected earnings, about $50.00 for a Bronze gig and $100.00 for a Silver 1 gig, plus a share of the $2 running cost paid from the same pool before creators. If a post overshoots its expected views, it earns nothing more on that gig unless Acme has switched on the optional bonus, which pays views beyond the median at the same CPM up to 1.5 times expected earnings, from a bonus reserve set aside per gig; any payout beyond the floor still comes from the pool's remaining balance.

Dispatch starts when two things are true: the fund has been received, and the brand-safety check is done. For Acme both are true at 11:15 am on Monday 8 February 2027.

2.4 What the dashboard shows right after funding

The moment dispatch starts, Acme's dashboard shows the campaign with these lines: Expected posts, Expected views, Cost per 1,000 views, Posts live, Views, Clicks, Conversions (from Phase 3), Fund, Spent, Pending, Balance, Reserved, Add funds, plus gigs by state, average time to post, and checklist pass rate. Right after funding, Fund shows $6,000, Spent shows $1,200 (Distribution Club's 20% share, taken the moment the deposit landed and never refunded), Pending shows $0, Balance shows $4,800 (Fund minus Spent minus Pending: the creator pool, not yet used by any gig), Reserved shows $0 (no gig accepted yet), Expected posts shows about 70, Expected views shows "Expected: 752,000 to 940,000," never a single promised number, Cost per 1,000 views shows about $6.38, about 70 gigs are in the "open" state, 0 accepted, 0 posts live, 0 views, 0 clicks. A dispatch line says wave 1 was sent at 11:15 am. The gig state names used on this page are open, accepted, submitted, in review, changes requested, approved, live, complete, expired and cancelled (assumption). The campaign itself is in one of three states, draft, live or paused; "fund not yet received", "brand check pending", "campaign complete" and "slots unfilled after 48 hours" show as banners on the campaign page, not as states. Below the tiles sits a by-platform panel, one row per platform, with views, clicks, cost per 1,000 views and posts live against expected; Acme's campaign has one platform, so one row. Two pages above the campaign, Posts and Gigs, list every post and every gig across all of Acme's campaigns. The league mix behind these numbers, about 46 Bronze gigs and about 24 Silver 1 gigs, is internal planning; Acme's screen never shows it, and never shows leagues or creator CPMs.

From this screen Acme can pause and resume dispatch, add funds ($100 minimum, with the expected range re-quoted), change distribution preference, request an extra view refresh (up to 5 a day for the campaign), sort posts by lowest cost per 1,000 views once posts exist, rate each post from 1 to 5, write to support about a post, and download a CSV report. Ratings are collected at MVP but only feed into creator scores from Phase 3.

3. Matching and dispatch

3.1 Building the candidate list

Dispatch does not show the campaign to everyone. It builds a list of creators who fit, and only they get offers. There is no gig board and no way to apply. For Acme's campaign a creator is on the list only if every one of these is true:

• Connected platform: they have connected an Instagram professional account, because Instagram Reels is Acme's chosen platform.
• League: on that connected account, their median views per post over the last 90 days puts them in Bronze 1 (5,000 to 9,999), Bronze 2 (10,000 to 14,999) or Silver 1 (15,000 to 24,999 median views), the leagues the planner picked for Acme's budget, audience and "auto" distribution preference, never a choice Acme makes itself. Follower count does not matter. League is counted per platform, so a creator can be Bronze 2 on Instagram and Silver 1 on TikTok.
• Category: Developer tools is one of the up-to-3 categories they picked at onboarding.
• Audience: their connected account's audience insights show mostly United States viewers, matching the audience Acme described, "US developers" (Tier 1); the creator's own location does not matter, and there is no city targeting in V1.
• Availability: the current time is inside their weekly availability hours, and they have not tapped "Pause offers".
• Gig limits: they have fewer than 3 active gigs, and fewer than 10 completed gigs in the last 30 days.
• Brand cooldown: they have not done a gig for Acme in the last 30 days (the limit is 1 gig per brand per 30 days).
• Score: their creator score is 40 or above. A score below 40 pauses dispatch to that creator until ops reviews them.

Because availability changes by the hour, the list is rebuilt before each wave, so a creator whose window opens later in the day can join a later wave (assumption).

3.2 Ranking

The list is then ranked. Five things move a creator up: how well their categories fit the campaign; their creator score (0 to 100, starting at 60 for new creators); their expected views, taken from their recent median; recency, meaning creators who have not had an offer recently rank higher, so offers are spread fairly; and the "new creator" boost that applies to a creator's first 3 gigs. Ranking is never sold. There is no paid way for a creator to rank higher.

