86 minutes of paid-UGC alpha | Hector Serrano (Wispr Flow)

And so we're going to be going deeper into the stuff that you've seen work. First of all, give us kind of a sense of what it is you're responsible for at Whisperflow. What's kind of your job there and what do you work on? First of all, I just want to give a lot of credit to the other members of the team. Like what I touched on the other day is a very small part of the business um and that's mainly content as a whole i'm a content creator myself and that's how i originally came into whisper and that role obviously evolved a lot and now i'm kind of in charge of our paid ugc program on the actual content side i'm not on the media buying side of things and then on top of that also managing our organic channels for our founder um like youtube and instagram okay awesome something that i've noticed about you and something that i think is really rare these days is you're you're very good at breaking through the noise both in the content you create like your tweets recently have just gone crazy viral on twitter everyone's sharing it all over my feeds so clearly you figure it out how to do that yourself also with the the ad work that you do the ugc work that you do also very effective so there's a lot that we can all

learn from you and what you figured out thank you so just kind of zooming out first talk about the the growth levers that you have been spending time on what has been working recently in growing whisper flow slash can work for other b2b sas products i think the first one and it's maybe a bit corny to say but i think most importantly whisper has grown at the rate it has because of the product it's everything has been product-led growth since the beginning i joined at the pre product stage and i remember we had a few thousand users early on and just i don't know where it just started catching steam and like six months in i remember teney said it was like wow we really found pms like it found like we struck gold um and then from there just adding on all these other channels whether it be organic paid everything is just adding more fuel to the fire and what we found a lot of success with um through trial and error doing a bunch of different things me testing a bunch of channels other people testing bunch of channels. It's like one of the main ones we've landed on now is paid. And we're funneling that with a lot of UGC content. And we have a lot of pillars inside of paid, whether that be UGC

video, statics, influencers, in-house videos, founder storytelling. But yeah, paid ads as a whole, whether it be through meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, has definitely become one of our main pillars at Whisper. And it's one of the things I'm leading on the content side of things. Awesome. Okay. So let's, let's dive in there. But first, I think to your point, it's really important to say uh none of this will really work if your product isn't exactly great if there's not real organic product market fit already um i imagine this can work for a little bit and then it just fades away if the product isn't great so i guess is that just like step lesson one this needs to be working on its own with before you start investing in paid yeah exactly i have like a lot of founders sometimes reach out or come by the office or friends and they're like what's the hack like how did whisper grow so fast and it's like no disrespect to other products but it's like if you're not having that growth early on um and you're having to force it a little bit too much and maybe you have to like go back to the drawing board a little bit and like rethink how you're actually positioning the product is it actually valuable to your users

it why isn't it growing um by itself organically and like yeah there's really no hack besides having a good product and then adding more more levers to pull from so let me ask when do you think it makes sense to start investing in these inorganic channels? Well, I think paid is actually one of the best channels to invest on early on. And I learned this from Matt, who was actually our ex head of growth at Whisper. He's now at Victor. And a lot of his lessons and lessons that I've learned from him is like taking this e-com approach to SaaS, which a lot of companies like scared to turn on the paid engine. And what happens when you actually turn on the paid engine is you actually learn a lot faster, like if the messaging actually resonates with your audience, Are you actually able to convert this cold traffic into users?

And like at the end of the day, most companies aren't that skilled in organic content because it is something very like new. And unless you have like really young people on your team who really understand these organic channels really well, know how to package it, know how to make the content. It's really hard to actually get any clear numbers on does your product actually have legs? Do people actually resonate with it? Are you actually able to track these conversions, et cetera? So I think paid makes sense from the get go. obviously like testing within your your limits and your budgets that you have but yeah if you're able to like see i'm able to turn this cold traffic into paying users then you kind of have like a clear signal there that this same messaging or this product will also work on organic if you like optimize things a bit more i want to come back to that just like what that early team may look like even maybe pre-product market fit but what's really interesting about what you're sharing here is people you know paid has been around for a long time running ads on instagram facebook tiktok all these things like there's nothing new as a platform and what you're saying here is there's

still a lot of alpha and opportunity to grow substantially and do something different in paid yeah 100 and like a lot of times people also get scared because they'll say like oh i don't want to turn on the paid engine yet or spend a bunch of money because then we're gonna like we're gonna reach a point where we like oversaturate this market or this icp but at the end of the day it's just like getting smarter with how you're again positioning the product and there's always new ways um or like new messaging new icps you can target and you won't really reach saturation if you're like savvy enough with the angles that you're kind of approaching your content with or the paid that you're or how you're approaching that paid mechanism i guess this episode is brought to you by this season's presenting sponsor work os what do open ai anthropic cursor replit sierra clay and hundreds of other winning companies have in common they're all powered by work os if you're building for enterprises. You have felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs built for B2B SaaS. And now there's a new kind of user that needs access to your app, agents. AI agents need to register, authenticate,

authenticate, and get permissions, just like a person. WorkOS handles it all. AgentAuth to give agents scope, revocable identities, agent registration with AuthMD, and Airlock to judge every agent action and allow, deny, or escalate to a human. I've noticed that every startup that I'm an investor in that expands up market ends up using WorkOS because they're the best. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. Okay. So let's actually, let's dive into this. So let's talk about paid UGC and paid in general. What's kind of the overall strategy that you have employed that has worked so well?

