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

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Hector Serrano says paid UGC can scale SaaS when it combines product-market fit, performance-based creator pay and room for creative experimentation.

- Show: Lenny's Podcast
- Hosts: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://realalpha.app/people/lenny-rachitsky/)
- Guest: [Hector Serrano](https://realalpha.app/people/hector-serrano/) is Head of Content at Wispr Flow.
- Published: Nov 1, 2026
- Length: 1 h 28 m

## The best minutes

- [14:01](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=841) [A smart retainer gives creators a floor and uncapped upside](https://realalpha.app/s/a-smart-retainer-gives-creators-a-floor-and-uncapped-upside/) (5 min)
- [31:03](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1863) [Build a creator roster through targeted outreach and experimentation](https://realalpha.app/s/build-a-creator-roster-through-targeted-outreach-and/) (7 min)
- [1:03:49](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3829) [Keep AI out of the creative customers see](https://realalpha.app/s/keep-ai-out-of-the-creative-customers-see/) (4 min)

## Also worth watching

- [39:41](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2381) [Technical buyers can respond better to plain, unpolished UGC](https://realalpha.app/s/technical-buyers-can-respond-better-to-plain-unpolished-ugc/) (3 min)
- [51:21](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3081) [Ads can wear out after about $100,000 in spend](https://realalpha.app/s/ads-can-wear-out-after-about-100-000-in-spend/) (3 min)
- [20:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1202) [Modern marketing hires need proof of execution, not credentials](https://realalpha.app/s/modern-marketing-hires-need-proof-of-execution-not/) (5 min)
- [1:08:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4082) [Founder content builds trust before it drives sales](https://realalpha.app/s/founder-content-builds-trust-before-it-drives-sales/) (6 min)
- [1:15:54](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4554) [YouTube packaging can matter more than video production](https://realalpha.app/s/youtube-packaging-can-matter-more-than-video-production/) (4 min)

Skip the creator-career advice and later hiring discussion, plus the seven-minute lightning round on books, travel, movies, and mottos.

## Summary

Serrano leads Wispr Flow’s paid UGC program and manages organic channels for the founder. He joined at 19 and built a roster of 50 creators producing 500 to 600 paid UGC ads each month; the description says the top creators earn over $13,000 a month.

Serrano says product-market fit is the foundation, while paid campaigns can test messaging and conversion early. He explains how Wispr Flow shifted from view-based organic UGC to paid creator ads, using performance-linked compensation and retainers to keep creators engaged. He argues that companies should hire for demonstrated content ability, coach young talent and give creators room to experiment. He also makes the case for human-made creative, founder-led content and YouTube packaging as ways to build trust and reach audiences over time.