3.3 Waves

Offers go out in waves. For each open slot, the number of offers in a wave is 1 divided by the recent acceptance rate for that category and league, rounded up, with a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 6. Until 50 offers of data exist for a category and league, the wave size defaults to 2 (assumption). Acme's campaign is new to both groups, so wave 1 uses the default of 2 offers per slot. Acme's campaign has about 46 Bronze slots and about 24 Silver 1 slots.

Each offer expires 30 minutes after it is sent. Slots are filled first come, first served: the first 46 Bronze creators to accept fill the Bronze slots, whatever wave they were in. When wave 1's offers have expired, any slot still open goes to wave 2, which sends offers to the next creators down the ranking, using the same adaptive wave size for that category and league. Then wave 3, and so on. A new wave is sent when the previous wave's offers have expired, so about every 30 minutes (assumption). Not every eligible creator gets an offer for a slot: sending one to everyone who could plausibly accept would fill slots almost instantly, leave most of those offers unaccepted, and show "This gig has been filled" to creators who did nothing wrong, which wastes their time and adds noise to the responsiveness part of the score. The adaptive wave size sends only as many offers as are expected to produce one acceptance, and grows automatically, up to 6, for a category and league where creators accept less often. Waves continue for up to 48 hours from the start of dispatch. If slots are still open after 48 hours, Acme is told and can widen the audience or category, or increase the fund per gig; the platform decides any change to the league mix behind the scenes. The beta target is that 70% of slots fill within 2 hours of dispatch.

Wave 1 for each slot only reaches creators of that slot's own league. From wave 2 onwards, creators from higher leagues who have switched on "Also send me offers from lower leagues" in their settings join the candidate list for that slot too, ranked by the same factors, so they fill slots the league's own creators did not take rather than crowding them out. A lower-league creator never receives a higher-league offer, and the setting is off by default (Product spec). For example, one of Acme's Bronze 2 slots is still open when wave 2 goes out. Maria, a Gold 1 creator who has switched this setting on, is in wave 2's candidate list for that Bronze 2 slot alongside Bronze 2 creators. She accepts and is paid at the Bronze 2 CPM, $5.00 per 1,000 views, on her own median, not the $5.25 Gold 1 CPM she would earn on a Gold 1 slot. Her expected earnings are still her own median views times that CPM, judged against her own account the same way it would be for one of her own Gold 1 gigs.

In the example, wave 1 goes out at 11:15 am on Monday 8 February. Priya is not in it, because her availability window does not open until 6 pm. By 6 pm, 10 of the 46 Bronze slots are still open. The wave sent at 6:15 pm carries 20 Bronze offers, two per open slot. Priya, now inside her window and ranked near the top thanks to the new creator boost and a strong category fit, gets one of them.

3.4 What the offer looks like on Priya's phone

The offer arrives as a push notification first. If Priya has not opened it within 10 minutes, an SMS with the same offer is sent as a fallback. Five minutes before the 30-minute countdown ends, an "offer expiring" reminder notification is sent. The screen is designed to look like a ride request or a delivery order: one screen, the facts, a countdown, two buttons. The fields are:

Brand

Acme Notes, with its logo.

Category

Developer tools.

CPM

$5.00 per 1,000 views, for a Bronze 1 creator with a "US developers" (Tier 1) audience posting a Reels video.

Expected earnings

$50.00, with no bonus switched on for this campaign.

Deadline

72 hours from acceptance.

Sample

No.

Platform

Instagram Reels.

Countdown

30 minutes, counting down from the moment the offer was sent.

Buttons

Accept and Decline.

Expected earnings deserve a word. They are worked out at dispatch time, before Priya sees the offer, so she knows them before she commits. The rule is the creator's median views per post over the last 90 days on that platform, read from the platform's official API, times their CPM, and the CPM is the audience geography base times the platform factor times the category factor times the league factor (see Rate cards for the full tables). Priya's median on Instagram Reels is 10,000 views per post, which makes her a Bronze 1 creator; her audience is mostly Tier 1 ("US developers"), the campaign category is Developer tools, factor 1.6, and her league factor is 1.00, giving $2.50 x 1.25 x 1.6 x 1.00, a $5.00 CPM. 10,000 views (10 thousands) times $5.00 is $50.00 expected. "Views" means Instagram's own video view count; impressions are not used on any platform.

Tapping the notification opens the full brief and the full checklist, so Priya can read what Acme wants before deciding.