I think it would be kind of good to start maybe from what we learned previously, actually. So where do we go back to? I think this was like early 2025. We had an intern named Tobin. He's a good friend now. I don't know if you've heard of him. He also went pretty viral a while back. He ended up joining Polymarket. But basically, Tobin came on as an early intern marketing hire. Didn't really have any experience besides some basic UGC. I think he was studying finance and wanted to be a lawyer. And he came in and Tane just gave him a budget and was like, just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks.

Did a few projects, nothing really worked. And then he found really good success with organic UGC. And this was also around the Cluey era when there wasn't that many people doing it successfully. Explain organic UGC. What is that exactly? Yeah, so Organic UGC is you basically get a bunch of creators in a group. These creators will make videos about your product and then they will post that on their own Instagram pages or own TikTok pages. So imagine you join Whispers Organic UGC group and you make an account called Lenny Whispers and then you just upload your videos into there and then you get paid based off on a CPM metric.

So maybe it's like, I don't know, $2 per thousand views and then it tapers off like as you get higher and higher. And yeah, Tobin set that up for us. and I think in like two and a half months it was like 500 million views, super low CPMs and it worked decently well but I think it was also early on in the organic UGC phase where everyone was really focused on vanity metrics and they didn't necessarily lead to a lot of conversions because obviously the type of product that Whisper Flow is as well, it's a bit harder to get students to pay for it. So ultimately we ended up killing the program which I'm not entirely against organic UGC.

It's just making sure that you're not again chasing the vanity metrics and then tobin did this a lot better at polymark and he like cracked the code with um organic ugc and like not just doing very top of funnel um concepts but yeah organic ugc does work we just didn't see that much success or the success we wanted at whisper and it was also going to be really hard to find someone uh to take tobin's role after he left so we're like let's just kill this and then again paid was working relatively well for us so that kind of brings us to where we're at now where i mean not now but like seven months ago i realized that paid was working really well and i was the one making all the paid assets so i was like what if we apply tobin's playbook from organic ugc of like building this community building this roster and paying off performance and we just apply it to paid and we maybe make the ads a bit more middle of funnel maybe a bit more pitching the product um i mean not even just middle funnel because you need everything in paid ads but more just like pitching the product straight on instead of just like screen on text ads. And then I stumbled upon Tribe, which I don't know if you want me to get

into that now. Yeah, talk about Tribe and it's T-R-Y-B-E, right? Yes, T-R-Y-B-E. So Lucas Pachter, he's this guy who started Tribe. But before that, he actually started Squid Hoss, which is a clothing brand. And he grew really fast through TikTok shop. But there wasn't really a way to do the same thing on Meta. So he made this internal tool where they could run creators ads and pay them based off performance and then he basically made it available for everyone and we were one of the first companies to hop on and when i saw it i was like this is a no-brainer it's like the tiktok shop method but for meta ads and since sascom aren't able to use TikTok Shop, it's like now they've unlocked this sort of this new channel for SaaS companies to be able to run performance-based ads. And yeah, we hopped on there, built out our program. And I mean, if you fast forward to now, we're now launching like 500 to 600 ads every single month. And it's been a great process. Obviously, that's kind of skipping a lot to where we're at now, but just wanted to kind of give an idea of what we tried, how it worked, but also didn't work, and then how we ended up on the performance-based model that we have now for paid UGC.

Okay, amazing. We're going to go much deeper, but just to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about here. So when you talk about organic UGC, it's not free. It's basically you're getting influencers, creators to create a pitch basically for Whisper. You take their video, you put it on your channel and you pay them per views. No, so they post it on their channels. They post it on their channels. Yeah, yeah. So it's a CPM based. So let's say, again, we bring you into the group and then you make your own channel. on TikTok and Instagram and it'll be like Lenny Whispers or Lenny Talks.

It can be anything really, but you wouldn't post it on your main Instagram. You'd post it on an alternate and then we would pay you a CPM-based. Okay, so the big difference here is instead of CPM-based, which is basically views-based, they take a percentage of spend or GMB. Yeah, a percentage of spend or GMB, depending on if you're in SaaS or if you're an e-com, something like that. Awesome. Okay, cool. so you've shifted to this model it's basically performance based uh ugc so just to be very clear about what this how this works you find i think you have something maybe like 50 creators right now yeah right now we have 50 okay and we'll talk about the progression that you recommend starting with a couple so you find creators you they make a video talking about how awesome whisper flow is you use that video as an ad on meta and tiktok and other platforms and then they get a cut of how that app performs.