### Minute by minute

- [3:08](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=188) **Product-market fit comes first.** Serrano says Wispr Flow’s growth began with the product: after an early few thousand users, it started gaining traction, and about six months in Tanay said they had found product-market fit. He argues that paid and other channels add fuel only after the product has real demand. He also says paid can be useful early because cold-traffic tests show whether messaging resonates and converts, as long as spend stays within budget.
- [8:28](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=508) **View-based UGC shifted to paid ads.** Serrano traces the program to an intern, Tobin, who built an organic UGC group whose creators posted on separate accounts and were paid by views. He says it generated 500 million views in two and a half months at low CPMs, but did not drive enough conversions for Wispr Flow. He then adapted the creator-community model for paid ads; the program now launches 500 to 600 ads each month.
- [13:38](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=818) **Creator pay balances upside and security.** Serrano says some creators get a smart retainer: for 25 videos, Wispr Flow might guarantee $1,500 and top up commissions if they fall short. A creator earning $500 in commissions after meeting the quota would get another $1,000; one earning $3,000 would keep the commissions without a top-up. He says SaaS can pay creators a share of ad spend when attribution is difficult, while ecommerce can use a share of GMV.
- [20:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1202) **Marketing hires need proof of work.** Serrano contrasts his 2.5 GPA with Tobin’s 4.0 and says both became good marketers, so grades and schools alone can miss talent. He looks for people who have made content and grown an account—even to 10,000 followers—along with signs of work ethic and cultural fit. He argues that young people can bring firsthand knowledge of fast-changing platforms and trends that older founders may lack.
- [28:20](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1700) **Build the first creator cohort.** Serrano says he joined Wispr Flow just after turning 19, after quitting Division I soccer and applying to about 200 positions. He says it took about a year to feel settled, and a finance internship helped him commit to content. For a new creator program, he recommends using a platform such as Tribe and sourcing an initial group manually on Instagram; he reports sending 150 to 250 targeted DMs in a week and getting five or six strong creators.
- [35:22](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2122) **Distinct creators keep ads fresh.** Serrano says to recruit creators who speak to different audiences and messages, rather than maximize headcount. He warns that copying top ads can create near-duplicates; he says Meta may group ads it finds more than 60% similar, contributing to fatigue. He cites a winning ad that showed a keyboard in the rain, with raindrops appearing to type on a laptop. For technical audiences, he says simple screen recordings can outperform polished ads.
- [42:58](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2578) **Creator relationships support retention.** Serrano recommends starting with creators who already follow the brand or have messaged it, then sending a personal note rather than a hard pitch. He uses an overview PDF and an onboarding call to learn about the creator, explain the product and payment model, and get them ready to make a video. He says weekly payouts and treating creators as collaborators help build trust and a stronger community.
- [48:20](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2900) **Creative and media buying split.** Serrano says a lean program needs a creative lead to work with creators and develop concepts, alongside a separate media buyer to run and optimize ads. He moved from making ads alone to building a creator roster as spend rose and ads fatigued faster. He estimated Wispr Flow’s library had about 5,000 lifetime ads and 800 or 900 live, across UGC and other formats.
- [53:44](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3224) **UGC can reach SaaS buyers bottom-up.** Serrano says B2B and enterprise companies are made up of individuals, so creator ads can bring in a solo user who then introduces the product to coworkers. He argues that creators with small followings can feel more genuine than well-known influencers, whose sponsored promotions may seem less authentic.
- [56:43](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3403) **Creators improve by publishing.** Serrano tells aspiring creators to stop collecting advice and start making videos. He says even experienced creators stutter, redo takes and struggle to get their thoughts concise; one of his own viral videos took several long recordings to edit. He argues that publishing and practicing matter more than making a first video perfect.
- [59:48](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3588) **Startups can hire like sports teams.** Serrano warns against assuming that high salaries, top grades, prestigious schools or long resumes will produce the right UGC marketer. He recommends looking for a scrappy, hungry person with some evidence of content ability. Drawing on sports, he says startups can scout interns, coach them over time and give them room to experiment and fail.
- [1:03:49](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3829) **Human judgment matters in creative.** Serrano distinguishes internal automation from public-facing creative and says a human should handle the final work. He warns that errors, awkward wording or synthetic-looking ads could damage trust, particularly for an AI product. He argues that focusing on quality and purposeful posting can stand out amid the volume of AI-generated content.
- [1:08:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4082) **Founder content compounds over time.** Serrano says founder-led content can make a company feel more human and build an audience if founders share value and document a mission instead of pitching immediately. At Wispr Flow, he says content ties back to a goal of one billion daily active users, with different formats showing product launches and company life. He argues that organic content creates touchpoints that can support paid conversion.
- [1:15:54](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4554) **YouTube packaging earns attention.** Serrano says a strong video can go unnoticed if its title and thumbnail do not make people want to click. He argues that YouTube performance also depends on storytelling, pacing, retention and delivering on the thumbnail’s promise. He says well-packaged videos can keep finding viewers months or years later, unlike short-form posts that may fade quickly.

## Transcript

Lenny's Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, with Hector Serrano.

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

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=0) You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing Whisperflow over the past couple years. You joined Whisperflow at 19. I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. Applied to like 200 positions. I found some company called Whisperflow. I applied, had a call with Tanay, and then I joined. I've never worked in a startup. And I told Tanay, like, I was like, I want equity in Whisper. And Tanay laughed and was like, I like you, man. There's all this talk about no jobs left for young folks. AI is taking everyone's jobs. Young people are actually much better at this work. A 30, 40-year-old founder doesn't understand what an 18-year-old kid who's in these Discord chats scrolling every day on Instagram and TikTok, they don't understand what's actually working and the best ways to approach these new channels.