3.5 Accept, Decline, ignore, and "filled"

• Accept. The gig moves to the accepted state. $50.00 of Acme's creator pool, Priya's expected earnings, is reserved for it, and Acme's Reserved tile rises by $50.00. The 72-hour deadline clock starts. Priya now has 1 of her 3 allowed active gigs, and she cannot get another Acme gig for 30 days. Her responsiveness counts this as an answered offer.
• Decline. Free. Nothing happens to her score. The offer disappears and the slot stays open for others.
• Ignore. The offer expires after 30 minutes. One ignored offer changes little, but repeatedly ignoring offers lowers the responsiveness part of the score, which is 10% of the total.
• Filled. Because 2 offers go out per slot, more creators may accept than there are slots. A creator who taps Accept after the slots are full sees "This gig has been filled". Their score does not change.

Priya taps Accept at 6:20 pm on Monday 8 February 2027. Her deadline is Thursday 11 February 2027 at 6:20 pm.

4. Creator side, step by step

4.1 Priya before the offer

Everything a creator does happens in the creator app on iOS or Android. Priya signed up in late January 2027, during the open creator beta. Her onboarding went in this order:

1. Sign in. Priya's choice is a phone number confirmed with a one-time code by SMS, instead of Google or Apple.
2. Profile: her name, her country, her city, and up to 3 content categories. She picked Developer tools, and Productivity apps, since she makes developer-productivity content. A creator's profile city is not used for matching; Distribution Club matches on the audience a brand describes, not on where the creator lives.
3. Connect a social account. She connected Instagram through Instagram's official login flow. The app asks only for the permissions it needs: to publish, and to read statistics, including where her audience is (her audience geography tier). Her access token is stored encrypted.
4. Automatic eligibility check on that account: she is 18 or over; her median views per post over the last 90 days is 10,000, above the 5,000-view floor; she has at least 10 public posts in the last 90 days; and the account is at least 90 days old. She passes. Her league on Instagram Reels is Bronze 1, and her audience is mostly Tier 1 (read from Instagram's audience insights, by hand from a screenshot at MVP).
5. Availability hours. The default is "always available". Priya works during the day, so she set Monday to Friday, 6 pm to 11 pm in her local time zone. Offers are only sent to her inside that window.

Her creator score starts at 60 out of 100, like every new creator, and her first 3 gigs get the new creator boost in ranking. She has not set up payouts yet. Payout setup (identity check, the tax details the payout partner asks for, and a bank account or Payoneer account) is needed before her first payout, not before her first gig. Her settings also have a switch called "Also send me offers from lower leagues", off by default; since Bronze 1 is already the lowest league, this switch has nothing to add for Priya, though it matters for creators in higher leagues, as Maria's example in section 3.3 shows.

4.2 Inside her window

At 6:15 pm on Monday 8 February the offer arrives. She has 30 minutes. She taps it, reads the brief and checklist, and accepts at 6:20 pm. The app now shows the gig with four things: the brief, the checklist, a countdown to Thursday 11 February at 6:20 pm, and an Upload button.

4.3 Reading the brief and the checklist

The brief tells her what Acme Notes is, links to the download page, shows three product screenshots, and gives the key message: "capture and search your dev notes without leaving the terminal". The checklist is the one AI drafted from acmenotes.dev and Acme edited: nine items, one short of the limit of 10, with item 5 in Acme's own words. Every item must pass at review:

1. The app (its icon or a screen from inside it) is on screen within the first 3 seconds.
2. The app's name, Acme Notes, is spoken or shown on screen at least once.
3. The creator shows at least one thing they did inside the app and says the key message from the brief in their own words.
4. Video is vertical (9:16), between 20 and 60 seconds.
5. Say the promo code DEVNOTES20 out loud and put it in the caption (Acme's wording).
6. The caption contains the campaign hashtag and tags the brand's handle.
7. The creator appears on camera or narrates; all footage is original, no reused clips, no stock.
8. No competitor app or brand is visible or mentioned.
9. Audio is clear and music is from the platform's licensed library only.

Disclosure is not on the list: Distribution Club adds "#ad" and the platform's paid-partnership or branded-content label at posting, and the link check enforces it (section 6.2). The checklist never asks for an opinion. It asks for facts from the brief. Priya must give her honest view of the app.

4.4 The 72-hour countdown and making the video

The countdown runs from acceptance because Acme required no sample. If a sample had been required, Priya would have shared a delivery address on acceptance, Acme would have shipped it and marked it dispatched, Priya would have marked it delivered, and only then would the 72 hours have started.

