Why Cult Creative launched a new app for creators

Cult Creative has launched CULT, a native iOS and Android app that lets creators find brand campaigns, sign agreements, invoice, and get paid straight from their phones, with payments promised within 30 days. Over the past year, the creator marketing company facilitated more than US$630,000 in payouts to 8,000 creators across 500+ campaigns. 

Co-founder and CEO Shermaine Wong pointed that that brands spend serious budgets on creators here, but the processes are still not streamlined. Thus, the brand has built CULT, an evolution of their existing web app. 

"We built the web version first, in 2024, on purpose," Atiq Zainul, head of products and operations at Cult Creative, said to A+M. At that stage,he said, the problem was the workflow itself. Campaigns ran across spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs; creators proved results with screenshots; and payment took two to three months.

"We wanted to standardise that with digital agreements, in-app invoicing, and a fixed 30-day payment term, and prove brands would work inside it before we invested in native apps," Zainul said.

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CULT actually isn't Cult Creative's first app. The company had started out as a job portal for creatives, but in November 2023, its app was sunsetted as the team realised it had little control over whether creators actually got paid once a job match was made.

Some creators had reported being underpaid, unpaid, or paid inconsistently, and the app's tech couldn't track what happened after the match. It took the company three years to "rebuild brick by brick", Wong said, and launch an app again. 

Today, it's new app keeps the web platform's agreements, invoicing, and auto-updating media kits, and adds new features such as push notifications and smoother integration of TikTok and Instagram accounts to a creator's media kit. It also showcases campaign performance pulled directly from TikTok and Meta, so creators and brands work from the same numbers, as well as a personal dashboard tracking each creator's earnings and best-performing content.

Atiq said the browser had become the bottleneck. "Going native means a creator hears the moment a brand leaves feedback or a payment clears, which used to be work our client success team did by hand," she said. 

"Creator campaigns are time-sensitive, and you can't reliably reach someone on a web app. We tried email and WhatsApp alerts, but our client success team was still chasing follow-ups per campaign by hand: draft feedback, deadlines, payment confirmations. Push notifications take that off people."

Another issue is the media kit connection. On web browsers, connections between creators and their social media accounts drop and go stale over time. Native integration clears that up.

Atiq said, "Neither is glamorous, but together they cut six hours from a typical campaign, and that's what lets us scale without adding headcount at the same rate."

There's also longer-term value in the data collected. Every completed campaign adds to a verified record of how a creator actually performs in terms of delivery, timeliness and results. This data allows Cult Creative to build a reputation profile for creators, so brands can better choose who to work with. 

Through the app, brands can get a look under the hood more easily too. Julia Rybalchenko, regional marketing lead at Emborg, said: "We used to see a campaign's results in screenshots, a week after it ended. Now we see the same TikTok and Meta numbers the creator sees, while the campaign is still running."

Cult Creative will showcase CULT at CRE.ATE 2026, its inaugural creator festival, running from 30 October to 1 November at Sky Society during Urbanscapes KL. Billed as Malaysia's first dedicated creator economy event, it expects over 3,000 attendees and creators across three days. 

Malaysia's creator economy is increasingly moving beyond side hustle territory. A Kearney study for TikTok found that around 45% of surveyed creators earn more than the country's RM1,700 monthly minimum wage, while 17% earn more than RM5,000 a month. Nearly 35% identified as full-time creators, and income flows through brand partnerships, livestreaming, and affiliate commerce. 

With more creators treating content as a profession, the way they get paid is coming under closer scrutiny, a gap Cult Creative is looking to close with CULT. 

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