One list of creators works until about thirty. After that you need tiers, and the shape of those tiers decides how much of your week the program consumes.
Every creator program starts as one list. It works fine, right up until the point where you are scrolling to find someone and you have stopped remembering who half of them are. In practice that happens somewhere around thirty creators.
The fix is groups, and the interesting question is not whether to use them but what to divide on. Three schemes cover almost every program worth running.
A YouTube creator and a TikTok creator are not doing the same job. The brief is different, the turnaround is different and the money is usually different. If your campaigns are format-specific, platform groups let you post a bounty that only reaches people who can actually fulfil it.
This pairs with required socials on a bounty. Grouping by platform and requiring that platform means a creator can neither see nor submit to work they are not set up for.
Tiers are about how much you are willing to pay, not how much you like someone. A tier 1 group might be creators who have delivered three approved pieces and consistently draw an audience. A tier 3 group might be everyone who just joined.
The practical benefit is that you can post the same brief at two prices to two groups and see which converts. That is difficult with a flat list and trivial with tiers.
Sometimes the group is just the people working on a launch. It exists for six weeks, gets four bounties, and then gets archived. Treating groups as disposable is fine and often better than maintaining a taxonomy nobody updates.
Every workspace has a default group that holds everyone. Resist the urge to delete it. It is the right target for announcements, for the occasional bounty you genuinely want everybody to see, and for the case where a new creator has joined and you have not decided where they belong yet.
Groups are not folders and a creator is not filed in exactly one. Someone can be in YouTube, in tier 1 and in the launch group at once, and will see work posted to any of them. Deduplication is handled for you, so a bounty targeting two overlapping groups does not reach the same person twice.
If you take one thing from this: name groups after what you would search for at the moment you are posting a campaign. You are not building an org chart. You are building the list you wish appeared in the dropdown.
A creator bounty program pays creators for specific work you approve, instead of paying up front for a promise. Here is how to set one up in an afternoon: the roster, the groups, the first three bounties with real amounts, and how you pay.
The bounty builder is a sentence you fill in: what earns a reward, what it pays, how often, when it runs, and who sees it. Here is the whole grammar, and the campaigns it produces.
The same bounty behaves like two different products depending on who you point it at and how you price it. A practical guide to both, with the trade-offs nobody mentions up front.