On Tuesday evening Priya installs the app, records her screen taking a few real notes, and edits a 34-second vertical clip on her phone, narrating over a screen recording with her face in a small corner. She opens with the app's icon on screen (item 1), says "Acme Notes" (item 2), shows herself capturing and searching a note from the terminal and explains in her own words how it fits her workflow (item 3), says "use code DEVNOTES20" near the end (item 5), keeps every other note-taking app out of shot (item 8), and uses no music, only her voice (item 9). She is on camera in a corner the whole time and shot everything herself (item 7).

4.5 Upload, caption, Submit

The Upload button takes one video file, MP4 or MOV, up to 500 MB. Before the upload starts, the app checks three things on the device: the file format, the length (20 to 60 seconds, from item 4 of Acme's checklist) and the orientation (vertical). Priya's file passes. She then writes the caption. She includes the campaign hashtag #AcmeNotes, tags @acmenotesapp, and puts "DEVNOTES20" in the text. The platform will add "#ad", the branded-content label, and the campaign hashtag and brand tag at posting time if they are missing, but including them herself means item 6 passes cleanly.

She can replace the video or edit the caption as often as she likes until she taps Submit. She taps Submit at 9:40 pm on Tuesday 9 February 2027, about 45 hours before her deadline. The gig moves to the submitted state and the countdown stops.

5. Review

At MVP, the check is entirely by hand: the founder works through Acme's checklist as a form, 50 to 100 submissions a day, deciding within 48 hours; see MVP in two weeks. AI verification is the target, added once volume passes about 100 a day. The walkthrough below shows the process once it is live.

Distribution Club checks every submission against the brand's checklist, item by item. Brands do not review; there is no brand approval step. Review has an AI pass and a human pass: once AI verification is live, the AI result reaches the creator within 24 hours of submission, and the human decision follows within 48 hours of submission.

5.1 The AI pass

AI verification runs first. The audio is transcribed with speech-to-text. Key frames are pulled out of the video and described by a vision model. Then a multimodal model reads the transcript, the frame descriptions and the caption, and checks each of Acme's nine items as pass, fail or unsure, with a one-line reason. A perceptual hash of the video is compared with earlier submissions to catch duplicates. For Priya's video the result looks like this:

5.2 The human pass

At MVP an ops reviewer confirms every submission, which takes about 6 minutes each. The reviewer sees the nine rows above, plays the video, and checks anything marked unsure. For Priya's item 8 the reviewer looks at 0:20, sees an open browser tab with no competitor app named or visible, and marks it pass. All nine items now pass, so the reviewer approves the gig at 9:05 am on Wednesday 10 February 2027, about 11 hours after submission. Priya gets a notification. Her quality score (first-pass approval rate, 30% of the total) benefits because she passed first time.

From Phase 3, submissions where AI marks every item "pass" and the creator's score is 80 or above are approved automatically, with a 10% random spot check by a human. Everything else still goes to a human.

5.3 If item 5 had failed: changes requested

Suppose instead that Priya had forgotten the promo code. AI would mark item 5 "Fail: promo code DEVNOTES20 not spoken and not in caption", the reviewer would agree, and the gig would move to the changes requested state. Priya's phone would show exactly which item failed and why, plus a new countdown: 48 hours to submit a revision. She would re-record or re-edit, upload again, fix the caption, and tap Submit again. Review would run again within 48 hours. There is one revision only. If the second submission also failed, the gig would be cancelled with $0 paid and the $50.00 reserved for her would go back to Acme's creator pool (section 10.3). A first-time fail also counts against her first-pass approval rate, so her quality score would dip.

5.4 The review rules

Four rules apply to every gig. One revision round, within 48 hours of the changes-requested notice. A second fail cancels the gig at $0 and returns its reserve to the brand's creator pool. An approved creator must post within 24 hours (section 6.1). A fraud flag on a release settles within 3 business days (section 10.7). There is no brand approval step: Acme sees Priya's video for the first time when it is live.

5.5 The review SLA

The AI result must reach the creator within 24 hours of submission, and the human decision must follow within 48 hours of submission. The beta target is that 90% of submissions meet this two-part SLA. Priya's AI result and human decision both landed within about 11 hours, well inside both windows. If review runs late, the creator is not penalised and the deadline is not affected, because the deadline stopped at Submit; ops is alerted so the queue can be cleared (assumption).