Exactly. And then you have two kind of approaches to the cut they take. Talk about that. Yeah, so obviously we don't want to just pay creators just off percentage base,

it's just easy to burn out as well as a creator like if you're talking about something you don't believe in it can get boring really quick yeah it's almost a test of product market fit can you find creators that are excited about yeah but don't turn yeah that was that was honestly

because i guess some context as well i was actually at whisper i was the one making every single ad for like a year and a half so i made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ads um which i guess that's a testament to how much i loved whisper i didn't go crazy um and and yeah do you think that is actually really important for the person that takes this work to have been the person creating the ads before asking creators to create the ads a thousand percent because it goes back kind of to the point i had mentioned earlier where a lot of people who've never worked in content or who have never worked with creators end up being the ones briefing them and telling them what to do and it's like you would never have someone who's not I would never go up to the engineering team and be like, hey, you guys need to solve this problem like this and do this and this and this. They're going to be like, what is this guy telling me?

this so another kind of uh bullet point i want to double down on there is just this idea of young talent that's something you talk a lot about just the value and almost like the alpha in hiring young people yeah i mean also going back to the point that you had just mentioned like how it's

the hardest role to hire i think it's very simple it just boils down to like what i mentioned like the two resumes there's there's no clear path for a good marketer a good modern marketer who understand socials and if you like look for these things that you might think are high signal where it's like the best grades the best school um certain majors like you're not going to end up with the market that you had envisioned um so i think that's why it's hard because there's no real like defined path of like okay this is how you find the next token or the next hector or the next x person so yeah i like my suggestion if you're trying to find someone similar to me would be try to not find someone similar to me because you're not going to find the right person it's just like give it a shot to some kid who has like some crazy background and the crazier the better and obviously has some some proof um in the work but yeah the point that you were asking was the importance of young talent right and like why that really matters yeah um i think i've seen this example honestly in a lot of different industries i don't know if you've heard of jimmy farley but he's like one of the tiktok shop like og guys like he's he's been on there i don't know since

to like 17, built a huge agency, works with some of the biggest brands. And recently, I think his agency got acquired by Physicians Choice for like $2 million. And now he's like in-house with them and also works with other brands. But I've just seen this kid like surround himself. I mean, he's older than me now, but I've seen him surround himself with like all these older founders and all these older founders of these e-com brands are always like just talking about how like having a Jimmy next to you is so much alpha because a 30, 40 year old founder doesn't understand what an 18 year old kid who's in these discord chats or who's scrolling every day on instagram and tiktok they don't understand like what's actually working and the best ways to approach these new channels and if you have young people next to you in whatever industry you are whether you're in sass you're in e-com whatever it is and you just find someone that kind of understands the things that you don't and the early things and you're able to ask questions and learn from them i think it's like a no-brainer to have someone like that on your team it's like even even if you do your best now to dive into TikTok shop or into tribe, like you're still going to

struggle because you're not going to be able to connect as much with the creators or you're not going to understand certain things. And it's just going to take you a lot longer time to get used to those things instead of like putting your time into something that you're better at and then bring someone that can kind of manage those things for you. I love this advice. There's all this talk about, you know, no jobs left for young folks. AI is taking everyone's jobs. And this is a really good example where young people are actually much better at this work yeah and i think obviously today's super young and like she's one of the smartest people i know and like he'll still bring me into his office or hop on a call and like be asking me like oh like what's working on instagram like how are you doing this so fast or or just like ask me Questions about content in general, and I don't, I mean, I don't think, I've seen this from today and the team in general, like, I don't think there's ever a point where you get smart enough to where you need to stop learning. And if you take that mentality of the founder, I think it's like the day you stop growing. And that's something I've definitely learned from today. Like, you're never too good or too smart to continue learning. And it can even be from a random 22 year old or 19 year old like me. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And you joined Whisperflow at 19, right?

Yes, I had just turned 19. It was like three days after my birthday. And how long did it take you to feel like, okay, I kind of figured something out? You said initially it was kind of rocky and not sure what you were doing. Yeah, I mean. Just give people some context. It was a weird transition because I had just quit Division I soccer like three days before as well. And I literally went home, looked up Whisperflow on LinkedIn. Well, I don't know if I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. I applied to like 200 positions. I found some company called Whisperflow. I applied um had a call with Tanay and then I joined and yeah it was it was crazy like looking back some of the memories like I remember it was like one of the first days and we're getting ready for our launch and I was in my I think it was my calculus class and Tanay started slacking me in class and I left to go to the bathroom and popped up my laptop and I started um I hopped into the slack huddle and he was basically like our launch video isn't what it needs to be do you think you can edit it on CapCut or whatever tools you have and make it a bit more Gen Z vibes and yeah I got out of calculus and I just started editing a video I had some editing experience

but for today on my one of my first weeks to ask me to do that was pretty scary but yeah that was pretty much summed up my first year at Whisper I just picked up random stuff didn't really have a clear position I'm pretty sure they didn't really know what I was doing either I didn't know what I was doing and yeah it probably took me a year to like feel actually comfortable and there was there was a lot of ups and downs and actually one thing I want to point out as well is I was also doing a finance internship after so it'd been a year it had been a whole school year and then it was my junior year going to senior year and that summer I had applied well I had applied to a bunch of finance internships early in the year because I didn't know if content was a real career and like obviously I was enjoying whisper and I was making some decent money for my personal brand but I was like I don't know if this is a real career and my parents like we immigrated to the us and everything and like me being in college and like studying finance was a big deal and they wanted me to go down the traditional route so i ended up landing a finance internship in new york city and i was balancing two summer classes whisper flow and the finance internship and like

two weeks since the internship i absolutely hated it and i was like i do not want my life to be like this i need to make content and whisper work out so i would sneak out the office and go to some cafes in soho and just work on whisper and my personal content and then from there everything started to like click and then yeah that's kind of how it will happen what a journey i feel like we could have a whole other conversation about just the creator path and how to become a content creator on instagram and all these platforms that's its own that's its own thing i'm going to come back to how you find the creators for this kind of paid agency strategy which we walked

