Magic Mind: From under $1M to over $50M run-rate in 5 years
The story of how a small offshore team built the influencer engine behind one of the fastest-growing wellness brands in America — and the playbook that became Closey.
The Numbers Behind It All
Five years of real data. The shape of growth, the spikes, and the scale.
Monthly Performance
Campaign Breakdown
Where It Started
It started with a call for help. Magic Mind wanted to grow through creators but didn't have the team to do it in-house — so Sebastian Borza, founder of Nv.social, answered.
Nv.social was Sebastian's small, young influencer marketing agency — just Sebastian and two assistants, working with 3-5 brands. He'd built it on top of two years as a YouTube creator himself, and then leading a 13-person influencer marketing team for Ana Luisa, a New York jewelry startup. He understood creators because he'd been one.
Magic Mind started working with Nv.social in April 2021. The product was a hard sell — a productivity shot most people had never heard of. At the time, the brand was doing about $1M in annual revenue.
The team got to work immediately, and with the early planning in place, collaborations began closing quickly.
The first collaboration: 3 YouTube videos for $150, negotiated down from $1,470 — with creator Emmett Short.
One growth engine. Five years. 7 Phases.
The Starting Line
Back then, Nv.social was Sebastian and two assistants — a lean crew.
Magic Mind's campaigns started performance-first, and because the product needed real trust and education, Sebastian focused on YouTube and podcasts.
For a product people put in their body, trust is everything. Nobody buys a wellness shot because a creator mentions it once. They buy it because they watched someone drink it every morning for a week. That insight would later become the most successful campaign format in the entire program.
- -First post: June 2021 — 3 YouTube videos for $150, negotiated down from $1,470
- -Platforms: YouTube + Podcasts
- -Team: Nv.social core crew — Sebastian + 2 assistants
Magic Mind Team Scaling, First Systems
The first performance campaigns delivered: 3-6x ROAS for a relatively unknown "productivity shot". The next step was to scale.
Nv.social's team grew to five offshore juniors, all hired and trained by Sebastian from scratch within weeks.
The systems behind the work held up no matter how fast the team moved — the same core process every time: sourcing creators, closing collaborations, managing relationships, and managing content.
Sebastian also began building a dedicated sourcing tool with a developer — full-fledged software, because the existing options were not up to par.
- -Team: +5 new hires at Nv.social for Magic Mind
- -YouTube and podcast collaborations scaling — 150+ micro and mid posts/month
Team Goes Local
A new 968 square foot office opened in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, with five people and active hiring.
Sebastian brought the operation into a physical office because it made the team dramatically more productive.
New hires came in as complete beginners at offshore salaries. The team ran like a sales floor — clear KPIs, clear goals, and a fast-hire, fast-fire culture.
Nv.social built systems for onboarding and full training, and every recruit reached a solid mid-level within three weeks. Sebastian trained each one himself through SOPs, workshops, and live collaboration reviews.
Within a year, these Romanian juniors were outperforming experienced US hires who cost 8-9 times more.
- -7-person team, with a training flywheel in place
- -Sales KPIs — each agent brought in $7K+ in profitable sales
First office - dual monitor desk setup with green acoustic panels
Small office lounge with green couch - apartment-office vibe
The main room - sparse, just 2-3 desks, orange window blinds
“We got the first office because it was lock-in time.”
TikTok and the Content Flywheel
The team reached eleven people, and Nv.social opened a second funnel — awareness campaigns and early TikTok.
The volume of content being produced was getting hard to manage, so the agency added a third arm: a video editing team to power the full content flywheel.
Two video editors repurposed every piece of creator content into ad-ready variations for Magic Mind's paid media team. One influencer video could become five ad creatives. Content stopped being a one-time post and became a renewable asset.