6. Posting

At MVP the creator posts the video, not the platform. Verification is also by hand at MVP: the founder opens the link and runs the four checks, that the post is public, that it carries the ad label, that it carries the campaign hashtag and brand tag, and that the video matches the approved submission, since frame-hash matching is build-out work; see MVP in two weeks. Distribution Club reviews and approves the file and caption, hands the creator the approved package, and then checks the link the creator posts. This is what makes posting verified: the platform checks the live post against the exact file it approved, so the checklist that was passed is the checklist that goes live. Automatic posting, where the platform posts directly through a social platform's official API, comes later, per platform, once that platform approves the publishing permission (target Phase 3), and stays optional for the creator even then.

6.1 The approved package

When a gig is approved, the app gives the creator the approved package: the exact video file and the exact caption, including the disclosure ("#ad" plus the paid-partnership or branded-content label instruction), the campaign hashtag and the brand's handle. The creator posts this, unchanged, on their own account within 24 hours of approval, or on the go-live date if the brand set one (assumption on the 24 hours). A reminder arrives at 12 hours. Missing the 24-hour posting deadline moves the gig to Expired, with the same consequences as missing the content deadline: $0 paid, the reliability score drops, and the slot is re-dispatched (section 10.2).

6.2 Verifying the link

The creator pastes the post link into the app. The platform runs four checks, in order: the post is public; it carries the ad label ("#ad" plus the platform's paid-partnership or branded-content label); it carries the campaign hashtag and the brand tag; and the posted video matches the approved submission. The match check tries a frame-by-frame perceptual hash first, falls back to matching the transcript if a hash match is not possible, and falls back again to an ops manual check if neither works. Reads use the platform's API with the creator's connected account where a read permission exists, or the platform's own public data where that is enough: YouTube and X give public view counts; Instagram and TikTok need the creator's connected account.

Passing all four checks is what "verified" means: the floor is released and the 14-day earning window starts from the post's own publish time (section 7). If any check fails, see section 10.6.

6.3 Automatic posting, later

Platform-posted mode is switched on per platform once that platform approves the publishing permission, target Phase 3. A per-creator setting, "Let Distribution Club post for me", defaults to on once it is available for a platform. The creator sees the exact caption before submitting either way, so nothing about what gets said changes between the two modes. Once platform-posted mode is live for a platform, the mechanics at posting time are the same on every social platform:

1. Transcodes the video into the format that platform accepts.
2. Builds the final caption: the creator's caption, plus "#ad", plus the campaign hashtag and the brand's handle if the creator left them out.
3. Switches on that platform's paid-partnership or branded-content label, where the platform offers one.
4. Uploads and publishes through the official API.
5. Stores the post ID and URL.
6. Reads the post back through the API to confirm it is live.
7. Runs the four checks on the live post, releases the floor and notifies the creator and the brand.

The API differs per platform, in general terms:

• Instagram Reels: Instagram's content publishing API, which needs a professional account (Creator or Business). Instagram limits an account to 100 API posts per 24 hours, and access tokens expire and must be refreshed.
• YouTube Shorts: the YouTube Data API upload with the creator's OAuth permission. The app must pass Google's compliance audit before uploaded videos can be public, and each upload uses a large share of the daily quota.
• TikTok: the TikTok Content Posting API in direct-post mode, which supports the branded-content disclosure toggle. Until the app passes TikTok's audit, posts from it can only be private.
• X: the X API for media upload and post creation. The same video is posted as a video post with the caption as the post text.

Limits like these should be verified against each platform's current documentation. The Dependencies page has the detail.

6.4 Priya's post goes live

Priya's gig was approved at 9:05 am on Wednesday 10 February 2027, with no go-live date. The app hands her the approved video file and caption at once, with "#ad", the branded-content label, #AcmeNotes and @acmenotesapp already in place. She posts it to her Instagram account at 9:40 am, well inside her 24-hour posting window, and pastes the link into the app. Within a minute the platform confirms all four checks: the post is public, "#ad" and the branded-content label are present, #AcmeNotes and @acmenotesapp are present, and the video's frame hash matches the approved submission. It stores the post ID and URL and releases the floor: $10.00, which is 20% of her $50.00 expected earnings, into her wallet as Pending. Her phone shows "Your Acme Notes video is verified and live" and "$10.00 released". Acme's dashboard now shows 1 post live with a link.

7. Tracking and payment

A gig's expected earnings are paid as views come in, not in fixed shares. A floor of 20% is released once the link passes the four checks; the rest follows views, refreshed once a day, up to the cap, which is expected earnings unless Acme has switched on the optional bonus (it has not, on this campaign). A post stops earning 14 days after it goes live. For Priya, whose expected earnings are $50.00, the floor is $10.00 and the cap is $50.00.