Okay, let me try to walk through the steps here because this was so much juicy gold stuff uh advice so step one sign up on tribe tribe is kind of where you manage creators and pay out and all that kind of stuff uh your advice here is don't work through tribe to find them because no one's going to care about you yet and your advice is go to instagram keyword search for things that kind of in your market ugc tech lawyers that maybe want to make money on the side to recruit the first five the advice to start at five don't go too big yeah okay and i would i would also it's not even just start with five or start with lawyers or whatever it's like you have to look at your ad library and look at your product and be like okay

what specific gaps do we have that we actually need to fill in because more isn't necessarily better and like that applies to everything in life but specifically in creators if you just bring 100 with 200 of the same creators that isn't going to lead to scale because again everything is going to look the exact same but when you bring in five creators that each speak to a specific your audience each speak to maybe a specific messaging of your product you get five net five different creators that can all make net new concepts and like it just exponentially grows the more different creators you bring on board so it's like not just the point about bringing a few creators it's also being very specific about those few creators you're actually bringing in and so when you say that it's think about what customer kind of market what icp are targeting and what's a creator that will speak to that audience exactly so at whisper we have everything from like moms to lawyers we have like the awesome thing about whisper is like when you have a product that people love like you get so many cool people wanting to work with your brand we have like an eight-figure e-com founder that loves whisper so much that he just makes ads for us and it's

like i find that pretty incredible like some dude who has a successful e-com business he loves whisper so much he just wants to be part of the community and he's like 45 has kids and yeah like we have basically anything you can imagine engineers lawyers moms sales reps agency owners

ads and there are ugliest ones as well. This season's supporting sponsor is DX. Now that everybody at your company is finally using AI. The question that engineering leaders face is no longer are we using AI, but is it paying off? With DX, you can measure and benchmark the impact of AI adoption across your full product lifecycle. DX shows you where AI is helping developers and where it's creating new bottlenecks. You can also use it to evaluate AI vendors, monitor costs and licenses, and see exactly what's limiting your agents. That's why hundreds of enterprises,

including Snowflake, Sony, and BNY, use the DX platform to measure AI's impact on developer productivity. Visit getdx.com slash Lenny to get a demo of DX. That's getdx.com slash Lenny. What does the DM look like when you reach out to a creator? So it kind of depends, and there's honestly some different ways to go about it. a lot of times as a brand you'll actually have a lot of creators already in your dms or a lot of creators that are already following you so that's like the number one place i would actually start and a lot of our early creators came from there is we would just go into our following list and look up ugc or look up creators and then also go through our dm requests and you'll actually like come across a lot of creators and from there it's like they already follow you they probably already like your product so it gets really easy and you can just be like hey lenny i saw your content i really enjoyed it i would love to have you be part of our creator group and i don't necessarily pitch it i don't necessarily pitch the performance-based thing yet because it's still a pretty it's still a relatively new thing for creators like hear this new model and a lot of them were skeptical

at first which i understand why but even like seven months ago six months ago is even more like new um so even then like today i still wouldn't start with that and like go straight into pitching super hard. I'll just be like, hey, love your content. Will those times be part of our creator group? Are you interested? From there, you'll get a response back. They'll probably ask you for some more details. And then I have like a PDF that's like super simple. I just kind of explain the program structure, how much we pay, how much some of our creators are making. And then from there, I'll just hop on a call with them, close them and get them like onboarded in Discord, get them with your flow code and then get them making videos.

And the other way is if they don't follow us and I'm doing outreach is I'll just send them a DM and be like, hey, if someone across your content really enjoyed it, I'd love to help you be part of our Whisper Flow group. This is the tool. This is how it works. Here's the link to it. Let me know if you'd be interested. And then from there, if they're interested again, I'll pitch them and it's kind of the same sort of route. And this is from the Whisper Flow Instagram account? Sometimes I do either or because I also, since I'm a creator myself, I also have a lot of, which is also the pros of hiring people who are in content.

Some of our best hires at Whisper in content have been through me posting on Instagram stories or our best creator hires, I'll be like, hey, I'm looking for UGC creators, just post a story. Or hey, I'm looking for a videographer or hey, I'm looking for an editor. Like that's one of the cool things about hiring a content creator. If they make, again, content in your specific niche or they make high value content is they can also be used as like a very good hiring mechanism. And yeah, it depends. Like if you have someone who's a creator, I think it works pretty well. Obviously like a creator face, whatever.

