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Lenny's Podcast · 3 min · Nov 1, 2026

Technical buyers can respond better to plain, unpolished UGC

HSHector Serrano · Head of Content, Wispr Flow

For technical or expensive products, match the creator to the buyer; plain screen recordings can outperform polished ads.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 14:01A smart retainer gives creators a floor and uncapped upside5 min
  2. 31:03Build a creator roster through targeted outreach and experimentation7 min
  3. 1:03:49Keep AI out of the creative customers see4 min
  4. 39:41Technical buyers can respond better to plain, unpolished UGC3 min
  5. 51:21Ads can wear out after about $100,000 in spend3 min
  6. 20:02Modern marketing hires need proof of execution, not credentials5 min
  7. 1:08:02Founder content builds trust before it drives sales6 min
  8. 1:15:54YouTube packaging can matter more than video production4 min
“the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform.”
HSHector Serranoat 40:26 · Lenny's Podcast
40:26

Takeaways

  1. Choose creators who resemble the customers you want to reach.
  2. Test plain screen recordings for older or technical audiences.
  3. Match the ad’s style to the buyer, not a generic UGC template.

About this segment

For technical or expensive products, match the creator to the buyer; plain screen recordings can outperform polished ads. Credibility with the audience matters more than a slick format.

HS

Hector Serrano

Hector Serrano is Head of Content at Wispr Flow.

  • Lenny Rachitsky, Host · Host, Lenny's Podcast

    Spent seven years at Airbnb; his product newsletter has over 1M subscribers.

From “86 minutes of paid-UGC alpha | Hector Serrano (Wispr Flow)”, Nov 1, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

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

  1. 39:46

    any any type of icp you can imagine and i get this question a lot as well from a lot of founders and different businesses reaching out they'll be like oh well i have a dev tool or i'm in a sleep space i can't make content for for my brand or i haven't had success with UGC. And a lot of times what happens is people mistake UGC for thinking it's just college kids making content. But UGC is user-generated content. And if you're a dev tool, your user is probably going to be an older technical person. And you can't get by bringing on an 18-year-old who isn't technical to talk about your product. And those ads might look a lot different. They might look a lot different. Like, for example, our technical ads at Whisper, when you're speaking to like this older demographic who isn't really on Instagram that much

  2. 40:30

    or isn't maybe a bit more serious, the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform. And that can be something as simple as like a screen recording of someone using your product. It could be like a minute, 30 seconds long. It can be super long. Like some of our best ads, you would look at them and you'd be like, holy cow, these are ugly. These are such bad ads. But they actually perform the best for those specific audiences that maybe are a bit older, maybe are a bit more technical.

  3. 40:54

    And it's like the same thing for a sleep product. Like if you have an expensive product in the sleep niche or industry, whatever, and you have an 18-year-old kid selling it, why are you or why am I going to buy a $3,000 product from a kid? Probably it's not going to work that way. You want to buy it from someone who maybe speaks the same way you do, who works in the same things you do, has the same problems you do.

  4. 41:16

    And yeah, I think UGC works for any company. It's just the maybe more upstream you go and the more expensive your product is and the more niche it is. It gets a little bit harder, but it's just like, okay, how do I find users who want to make content about my product? And this unexpected element of what works is part of the reason I imagine you run so many ads. You mentioned you do like 700, 500,000 ads a month.

  5. 41:37

    Part of the reason is to discover the ones that are working. Exactly. Yeah, because ads, I would say, is almost weird and inorganic content. Like I can kind of put my finger on what works on organic, but sometimes I'll see an ad that comes in and I'm like, what the heck is this? And it ends up becoming the best performer. or so. That's why I think it's just good to experiment. Don't really have like such a high bar for like, oh, if the ad doesn't work this way or that way, we're not going to run it.

  6. 42:01

    Like again, some of the ads that I made a year ago, it's literally like a screen recording of someone using the product with some text at the top, 9x16, super long video. And there are best