GRIN Influencer Marketing

A Master Class in Deception and Underperformance

Grin deceived us throughout the sales process, hiding critical information, overselling the platform, and getting us to sign a 12-month contract with auto-payments that are impossible to stop, even when scammed. We're left with a tool that fails to meet our needs and doesn't deliver what was promised.

Their "Curated lists" feature, touted as a white-glove service for creator search, is laughable. The team puts in minimal effort, delivering irrelevant or duplicate influencers. The promised robust discovery tool doesn't exist; they recently added a few search filters that are ineffective.

Grin is a resource drain, creating problems instead of solving them. They excel at cold selling and misleading demos, coercing small businesses into a 12 month contract. The reality is far from what's promised.

Avoid Grin and save yourself the frustration and wasted money. You'll likely end up trapped in a long-term contract for a product that fails to deliver.

Don't waste your money, what the sales person says the software does and what it actually does are 2 different things.

What do you dislike about GRIN?

There are several issues with the platform. Firstly, Instagram search and creator search has completely been taken off. These changes were not communicated before signing a new contract with Grin. Our primary use case was discovering influencers, at this point Grin is a glorified order-placing application for customers that links to Shopify.

The advertising of Grin Up, which is their supposed replacement for creator search run by actual humans on the Grin up team - it is the worst possible feature where Grin put its own team on manually finding influencers. In some cases they sent us "influencers" with no posts, some with no followers, it was like there had been no effort put into the process. If there are attachments, I will show the final output from the Grin Up team here as well.

Beyond all of this, the way they hid behind and misled us before the signing of our new contract was the most frustrating piece in the whole situation.

What problems is GRIN solving and how is that benefiting you?

Grin at this point is just taking our money, without solving any problems for us. We're less productive than before, we used Grin successfully for a year until they misled us and got rid of all their key uses.

What do you like best about GRIN?

Grin used to be a great platform, with good customer service. Now they have no first-party data, no ability to deliver what's needed from an influencer platform. I wish they ended our contract when we asked them to, now it's just a waste of money on our end.

They are very good at cold selling, demo, etc - and coherse small businesses into signing a 12-MONTH contract (you can't get out, even if their service is off).

Since Meta changed its policies, their creator search and curated list are basically handicapped but they would keep charging you for the reminder of the contract (auto-renewal, another trick) - very smart they know how to squeeze the demand and take advantage of small businesses to maximize their profit.

Grin is also glitchy at times especially when syncing with Shopify; but you ask your account manager, they always blame something else...lol...

keep all the evidence and request a chargeback from your bank or credit card they are usually fair and help correct such injustice.