and then also if you're a really well-known brand obviously if your creator getting a message from like nike or whatever you know what i mean like it's very impressive and you're probably more likely to get a response so i think it just depends and then okay so you dm them they're interested you send them kind of an overview in the early say the first five you said you hop on a call pretty quickly and just kind of pitch them and explain the program is what's like the onboarding look like these creators are very used to just being used and like just it's everything they do is like a transaction they make a video they get paid and they never talk to a person again and we live in a like day and age where everything is digital everything's virtual most people are working remote most creators are remote and they crave community um the same way just like a regular person would create community and we just make sure like that we connect from the get-go and like it's like at the end it's like friends we're like working together i don't see them as just like hey a creator that i'm gonna extract some videos from and never talk to again i get on a call with them like you said and I have this whole slideshow but before I go to my slideshow

like ask them about themselves like how they got into content why they enjoy it and just like have a conversation try to get to know them and then from there the flow of the of the slideshow is I have an intro slide where I talk about myself I talk about my background as a creator so like they respect me and they know I'm not just some random dude talking to them and then from there I'll also intro our media buyer who's Eric shout out to Eric and then from there I explain the product and then from there i explain how tribe works so i like i let them know like what they can expect in terms of the flow from them making the video to it getting accepted to it getting ran as an ad i tell them we pay them out every seven days which like another um hack as well like you want to keep your creators motivated and the higher dopamine rush they can get and the more money you get them early on the better um so yeah we pay out seven days we tell them that then from there we show them some example ads and then i get them onboarded and fully going on the call it's almost like you're closing you're closing like a sales deal you don't want to get them on side and then you let them get off and then you have to chase them down it's like

you want to be very strategic with your time and their time so i try to like meet them introduce myself get them onboarded and get them going so that they know like hey you can start making a video right now so a big lesson here is treat them treat them like humans care about them help them feel like they're part of this thing, not just feel like, okay, you're going to make money. Just shut up. Don't worry about it. You're going to make money. And I think this is actually a really good outfit as well. I think the companies that will win long-term are the companies that have the best relationships with creators.

Because word gets out really fast. And if you're a brand that treats creators bad, doesn't pay on time, doesn't pay them whatsoever, maybe, or you just block them, et cetera, word will get out and creators probably won't want to work with you or you won't get the best terms or you won't get the best quality creators. So that's like one really big thing we focus on at Whisper. It's like not even just with creators, but any external agencies or anyone we work with, we always want to treat everyone with a lot of respect. And yeah, I think it's the companies that do that the best will win long-term as well.

What does the early team look like to start this initiative? Is it just a Hector that is running this solo or is there a larger team that you'd start with? Honestly, it's pretty lean. So our marketing team as a whole is pretty flat. Obviously, we're growing a bit faster now. I think we've passed like 120 full-time employees now, which is pretty crazy because I joined, I think we were like four at the time. I remember a message to Nate the other day. I was at the office and I was like holy cow like I just had like a a moment where I was like there's so many people around like this is crazy blah blah but yeah right now we're a pretty lean team and we were even more lean before but for tribe specifically to get something like this running all you really need is someone like me to kind of be the comms with creators come up with new concepts approve videos kind of get everything kick-started and then you need a media buyer It's pretty rare to find someone who's a creative and also a media buyer.

I don't really like numbers that much. I'm not really much of a numbers guy and I don't like staring at meta ads manager. I've heard it's a headache. So I'm happy I don't have to do that. But yeah, we have Eric on the media buying side of things and he like structures our ad account and everything. So when this media buyer, is this kind of like a performance marketing person that just lives in Facebook's ad system? Yeah, exactly. so yeah yeah eric's basically just lives in our on the media buying side of things on facebook uh linkedin youtube etc got it so you're kind of like the creative you're like this the content supply and then this person takes it and then is responsible for running the ads watching performance so optimizing the spend yeah got it okay and then is there anyone else that you find important valuable on that team early on and even later on early like if we go back to the early, early days, the marketing team was Daniel, our CMO. Um, Matt, who was our head of growth, um, before Eric came. And then it was me just like as a sole creator, kind of just making the ads myself. So, and then we had some external agencies here and there. And then slowly we added on design. Um, we added on an in-house like director and help produce films and launch videos.

um then we introduced like pr recently and like even even now i think we're still pretty lean i think it might be like 15 people on the marketing team like full-time we have a creator partnership leads for like influencers we have a celebrity talent manager like helps us close celebrities and and things like that so even then it's still pretty lean and everyone is like experts in their domain and it's all very flat we all just have free reign we all do what we're best at there's no real no really middle management and then poor our poor cmo daniel who's an absolute legend he just had a bunch of direct reports um so i feel sorry for his calendar but yeah that's that's kind of how everything is structured it's like very flat no middle managers and everyone just doesn't work is a core kind of takeaway from this conversation that when you're doing paid today

is EGC clearly working? Do you think this will work for every company? Is this something most B2B say? I don't know. Yeah, I think this works for everyone. It's like, it goes back to what I was saying. It's just finding those users that can speak to the users you want to acquire. And at the end of the day, one thing that we look at at Whisper is like the B2B side and the enterprise side is all made up of individuals. And if you can find a way to make your content speak to an individual who is part of those teams and maybe you get them as like a solo, how would you say, like a solo customer or whatever, to download the app, they use it, then they tell a friend in the company and then more people in the company start using it.

