The form is the gateway between your recruitment ad and your Discord community. It does three jobs at once: collects what you need to ship product, qualifies the applicant against your avatar, and routes them into a contract step that pre-trains commitment before they ever see the product.

This is the cheapest, fastest way to get leads for creators that I've ever found. And honestly — the system itself is generalizable. I've used variations of this exact flow for hires, partnerships, sourcing freelancers — anywhere you need to filter a pool of inbound applicants down to the ones who actually intend to do what they say they will. Creators is just the highest-volume use case.

This sub-page covers how I run V2 of the seeding form right now. Where it makes sense, I'll flag what I changed from V1 (the version I ran on the TikTok Shop brand a year ago) and why.

Why a form (and not Insense, Join Brands, etc.)

Most operators don't run their own seeding form. They use creator-marketplace tools like Insense or Join Brands. Those tools are fine — they just cost $750–$1,500/mo and force you into their pricing structure for content, on top of needing real outreach effort to get creators to actually bite.

Running your own form changes the math:

• You're paying for ads, not for access. A few bucks a day in lead ads gets you applicants. No platform fee on top.
• You go out and get them, instead of waiting for them to come to you. Outbound at this scale is impossible on platforms like TikTok Shop where you have to wait for creators to discover you.
• You choose when to scale. Pause the ads any time. Crank them up. No commitments. No platform telling you what your campaign should look like.

I've gotten one brand to 300 creators in the database on a $10/day budget over the course of a month. On another brand more recently, I had 50+ submissions in 2 days at a $25/day budget — had to turn the campaign off because we couldn't keep up with the inflow at our scale.

This is the cheapest and fastest way to fill an affiliate pipeline I've ever found.

Tool choice — where to host the form

I'll save you the long version: use Google Forms.

I've tested all three options that matter:

• Google Forms — free. Integrates with Google Sheets natively. The integrations and automations you'll want (auto-routing applicants by status, sending follow-up emails on a schedule, tagging by qualification tier) can all be built with Google Apps Script — and you don't even need to write the script yourself anymore. Ask Claude to write the App Script for whatever automation you need and paste it in. This used to be the reason I moved off Google Forms. It's no longer a reason.
• Typeform — slick UI, conversational form flow, paid. Worth it if you want a more polished applicant experience. The UX advantage gets you maybe 5–10% better completion rates in my experience. Not worth the cost for most operators.
• Monday.com — what I was using when I recorded the original version of this lesson. Expensive, especially when you start paying for the integrations and automations. Now that Claude can write the Google Apps Script equivalent of those integrations for free, the case for Monday.com falls apart. Save your money. Use Google Forms.

V1 was Monday.com. V2 is back to Google Forms with Claude + Apps Script automating the routing and follow-ups. Cheaper. Cleaner. Works.

The form structure

This is the actual flow I run now. Each section has a job.