Hyperstar Ranks Influencers by Sales, Not Followers

SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Creator marketing reports are full of follower counts and view numbers, yet they rarely show who actually sold the product. Hyperstar CEO Euychul Shin aims to fill that gap with data, and the company has launched an AI agent that selects influencers based on sales.

Shin is a serial entrepreneur. His first company, which he co-founded, was sold to a KOSDAQ-listed firm in 2023, and he spent two years there running creator campaigns firsthand. "We worked with a lot of creators, but right to the end it was hard to know who actually sold anything," Shin said. "The numbers didn't connect to revenue, so we had no choice but to pick creators for the next campaign on gut feeling." He targeted the global market from the start because he had seen in the field how hard it is for Korean brands going abroad to judge which local creators can sell for them.

A third of the followers, 35 times the sales

On the Hyperstar platform, an account with 235,000 followers generated 35 times the sales of an account with 797,000 followers, a sign that bigger accounts do not necessarily sell more. The company ranks creators by looking first at their actual sales, active follower ratio and sales history. Selection, outreach, contracting, campaign operation and performance verification all run in a single flow.

The rankings rest on real brand order data. Hyperstar connects orders from eight sales channels, including Amazon, Shopify, TikTok Shop, Coupang and Naver Shopping, and tracks revenue post by post. It has built a database of 10 million creators across 133 countries and holds a patent on its sales-based matching method. Users can ask Claude or ChatGPT in a single sentence to "find creators who can sell our product well in the U.S." and receive answers ranked by sales.

The results are starting to show. In the U.S., one K-beauty shampoo brand saw its revenue grow more than tenfold after connecting its Amazon orders and reselecting creators based on sales. For K-EXPO Mexico, a government-hosted event held in September, Hyperstar recruited 122 local creators over seven weeks and generated a cumulative 10.8 million views. Fifty-nine creators posted proof of their on-site visits, and the event drew 48,000 visitors over three days. Hyperstar also runs its own beauty brand, LAB09, where it tests new features and campaign methods first.

Singapore as a base for Southeast Asia

Growth has been steep. Revenue was $30,000 last year, and this year it had already passed 1.1 billion won by October. Of this year's $1 million target (about 1.4 billion won), 95% is already secured through contracts, and the company has 19 paying customers.

Hyperstar chose Singapore as its first base in Southeast Asia. It established a Singapore entity in January and, starting in November, will spend a month in a local acceleration program with Plug and Play. The goal is to serve 10 Singapore brands by the first half of 2027. Over the long term, it plans to extend the approach proven in beauty to health supplements and the home and pet categories.

The outlook for K-beauty is bright, but Shin expects the market to change. "We're moving past the stage where products sell just because they're K-beauty," he said. "Bringing in people who can explain a product's strengths well in the local language will matter more." That is why Hyperstar directly hires local staff in the U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia to build strategies for each market.

Residency at SVC Seoul has helped the team work in overseas markets. "For an early-stage startup, an overseas trip is something you think over several times because of the cost," Shin said. "Thanks to the global expansion program, we could go to LA, Mexico and Paris right when we needed to and meet brands and creators."

Shin believes SaaS alone will struggle to win over the market, since brand managers would rather get answers inside the AI they use every day than learn new software. "As more brands join, campaign data builds up and recommendations get more accurate," he said. "Whatever country we enter, we want brands to start out knowing from the data that this creator will sell this product."

Hyperstar is a resident of SVC Seoul, a global startup hub in Seoul's Hongdae area. The hub was established to connect startups with strong overseas growth potential to companies, universities, and investors in Korea and abroad.

SOURCE Hyperstar