And then maybe you chase down those enterprise clients and actually close the deal. Like that's realistically how most companies can approach that at the end of the day. And it's not like, oh, like who from X company is going to watch my video and like hop on an enterprise call and like want to close or whatever. But I think if you like approach it If I'm like, companies are made up of people and you just look at it like that and you think, okay, how do I want to sell to these people and how would these people respond well instead of getting sold to? I think you just have to break it down super simply and you're like, oh yeah, this would work for anyone.

Okay, that makes sense. Also what I'm hearing though is it's probably most effective for kind of product-led growth, bottom-up sort of products, not like a workday or a sales force, more like a whisper flow or ocean and things like that. Awesome. And, you know, like if you think about it, it makes so much sense why this would work. An influencer innately is someone that influences you to do something. You're basically getting influencers slash creators to create content that pitches the product and then you put them in people's feed through paid ads. And I get why it works because they're trying to convince them how awesome this is.

I also think that a good distinction as well is like it's not just an influencer or a creator. I almost think that creators with no following end up being better investments for brands because influencers kind of are seen now as sellouts a lot of the time and like when you see a big face or a big celebrity like selling a product it's like oh my gosh this person has been selling me things for like the last 10 years i know she's just getting a bag or he's just getting a bag and they're not really genuine and there's something about like not really knowing who the person is and They're not famous.

They don't have a lot of followers. And if you have like these partnership ads coming from their account, it just feels a lot more genuine as well. So just want to throw that out. That makes sense. Like the less they look like an influencer. Exactly. The less they look like they're trying to convince you and they're just talking like a regular human about how awesome your product is. I get why that would work. Like what I think about right now is there's that survey that someone did a while ago of just what do you want to be when you grow up? And for young people, it was like creator, influencer versus like- Yeah, stream.

I think a lot of people were saying they want to be a streamer, a live streamer. streamer yeah versus like astronaut or lawyer yeah and so you know this is a career path is what you're describing this is a way you're making money doing this a lot of people are actually making money being a creator online so for people listening that are like wait maybe this could be a career for me someday maybe i should explore this creator life any advice for someone that's embarking on this because for many people it may feel like i will never be as great as hector just talking off the cuff on a video and looking interesting any advice for someone that's trying to explore this path and do better i think the best advice would be to stop looking for advice it's it sounds it sounds dumb but a lot of times i'll have a lot of friends reach out like hey i want to get started and i've had this happen for like maybe the last three years where people are like hey i want to get started i want to start making videos like you and i hop on a call with them for like two hours i send them over a bunch of different guides pdfs things i've made etc for how they can get started and they don't do anything with it and it's like at the end of the day if

If you're a person who's going to ask before doing, you're probably not going to succeed. And even the best people, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of the most famous podcasters or influencers or celebrities. And a lot of these people also stutter and they also have to refilm things. And they have like specific things that they do to like lock back in, whether it's like weird noises they make with their mouth or like they fidget with their hands or they have like a phrase they repeat over and over again. or I've even seen some creators where they start stuttering a lot after they've been doing the same script over and over again and they'll put a pen in their mouth and will like open their mouth bigger and like talk and enunciate.

Is that how you say it? Enunciate the words like I guess more and then when they stop and they take the pen out of their mouth then they're going to pronounce it better. So it's like a natural thing as a creator and like even if you're doing this for 5, 10, 15 years there's going to be moments where you have to cut the video or you're going to stutter and you're going to have to refilm for 10 times and you might cuss out your camera and turn it off but it's just like turn it back on and keep filming sort of thing and yeah that'd be my advice just get started um and stop looking for more advice there's no better way to learn as a creator than than just turning on the camera and posting i love that advice and what i'm also hearing is you don't have to like one you don't see how much people struggle doing this stuff like you see this polished video and you don't know they have to put a pen in their mouth for yeah exactly or cuss out their camera yeah um Like, even my video that went kind of viral on X, like, I think it's, what, a 15-minute cut?

It was probably, I did two cuts before that. That were probably each, like, 30 minutes. And then I did that last one, which was probably, again, like, 30 minutes. And then I packaged it into a nice video. And it's, like, I do this for a living. And I've managed our tribe group for the last seven months. And I know, like, the back of my hand or whatever. and even then I still struggle like going through and putting my thoughts concisely and going through everything but it's not perfect but I put the message out I gave some value and people enjoyed it and yeah I don't think I don't think it needs to be perfect that's so great to hear because watching that video you're just so chill so relaxed just sitting there talking with little ipad and like how yeah people see that like I will never be as good at this so that's really helpful to hear when I think about starting to create being content creator I feel like I need to get a little fuzzy mic or something I feel like the step one or a tiny little yeah it's a canon event it's the canon event that's right you're not creator unless you have a tiny fuzzy little boy yeah um let me ask you one final question along these lines say someone's like

amazing i'm gonna do this we're gonna commit to this we're gonna hire we're gonna find someone to run it what are some The most common mistakes you find companies, people make when they're starting on this paid EGC route? I think a lot of the times is people will typically look in the wrong places and will maybe put out offers online or on LinkedIn or whatever with too high of salaries or too high, I guess, requirements. And you're not going to end up attracting the best people. If you put out an offer where you're going to pay, I don't know, You're like, oh, these people who are running UGC campaigns are in super high demand.