A view is what the platform's own count reports for the post, and nothing else is counted. Before pay for those views clears to Priya, or counts toward Acme's reports, it passes a set of checks: velocity within her normal range, audience geography consistent with her own insights, engagement ratio within band, no duplicate or recycled content (checked by a perceptual hash, a fingerprint of the video that matches near-copies, against the platform's library and the wider web), and no account or device fingerprint shared with another creator, on top of the 48-hour hold in section 7.2. Pay for suspicious views is withheld, and Acme's reports exclude it too; repeat offenders are removed from the platform. At MVP these checks run by hand on samples, every post with a velocity or geography anomaly, plus 10% at random; they are automated in the build-out. Only views reported by the platform's official API are ever paid for or reported, to either side.

The earning window is 14 days from the time of posting. Inside it the platform refreshes the view count from Instagram's API once a day (by hand at MVP; see MVP in two weeks); Acme can ask for an extra refresh up to 5 times a day for the campaign, on any platform, when it wants fresh figures. Each refresh that releases money sends Priya a notification. Priya's window runs from 9:40 am on 10 February to 9:40 am on 24 February 2027.

7.1 Priya's 14 days

The table shows five of the fourteen daily refreshes; the other days release smaller amounts the same way. After 14 days Priya has earned $45.00 of her $50.00 expected earnings, the cap for this gig since Acme has not switched on the bonus. Views keep growing after that, but the post has stopped earning: the extra views raise her median for future gigs, but there is nothing more to earn on this gig. Her performance score (the share of expected earnings actually earned), 20% of the total, benefits because she earned 90% of what was expected.

7.2 The 48-hour hold: Pending becomes Available

Released money is not spendable at once. Each amount released, whether the floor at verification or a daily refresh's release, sits in the wallet as Pending for 48 hours while automated fraud checks run: view velocity (did views arrive at a believable pace), the ratio of followers to views, the spread of viewer locations where the API gives it, and duplicate content. If the checks are clean, the amount becomes Available. If something is flagged, it stays Pending and ops reviews it within 3 business days (section 10.7). Priya's checks were all clean.

By Friday 26 February 2027 Priya's wallet shows $45.00 Available and $0 Pending.

7.3 A creator who earns less than expected

Not every post earns its full expected amount, and the system is built for that. Take Marcus, a second creator on the same campaign. He is Bronze 1 on Instagram Reels, with a median of 6,000 views per post over the last 90 days, above the 5,000-view eligibility floor, and the same "US developers" (Tier 1), Developer tools audience as Priya. His CPM is $5.00, so his expected earnings are $30.00: a $6.00 floor at verification, and the cap is $30.00 since Acme has not switched on the bonus. His post goes live on Friday 12 February 2027.

Marcus earns $15.00 in total, each day's release becoming Available after its own 48-hour hold. His post reached 3,000 views, half his 6,000 median, so he earns half his $30.00 expected earnings. The $15.00 he does not earn stays in Acme's creator pool, where it can pay for other gigs or Acme's next campaign; deposits are not refunded. Nothing is taken from Marcus; he keeps the $15.00 he did earn. His performance score dips a little because he earned only half of what was expected. This is the trade the rate card makes: 20% of expected earnings is released once the link is verified, the rest depends on views, day by day.

8. Wallet and payout

The wallet is the creator's balance inside the app, in three states: Pending (released, inside the 48-hour hold), Available (can be paid out) and Paid (sent to the bank). After the campaign Priya's wallet shows $45.00 Available. Nothing in the wallet is ever called a "credit": the site does not use that word for money at all; Acme's unspent fund is called the fund balance on the brand dashboard (section 9). Priya is owed a fee for the gig she supplied to Acme through the platform, and that fee moves through Pending, Available and Paid on its way to her bank account.

8.1 Payout setup

Before any money can leave the wallet, the creator completes payout setup. Distribution Club is an Indian entity, so the rail depends on where the creator is. An Indian creator completes an identity check, PAN details and a bank account or UPI ID, and is paid through RazorpayX or Cashfree Payouts, with TDS deducted. Priya lives in Manila, in the Philippines, even though her audience is mostly US developers, so she is outside India: she is paid through Payoneer, once the platform's eligibility as a payer with Payoneer is confirmed, with an identity check and the tax details Payoneer asks for. Until Payoneer is confirmed, a creator outside India can still accept and complete gigs; their wallet holds the balance and they are told when payouts open. See Payments. The app asks for payout setup before the first payout, not before the first gig, so Priya could accept and finish her gig without it. The app prompts a creator for payout setup the first time they have a Pending balance. For Priya that was 10 February 2027, the moment the floor released her first $10 as Pending; she completed setup the next day, well before that $10 became Available on 12 February. One payout account is allowed per person; this is one of the fraud controls. Payoneer converts her payout from US dollars into her local currency at the moment it is paid.

