“We found this person who was mentioning Opal in a video on TikTok and thought she was great. We hired her and she's part of the team. The channels are called Olivia Unplugged — she's building educational media for us. We went from zero to 700,000 followers across platforms and millions of views in a few months.”

Hire creators who are already users — they produce authentic content paid agencies cannot replicate

Schlenker describes Opal's creator-first organic growth strategy: rather than running brand accounts, Opal hired a TikTok creator who was already an organic Opal user. She now produces educational content about screen time, focus, sleep, and social skills under her own name with Opal mentioned naturally. The authenticity of creator-led content dramatically outperformed traditional brand social. Opal also licensed an organic video about smartphones that the creator made independently, which reached tens of millions of people and ran as a paid ad.