- -11-person team
- -Second funnel started — TikTok awareness
- -Content flywheel: video editing team repurposing creator clips into ad creatives
Workstation with Magic Mind neon lettering on wall - the working office
Finding the Rhythm
The team settled at around fifteen people — more editors and a few more closers. But the real progress was not headcount, it was systems.
The SOPs matured, the training pipeline tightened, and onboarding became a highly structured process.
Constant A/B testing produced the highest-performing campaign format the program would ever run: the 7 Day Challenge. 3,952 collaborations would eventually close through that single format.
- -~15-person team, stabilized
- -7 Day Challenge emerges as top format, dominating content and conversion performance
- -3,952 collaborations closed in the 7 Day Challenge format alone
The Explosion
This was the stretch that tested everything.
The team surged from 17 to 37 people in five months — a chief of staff, three support staff, a contracted recruiter, and dedicated trainers to handle the wave of new hires. The video editing team grew to five: four editors and a content strategist.
The 968 square foot office could not hold everyone. For three months, the entire team worked from home while a new space was prepared, with new employees joining almost daily.
In November 2023, the team moved into a new 6,458 square foot space across two floors — still tight enough that people occasionally brought chairs from home when a new hire started.
By this point, the systems themselves had become the bottleneck. The old setup could not sustain this pace of growth.
- -Magic Mind locks in Nv.social as its exclusive influencer partner
- -17 → 37 people in 5 months
- -6,458 sq ft new space, two floors
- -400 average collaborations per month
Brand new empty office space with NV synthwave wall mural, unfurnished
Massive new open floor plan being set up
Full team photo at Halloween party with colorful mural and costumes
“When we went from around 15 to 37 people, it was a shock to our systems. That's when I understood we had to rebuild Nv.social from the ground up. The old systems could not sustain that growth — we had to switch operating systems mid-growth, both for execution and for clients. We needed to become a well-oiled machine for closing influencer collaborations.”
The Machine
Nv.social was operating at full power across ten departments — Sourcing, SDR, Sales, Campaign Management, Support, Campaign Directors, Influencer Ads, Celebrity Endorsements, Video Editing, and TikTok Shops — each specialized in one piece of the collaboration pipeline.
Sebastian remained both the bottleneck and the advantage, approving 100+ creator collaborations per day and evaluating each against dozens of metrics: engagement rates, audience quality, cohort overlap, video skills, and usage rights potential — all weighted differently for YouTube, podcasts, Instagram, or TikTok. To keep up at that volume, Sebastian and two developers were building software to support the process.
The team had become a negotiation machine. Creators who quoted $30,000 were routinely closed at under $500 — not a handful of times, but thousands. Every team member was a trained salesperson with a practiced set of closing techniques.
Every brief was personalized, and every piece of content was co-directed with the creator on an onboarding call, scripted, reviewed, and approved before it went live.
- -$100-$300K monthly spend
- -100+ creator approvals per day
- -Creators quoting $30K closed at under $500 — thousands of times
- -800 average new collaborations per month, each manually negotiated
Full team workshop - 18 people seated with colorful mountain mural behind them
Improvised mismatched chairs in a circle - not enough seats for new hires
Sebastian presenting to team with projector, colorful mural backdrop
Team working at desks with monitors, mural in background
Team member presenting to the group during a workshop session
What We Ran at Full Scale
51 campaigns across 10 categories. Every format that moves the needle.
YouTube
- YouTube Sponsored Integrations
- 7 Day Challenge Campaigns
- Long-Term Performance Partnerships
- Discovery Campaigns
Podcasts
- Podcast Baked-In Ads
- Podcast Product Placements
- Podcast Organic Placements
- Newsletter Placements
- Instagram Reels Stories Posts
- Nano Performance (Micro-Creator)
- Product Gifting Programs
TikTok
- TikTok Organic Content
TikTok Shops
- TikTok Shop Campaigns
- TikTok Shop Reviews
Celebrity Partnerships
- Celebrity Endorsements
- Brand Champion Collaborations
- High Signal Creators
Ads-Specific Content
- Creator Bench (Ad-Ready UGC)
- Content Flywheel
- Whitelisting / Partnership Ads
- Ads Compilations
Programs
- Magic Makers Barter Program (900+ Creators)
- Product Gifting Programs
Retail Launches
- Target
- Publix
- Whole Foods
- Sprouts
- Erewhon
- Albertsons
- HEB
Amazon
- Amazon Affiliate Campaigns
- Amazon Storefront Partnerships
Real Creator Content
A selection of creator content across our biggest campaigns. Every one of these was sourced, negotiated, briefed, co-directed, and approved by the Nv.social team.