I'm going to put out a job listing for $250K, $200K base salary, generous equity. You're going to end up attracting the wrong type of people. Like when I joined Whisper and when Tone joined Whisper, I can tell you we were turning nowhere near that. We were interns and we're just hungry kids who wanted to learn and wanted to grow. And again, had some experience with content. And I think if you just think that throwing money out there and looking for someone with the best grades or the best school or the best experience, is it going to get you the best hire to run this for you? You're in for a rude awakening.

And yeah, I would focus on just finding a scrappy kid who's hungry and willing to learn. And like, I don't know, you just get a good feeling from them. Like I was talking to Tanay recently as well the other day. Our first call, so I had a first call with Julia, which she was like leading our marketing team initially, one of those like four people. And then I had a second call with Tanay. And I remember like, mind you, they're hiring me as a UGC creator. I'm 19 years old. I've never worked in a startup. and I was probably I was not earning much money and I told Tanae I was like I want equity in Whisper and Tanae laughed and was like I like you man and like maybe it was like a stupid thing to say but like I think it showed how like I don't know I was naive but also hungry and like I believed in the company and I want to be part of the company and just like cues like that where it's like a young naive hungry kid who just wants in and wants to learn and wants to grow and yeah I think don't look in the right place don't look in the wrong places because you're going to chalk the wrong people.

You had a couple of awesome tweets along these lines. One is that everyone looking for a marketer with the best resume is going to end up hiring a bot. Yeah. And then the other is this really important tweet that the most successful founders, investors, creators I've met aren't the most talented. They're delusionally confident. They outwork everyone and they love what they do. Yeah. I think that pretty much sums it up. Then also another one that I resonate with a lot that I probably recently was like the the sports outlook on hiring sports teams like i come from a very competitive sports background i played over in spain i played for the davigo and la liga academy i played the mls next in the u.s i played division one in college and like we have all these structures for sports teams where it's like you scout young talent you bring them in you coach them you develop them for 10 years and then like if you're over in spain or over in europe um you eventually like get them as part of your academy maybe the second team and then maybe you sell them to a top club or maybe they end up becoming a homegrown contract or and they join like your first team and it's like i think a lot of startups should kind of adopt that mentality i think there's a lot of companies that actually

don't do internship programs anymore they don't think they're valuable and i think they're one of the most valuable things and if you can find the right people it's not a very expensive thing to do it's not very time consuming um and yeah i think like taking a chance on young on young people and giving them some money to to test things with and giving them some freedom to test things with um and like allowing them to fail and continue learning that's like one of the best models i think you can pick up from sports and like obviously it works like i don't know if you're very familiar with soccer but i mean like look at lamin yamal like just won the world cup at what 19 years old 18 years old and i think that same approach can be applied to the startup world like find young talent invest in them let them get real reps in the real world and then eventually they might become one of your a players i love that uh and i love that also part of this is giving them time to figure it out yeah 100 what's really interesting about this conversation so far

And five YouTube videos in, we're like millions and millions of views, 20,000 or 21,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is one of the hardest platforms to grow. And like a lot of people think, oh, we're starting a YouTube channel. We need to post three videos a week. And it's like, no, like if you actually put in the time and effort and you tell a really good story and you do everything with purpose and you package it really. Well, and you have a really good team of humans actually touching everything in there. You get really good end product and people actually can see the effort you put into it.

A final thing I just want to talk through briefly. You had this awesome video where you share what the team looks like to do founder-led content. i'll briefly share because i think this is really important for people i will point to the video where you go deeper basically it's a head of content a videographer to film you a youtube team to package it and short form editor to take it and create clips yes exactly the content person would that be you like are you that person also doing the ugc paid stuff yeah yeah yeah so yeah so i'm the head of content and that's why if you find a young person who understands content they can basically do anything whether it's organic whether it's paid um and that's why it's important to find someone with a following as well because again I understand how to build a following um and I know how to build a team now and the funny thing is like how I was mentioning

previously is like every person that's part of my team whether it be for UGC or whether it be for the founder-led content team I hired them from my Instagram stories the way I got our videographer He's 24 years old. I posted on my Instagram story, I think it was in May, like right after my college graduation. I posted, looking for a videographer full-time in San Francisco, slide up if you're the right fit. I probably had like, I don't know, 80 people reply on my story. And then from there, there was this kid named Alex. He was in Australia at the time. He was an American, like vacationing in Australia.

And he seemed like a great fit. And we flew him out to San Francisco, like on three-day notice, and we got him started. And then same for the YouTube agency. we met through Instagram and now they're some of my close friends so it's like typically the best social people you also find on social platforms sort of how it goes there's just so much win from having an audience it's one recurring takeaway from the 100%

Anyway, Hector, this was incredible. Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share or anything else you want to kind of double down on and leave listeners with?

