Disclosure: Justin Moore is a paid subscriber of this publication but he didn't pay for this story or ask me to write it. It was relevant enough to share with you.
Sponsorships expert Justin Moore launched Sponsor Mole today, a new app to help you find and pitch brand deals. For those who are tired of sourcing their own sponsorships, searching for contacts or figuring out what to pitch, you might find what Justin built useful.
Before you read more, you should know that I am a certified Justin Moore fanboy. I have his book Sponsor Magnet, I went to his conference by the same name. I've been to his challenges. I've seen him speak live. I am consistently impressed with his advice and his execution. Sponsor Mole was no exception.
I attended the online launch event for Sponsor Mole today with about 100 other people to see how the app works. The promise of Sponsor Mole is that it will "dig up your next brand deal." In the demo, Justin showed how you can connect your channels, choose your niche and location and Sponsor Mole will serve brand deal ideas to you. You can also search for contacts directly if you know which brands you want to work with—you'll get an email address for the influencer partnerships contact. Justin said they partner with sales intelligence platform Apollo to grab those email addresses.
Sponsor Mole can find unique pitch angles for you based on recent campaigns a brand has in the wild and it can draft pitch emails for you. Looking at the demo, I was questioning how much of this any AI chatbot could do versus what might be unique about Sponsor Mole, but it was clear that Justin built his own best practices into the tool. He walked us through a sample pitch and it's structured much like he recommends in his book with recent campaign intel, audience info, one sample link and an actual pitch. Even if you rewrite this—which I would because I can't stand how AI writes—it's some pretty helpful training wheels for your pitches.
You can also manage your sponsorships inside the tool, tracking which deals you close and who you've reached out to. The lowest subscription tier offers this feature along with brand contact lookup. If you want pitch help and weekly recommended brands to pitch, you need the middle tier (called Pro right now).
To me, the most useful part of Sponsor Mole is that it trains you on how to run your own sponsorship business. Even if you don't use the pitches it writes or if you can find the contact on your own, it's a pre-built system that walks you through every step of the process, in the way Justin recommends you run it.
The other part that resonated with creators on the call is that finding the right brand contact is time-consuming. Most of us are using LinkedIn for this and Sponsor Mole's base tier is cheaper than LinkedIn Premium. They also said you won't pay for searches that yield an incorrect brand contact. You can flag them and get credited back.
I might have rose-colored glasses on about this launch since I really believe in what Justin is doing for creators, so let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Justin made a compelling sales pitch today and it was one that was hard to say no to, but what went through my mind is how frequently I pitch new brands compared to working with the same ones over and over again. The answer is infrequently. I also tend to pitch brands that aren't working with any creators or ones that aren't online much. It's rare that I cold pitch, though I am doing it more and more the longer I'm in business.
Sponsor Mole is built with AI and uses AI for a lot of its functions, including "outreach drafts and brand research." For those of us weary about AI, that might be a turnoff to using this tool. During the demo, I was looking for telltale signs that the app was designed by AI too—like weird buttons that don't need to exist and extra useless information—and I didn't see any. I do think it was designed with AI, but it also seems to be fairly refined to only include what Justin and team wanted creators using.
One last thing to know is that Sponsor Mole does operate primarily in English but it handles brand deals worldwide. You set your location when you signup and it should serve you relevant brands and contacts for your location.
Ultimately, Sponsor Mole won't fix your sponsorship business or solve underlying problems that could be impacting your sponsorship business (like not shipping content or not having a clear audience), but for creators who do a decent volume in sponsorships, it could be a big time saver if it works well for you.
Sponsor Mole is not cheap. The Pro tier, which has most of the key features, is $999/year. There's a launch special to get it 50% off right now. The lowest tier, which just includes finding brand contacts and the deal tracker, is $249/year. There's no discount available on that one right now.
My take is that if you're already in the sponsorships business and it's sucking a lot of your time to handle pitching, you're who this tool is for. If you're just getting started and have not yet pitched very much, I think you need to do it the hard way before you appreciate and use something like this sufficiently to get your money back. The ROI is obvious if you book a deal or two per year, but you need to be the kind of person who books more than that already.
Check Sponsor Mole out at https://sponsormole.com/