7 Day Challenge
53.1M impressionsOur most successful format. Creators try Magic Mind for 7 days and film their authentic experience. 3,952 collaborations closed through this single campaign format.
High Signal Creators
23.1M impressionsPremium partnerships with high-trust, high-reach creators. Celebrity-level integrations.
Awareness
21.5M impressionsBrand awareness campaigns across Instagram and TikTok. Reach-first, measuring impressions and CPM.
Podcast Organic Placements
9.5M impressionsOrganic podcast integrations with major shows. Baked-in mentions that live forever.
JANN25 - January 2025 Campaign
16.5M impressionsMental Wealth campaign. High-volume seasonal push capitalizing on New Year's resolution intent. Broad niches, massive scale.
January 2024 Campaign
6.3M impressionsThe original January push. First large-scale seasonal campaign testing the creator engine at high volume.
Retail Launches
11.6M impressionsInfluencer campaigns supporting nationwide retail launches. Driving foot traffic and in-store awareness.
Sprouts - 961 posts
4.9M impressionsPublix - 46 posts
3M impressionsWhole Foods - 76 posts
1.9M impressionsTarget - 27 posts
1.6M impressionsHEB - 105 posts
1.9M impressionsLong-Term Performance
19.6M impressionsCreators who proved themselves and were kept on long-term collaborations. Consistency compounds.
How the Machine Worked
Every single creator relationship went through this pipeline. At peak, 37 people operated it daily.
A full software platform built by five developers — scraping fresh creators from YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and Instagram daily. This engine became Closey's foundation.
Personalized emails at scale. SDRs trained on battle-tested SOPs, hitting weekly quotas — or they did not last.
$30K quotes closed at under $500. Thousands of times. Every closer trained with a set of techniques built from 23,468 collaborations.
A personalized brief for every creator. An onboarding call with every one. A custom script for every single piece of content.
Co-directed with the creator. Reviewed. Revised. Approved. Nothing shipped without sign-off.
A custom ecosystem of connected spreadsheets and scripts. A bespoke CRM designed from scratch.
What Five Years Taught Us
We should have built the tech sooner
Running 37 people on Google Sheets and third-party tools meant constant data mismatch, missed follow-ups, and collaborations slipping through the cracks every single week. Six departments. Five platforms. Spreadsheets everywhere. It was unsustainable — and it's exactly why Closey exists.
One relationship can change everything
Sebastian befriended a big creator whose podcast he genuinely loved. They became close. Then Forrest Galante showed up as a guest on that show. The audience matched — Forrest sat squarely in the Joe Rogan listener cohort, which overlapped perfectly with Magic Mind's customer base. His voice was authentic. One organic relationship, built on real connection, not a database. That single partnership generated over $10M in revenue for Magic Mind.
ROAS isn't the only number that matters
Fifty-one campaigns across five objectives: performance, awareness, content production, partnerships, and retail foot traffic. Some campaigns existed purely to generate UGC for paid ads. Others drove foot traffic to Target and Whole Foods. Measuring all of them by direct ROAS would have killed the campaigns that actually built the brand. The $50M run-rate wasn't built on last-click attribution.
“Building the tech was super overwhelming as a non-technical founder. No AI tools to help back then. Hiring developers was a complete unknown. But we had no choice.”