8.2 The 1st of the month

The 30-day payout cycle is implemented as one automatic payout run on the 1st of every month. On that day the full Available balance of every creator who has completed payout setup and has at least $20 Available is sent to their verified bank account. Balances under $20 roll over to the next month. Money still Pending on the 1st waits for the following month.

Priya is paid $45.00 on Monday 1 March 2027, the second monthly payout run of the open creator beta. The transfer is made by Payoneer, not by Distribution Club. There is no fee on creator earnings at MVP. At the end of the year Payoneer produces whatever tax statement applies to her account; the details are confirmed by the chartered accountant.

Phase 4 adds an instant payout option: a creator can move Available money to their bank at once for a 2% fee, so $45.00 would arrive as $44.10 instead of waiting for the 1st.

9. What Acme sees at the end

A campaign shows the "campaign complete" banner when every gig has either finished its 14-day earning window, expired, or been cancelled (assumption); the campaign's state stays live, or paused if Acme paused it. For Acme, with the last posts going live in mid February, that is early March 2027. Suppose the campaign lands on the same result as the worked example on the Business model page: all about 70 gigs posted, each earning most but not all of its expected earnings, the way Priya earned $45.00 of $50.00 and Marcus $15.00 of $30.00.

"Spent" is $1,200 that became Distribution Club's revenue the moment the $6,000 deposit landed, fixed and never refunded, plus the share of the $4,800 creator pool actually earned by creators across all gigs. Real posts vary, the way Priya earned 90% of her expected earnings and Marcus earned 50% of his: averaging those two examples gives an illustrative 70% of expected earnings paid out across the whole campaign (assumption), $3,290 paid to creators (70% of the roughly $4,700 in total expected earnings across all gigs), for a total Spent of $4,490. Unearned money stays in the creator pool for more gigs; "Balance" is what is left of the $4,800 pool once earned amounts are paid out, $1,510 in this illustration. Each gig's expected earnings release as a floor at verification and then day by day as views come in, for 14 days, up to the cap of expected earnings, unless Acme switches on the optional bonus; each release sits in Pending for 48 hours and then moves to Spent, and the platform's 20% share does not move with those releases, since it was already taken at deposit. Acme's dashboard shows Fund, Spent, Pending, Balance and Reserved, the expected range of posts and views, views so far, clicks, cost per 1,000 views for the campaign, per platform and per post, and the by-platform panel; what each creator individually earned, and any league or CPM, are internal figures never shown on Acme's dashboard, while the $1,200 platform share is stated plainly on the billing page. The dashboard also shows views per post, average time to post (from acceptance to live), and the checklist pass rate (the share of submissions that passed review first time).

Acme can use the $1,510 fund balance on its next campaign or to add funds to a running one; deposits are not refunded. Acme can download the whole campaign as a CSV: one row per gig with platform, post URL, views, clicks and dates. It can also rate each post from 1 to 5, sort posts by lowest cost per 1,000 views, and use any post in paid ads or on its own channels for 12 months, since usage rights are included on every post at no extra cost. A question or complaint about a post goes to support.

10. When things go wrong

The path above is the common case. These are the rules for the other cases, each shown against the example.

10.1 Missed content deadline

If Priya had not tapped Submit by 6:20 pm on Thursday 11 February, the gig would have moved to the Expired state automatically at that moment. A missed deadline always produces Expired, not Cancelled, and only Expired lowers the reliability score. She is paid $0. Her reliability score (40% of the total) drops. The $50.00 reserved for her expected earnings goes back into Acme's remaining creator pool, and the slot is re-dispatched to other creators. There is no grace period.

10.2 Missed posting deadline

Approval is not the end of the clock. If Priya had not posted the approved video and pasted the link within 24 hours of the 9:05 am approval, by about 9:05 am on Thursday 11 February, the gig would have moved to Expired the same way a missed content deadline does: $0 paid, her reliability score drops, and the slot is re-dispatched. A reminder notification arrives at the 12-hour mark to make this less likely.

