A smart retainer gives creators a floor and uncapped upside

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 14:07

   especially early on. Because if you come into the group, you make 30 videos and you only make 100 bucks off of commission, then it is pretty demoralizing. And a lot of times we see with our best creators, they're our best creators because they've stuck around for the longest and they've understood how the model works. So one thing we actually have included is it's called a smart retainer. And what this is, it's basically like us saying, okay, we're gonna back you as a creator.

2. 14:30

   And let's say we're gonna do 25 videos and we're gonna pay you $1,500. As long as you hit that quota of videos, we'll pay you that money. But depending on how much they earn in commissions, then we might top them up or we might not even add that smart retainer in. So here's to make it a bit more clear. Let's say that you're in our program and you hit the 25 videos and you only make $500 in commissions, then we will pay you an additional $1,000 because you hit that quota.

3. 14:58

   But let's say that you also hit that quota and you make $3,000 in commission, then you strictly keep commissions and we don't add any smart retainer. So it's kind of us saying, as long as you hit these videos and you hit these metrics, we will pay you X amount. And it makes it so that creators that join in the group month one, month two, month three, maybe they're not able to reach over that amount in strictly commissions, but they're able to make some sort of amount of money so that they actually stay dedicated and keep growing and then three or four months down the line you see these creators start to break out and make purely commission space which for me as the guy running the program or if you're a brand owner that's like the best thing because you're paying them pure profit or or pure off the

4. 15:35

   best performing videos instead of paying out of pocket also i think some good background is i'm a creator myself so i found that a lot of companies and even at whistler we were doing this sometimes as well as like we would give briefs to these creators to make ads for us and we would give in this whole sheet where it's like don't say this say this use these hooks this is how we want you to talk about the product this is how you need to sell the product it's like when you send the creator a 10 page guideline on how they need it to their content what they need to talk about you end up removing the creative aspect that creators have and there's nothing more demotivating than that and I know as a creator like if I have a brand that trusts in me brings me in for a reason and just opens the doors for me to create

5. 16:14

   content how I see best fit for the product you're going to get better content out of me than if you just put me in this box so that's one of the main reasons that a lot of the creators want to work in our group and we also keep it really tight-knit so it's like this tight-knit feeling we bring the best of the best and then on top of that we keep it really open for them to experiment do whatever they see fit they're all fans of the product and then on top of that they're not capped at their earnings we're not paying them a hundred dollars per videos we're not paying them fifty dollars a video it's not a thousand dollars for the month it's like it's truly uncapped if they have really good videos and they put a lot of effort in we have creators now that are making like thirteen thousand dollars a month and that's not really possible with other forms of UGC or even influencers

6. 16:54

   that are making more money than full-time influencers. And they might have like 1,000, 2,000 followers on their own Instagram accounts. But this has just been a way for any creator who's talented to be able to make real money. Awesome. And the way you do it is if it's a shopping sort of product, you give them a percentage of GMV. And then if it's the B2B SaaS product, you give them a percentage of that spend.

7. 17:15

   Yeah, especially if you have like a freemium product where it's hard to track direct conversion because we also don't want to get in a place where, I don't know, maybe people are converting off their ads or maybe they're not, maybe they're purchasing. And then we're running those ads and profiting off those ads and they're not getting paid what they're worth. And with a product like Whisper where it's kind of hard to track those attributions or it might take a week or two, it's best if we just keep it at percent of ad spend.

8. 17:38

   But obviously if you're like selling, I don't know, a water bottle or a t-shirt and it's like really easy to track whether the person came from this ad or that ad and if they purchase or not, then it makes more sense to do a percent of GMB. So the innovation here that has worked really well is giving the creator a kind of a piece of the action of the success of their ad. Exactly. Awesome. And then also capping the downside so that they can actually spend time doing this versus being worried that they're not going to make a living.

9. 18:06

   Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of the times these creators have to, they end up having to constantly be negotiating with brands and working with new companies, learning new things. And it's like, not only are these creators all power users, but they get to work with the same company every single month. So just think about like the compounding effect of how much better their videos get over time instead of, oh, you're this brand who's running a new, maybe launching a new feature and you're like, okay, let's scramble to find new creators.

10. 18:29

    And it's like, if you already had that internal group of creators who already know your product and already believe in you and like some of my creators understand the product better than me almost and they come up with ideas I never could have came up with. So if you just have that internal group already, it's so easy that when we launch a new thing, whether it was like the Whisper NoteTaker or all these different features that we release, it's so easy for me to just drop it in the discord and be like hey guys let's make a video on this instead of having to go chase around and find all these different creators and brief them and then the next month they're gone and then two months down the line you have to go find them again um so yeah it just makes for a great experience both on the brand side and the

11. 19:03

    creator side and this again comes back to the product itself has to be awesome because it'll be very hard to find creators that love your product if the product isn't awesome yeah and