I guess my last point, which I have mentioned a lot, is I would just urge other founders out there, like give a chance like young talent and yeah just just find those people believe in them trust in them give them opportunities and yeah like not only will they turn into some of your best a players but also the amount of loyalty um they will have to is quite incredible and whether they stay at your company or they go on to do other things like they will always be there to help you or help you bring in other young talent um or guide you in the right direction when things new alphas out there um and yeah i'm super grateful to tanae and daniel and the whole whisper team for like taking a shot on me and there's no better place i think i i could have i could have landed and i'm like forever in debt or however you could say that i'm just super grateful um for the opportunity i was given that's beautiful well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round i've got five questions for you i've seen these i've seen these in the in the in the podcast won't be a surprise uh okay here we go first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people one of my i'm gonna give one

book i'm gonna give one really good book which might be a a cliche one but naval robin khan's almanac i remember reading that about two years ago or maybe a year and a half ago um and it was like kind of in this moment where i wasn't like i was sure i wanted to do content but i also didn't understand why it was important or why it mattered so much and like i read it the first time didn't really make that much sense to me and then i like gave you some time and then things started to like line up like it said kind of in the book and like how um how does he say like media is like one of the best forms of leverage because you don't have to ask for permission it's permissionless leverage and you can just make stuff and put it out in the internet and it will continue to work for you um and like i started to see that compounding effect over time of like me putting myself out there and it's a book i continue to find myself coming back to and reading um i bought it for my little brother as well recently um and it's like something i'm always sharing with friends and always passing on to them to read as well and i feel like it gives direction a lot to like young people as well um in this crazy world that we live in so i'll definitely say that's one of my

favorite books i've read yeah and i've all went through this era of just sharing this profound advice on twitter and then he kind of slowed down and and i love that there's a book that collects at all um and i love that so much of advice you to like you see it and like yeah that's fine and then you think back to wow he was so damn right have you have you read uh what's it ego is the enemy is that is that a book or is that one of his lines no it's a it's a new book i think i think it's called something i was just wondering if you read it because i was interested in in reading i was about to buy it um and you go to a bookstore there's not that many bookstore in puerto rico but yeah i'm looking for a new book so if anyone wants to drop some comments on the video oh okay does amazon deliver to puerto rico yes but it's like a bit it takes it takes a while living on an island everything is a lot lower a lot slower less dopamine rush don't get 24 hour delivery i love that okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie or tv show you have really enjoyed i just watched the elizabeth holmes movie with my girlfriend yeah i'm not gonna spoil it but wow that was a really good movie one thing that someone shared from the

trailer this is no spoiler uh when when he's you know that trailer when they're kind of staring at each other and he kind of puts his tongue in his mouth like his mouth is kind of doing some funny yeah uh he turns out when he's trying not to laugh or just get great character he puts his tongue against his molars and just presses against them to keep himself from laughing how about that i I did not know that. Yeah. But yeah, was it? It was a good movie. I liked it. Epic. Okay, next question. Favorite slash most interesting AI product you're using right now? Ideally, not Whisperflow. Honestly, I commented on your post the other day.

Miso. I don't know. Did you end up downloading it or no? I just tried to check it out. It's like a travel tool, right? Yeah, it's a travel agent. And I travel a lot. I think I have like 55 flights or 60 so far this year. Jeez. Like 89,000 miles. and traveling is always something i'm like not looking forward to because it gets pretty tiring like having to book the flights and everything um and i recently came across this product when they launched on x and i dm'd the founders on instagram and i was like yo get me off the wait list like i want to try this out and ever since i downloaded it's now been like three months like i can't stop using it and recommending it to friends and like just an example like the other day i slept through my alarm and i missed my flight to sf from pr and i texted i woke up i texted me so i was like hey i missed my flight can you get me on the next one and i didn't have to do anything else like took care of everything booked me on the next flight in like two hours i just chilled didn't have to pay anything extra um yeah it's like it's like the best travel agent i've tried by far um like obviously instinct is a good agent and everything but i don't think for

travel it's anywhere as fast and then what's also cool about miso is they have humans on the back end that will escalate things like if they if the agent gets stuck they have like direct connections to every major airline and everything and they can escalate things and take care of it for you. So it's like a lifesaver. I can just text now, hey, I want a flight and no dissents me. I'll get it booked in like a few minutes. That is extremely cool. I looked it up. It's just miso.com. M-I-S-O.com. What an amazing domain. I imagine no affiliation. You're just a fan. Yeah, no affiliation. So cool. Okay, go miso.

Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? Yes. i have a i have a life model that i like a lot i don't know if i'm gonna butcher this so maybe you can help me but um it's from steve jobs that you can't always connect the dots looking forward but you can always connect i'm looking backwards and like when i look into my own life like i see that basically in everything like i was never the smartest kid in school like my parents were always pretty frustrated with me i had really bad adhd um like soccer was the only thing i had and then i lost it and then i was like lost for for a few months even though i was at whisper and i didn't really understand all the things that were happening or why i even picked up a camera when i was 16 or why i started posting on youtube or why i played sports and like now looking back like everything it's so clear makes so much sense and like i understand the path i'm on on life and like i think sometimes you just got to keep going and it'll all make sense at the end and like yeah i think that's one of my favorite quotes i was back on i also find that to be very true and steve jobs nailed it again um hector this was incredible thank you so much for sharing so

much you're awesome um thank you final question how can listeners be useful to you um i mean if you guys want to follow me on x or on instagram or youtube whatever you guys want come join the the journey and your handle is just hector serrano serranu yeah it's pretty it's pretty similar across platforms it's like hector serrano you'll find me one way or another but yeah actor thank you so much for being here thank you thank you bye everyone Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.