10.3 Second review failure

A submission that fails review gets one revision round with a 48-hour deadline. If the revision fails too, the gig moves to the Cancelled state: $0 paid and the reserved amount returns to the creator pool. If the cause was an unclear brief rather than a careless creator, ops can grant a goodwill payment of up to 20% of expected earnings, so up to $10.00 for Priya, paid from Distribution Club's own revenue and not from Acme's fund. Two failures count against the creator's quality score. Cancelled is different from Expired: Expired is what a missed deadline produces, and it lowers the reliability score instead. Ops can also cancel a gig directly, for example if a required sample never ships; that kind of cancellation pays $0 the same way but leaves the creator's score unchanged.

10.4 Creator deletes the post inside 90 days

A post must stay live for at least 90 days. For Priya that means until 11 May 2027. If she deletes or hides it before then, the post stops earning at once and her score drops. Money already paid out to her bank is not clawed back unless fraud is proven. Money released but still sitting in the wallet stays hers unless fraud is proven (assumption). Since Priya's post stopped earning after 14 days, a deletion on day 30 would cost her score but not money.

10.5 Posting API fails (platform-posted mode)

This applies once a platform is switched to platform-posted mode (section 6.3), not to creator-posted mode at MVP. Sometimes the API call fails at posting time: an expired token, a platform outage, a daily limit reached (for example Instagram's 100 API posts per account per 24 hours). The platform retries every 15 minutes for up to 6 hours, then alerts ops and the creator. The deadline is not affected and the creator is not penalised: the video was submitted and approved on time. If the token has expired, the creator is asked to reconnect the account, and posting resumes. The floor is only released once the post is confirmed live and passes the four checks. At MVP, where the creator posts the approved package themselves, see section 10.6 instead.

10.6 Link could not be verified

If any of the four checks fails, the video cannot be matched to the approved submission, the post cannot be found or is not public, or the ad label, hashtag or brand tag is missing, she is asked in the app to check it: is the post public, does it use the approved file and the approved caption. She can fix the post and resubmit the link, and verification runs again. If the automatic checks still cannot decide, an ops reviewer checks it by hand. There is no penalty and the posting deadline is not affected if the post turns out to be right; the check exists to catch a wrong upload, a private account or a missing disclosure, not to punish the creator for something outside their control.

10.7 Fraud flag on a release

If the 48-hour checks flag something, for example a jump of 4,000 views between one daily refresh and the next on a post that had 200 views before, the amount released at that read stays Pending and ops reviews it within 3 business days. If ops finds it clean, the amount becomes Available. If ops confirms fraud, that release is cancelled, the money returns to the creator pool, and the creator's account is paused pending review (assumption). The checks cover view velocity, the follower-to-view ratio, geography spread where the API gives it, duplicate video detection by perceptual hash, and device and account fingerprinting. The beta target is that less than 2% of released money is later reversed or flagged.

10.8 Brand pauses dispatch

Acme can pause dispatch from the dashboard at any time, for example to fix a typo in the brief. No new waves go out. Offers already sent keep running to their 30-minute expiry, and gigs already accepted continue as normal (assumption). The 48-hour dispatch clock pauses too (assumption). Acme taps Resume when ready.

10.9 Slots unfilled after 48 hours

If, at 11:15 am on Wednesday 10 February, some of Acme's about 70 slots are still open, dispatch stops and Acme is told by email. Acme can widen the audience or category, or increase the fund per gig, and dispatch starts again; the platform decides internally whether to widen the league mix, for example adding Gold 1. Money for unfilled slots was never committed, so it stays in the creator pool.

10.10 Creator disconnects a social account

A creator can disconnect an account at any time, but active gigs must finish first. An active gig is one that has been accepted but not yet posted, that is any state from accepted up to approved or scheduled. A gig that has already posted and is only running its 14-day performance window does not count as active, so a creator can disconnect the account while that window is still running. On disconnect the stored token is deleted, and the creator loses their league on that platform until they reconnect. Posts already made stay on the account. The platform keeps checking those posts are live for 90 days using the stored post URL (assumption).

10.11 Brand asks for its unused fund back

Deposits are not refunded (founder decision, 19 September 2026). Unused fund is the fund balance, the unspent part of the creator pool; for Acme that is $1,510 in the illustration above. It stays with Acme as fund balance and is spent on Acme's next campaign, or added to a running one, and it does not expire (assumption). Money already spent on earnings paid out is gone. The brand terms say this plainly before the first deposit.

11. All the timers in one place

Two of these are worth reading together. The deadline clock stops when the creator taps Submit, so a slow review never causes a missed deadline. And the 14-day earning window starts at posting, not at acceptance, so a creator who submits early does not lose tracking time. The money side of all of this is on the Business model page; the things that can go wrong at a bigger scale are on the Challenges page.