[0:38](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=38) I think it's a no-brainer to have someone like that on your team. Actually, this tweet the other day, the best marketers are allergic to AI. If we go out and start making AI slot ads, it's probably not going to be received really well. There's so much noise. If you actually focus more on the quality and less on the quantity, it gets so easy to cut through the noise. Let's talk about paid UGC. You're getting influencers, creators to create a pitch basically for Whisper. Keep it really open for them to experiment, do whatever they see fit. They're not capped at their earnings. We have creators now that are making like $13,000 a month.

[1:08](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=68) The hardest role to hire for right now is someone like you. I think if you just think that looking for someone with the best grades or the best score is going to get you the best hire, you're in for a rude awakening. Hector, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be on. I'm even more excited to have you here. What I'm going to try to do with this conversation is create a very tactical guide to what is working in growing a B2B SaaS product right now. You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing Whisperflow over the past couple years. I saw the stat that revenue at Whisperflow grew 30x in the past year, which is absurd. You guys recently raised at something like $2 billion in a very competitive market. Clearly, you've figured something out. You've started to share some of the strategies that you've been deploying on X.

[2:05](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=125) 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

[3:07](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=187) 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

[4:10](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=250) 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

[5:11](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=311) 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?

[5:54](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=354) 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

[6:49](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=409) 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,

[8:00](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=480) 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?

[8:38](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=518) 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.

[9:13](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=553) 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.

[9:47](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=587) 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.

[10:22](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=622) 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

[11:25](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=685) 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.

[12:30](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=750) 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.

[13:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=782) 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.

[13:57](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=837) 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, 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.

[14:21](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=861) **Hector Serrano:** So one thing we actually have included is it's called a smart retainer. And what this is, it's basically like us saying,

[14:28](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=868) okay, we're gonna back you as a creator. 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. 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.

[15:05](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=905) 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 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

[16:04](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=964) 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 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 that are making more money than full-time influencers.

[16:56](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1016) 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. 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.

[17:25](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1045) 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. 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.

[17:58](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1078) 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. 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.

[18:29](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1109) 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 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 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

[19:25](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1165) 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?

[20:08](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1208) Okay, so let's go down this tangent of to find someone like Hector. What does a profile look like if you were to find Hector to lead this work at your company? This is one of the most interesting conversations I have with a lot of my friends, especially Tobin, like I mentioned earlier, because we both couldn't be more opposite from each other. like if you look at both of our resumes lined up next to each other and I asked you to pick one or the other hey you probably in your head would think it's pretty clear which one would be the right answer but at the end of the day both are the right answer and like I had a 2.5 GPA Tobin had a 4.0 I didn't go to a reach school Tobin went to Waterloo I played division one sports Tobin didn't and like there's all these different things but at the end of the day we both ended up being great marketers but that wasn't really evident if you like looked at the face value of our resumes but I think Whisper has done a really good job of like seeing one or two really key things and also like being able to see, okay, is this person a good state for the culture?

[21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1267) Do they seem hardworking? If they have the same values or the same culture as people already at Whisper, and like I feel like 10A, Daniel, and the rest of the team are really good at not only spotting early talent and seeing what are those key things to look out for, but also seeing, okay, is this a good person, a good human to have on the team? And I think Tobin and I, Obviously, I might be speaking a bit too much for myself, but I think we embody those character traits perfectly. And you might be asking like, okay, well, what are the traits I need to look for in a good marketing hire? And it's like, honestly, it's not that complex.

[21:38](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1298) **Hector Serrano:** It's like, has this person grown an account, even if it's like 10,000 followers?

[21:42](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1302) And do they somewhat understand what they're talking about in terms of creator and they've made content? Like, that's how basic it is. As long as they have some experience in building a following, even if it's a small following, it shows you that they understand the consistency it takes to like grow a social media following it shows you that they understand trends and how to make a video and how to edit and how to film etc and yeah i think that like it comes down to that like do they seem like a hard worker are they a good person and do they have those like minimum like 10 000 15 000 followers and then taking a shot on them and you can't just bring a young person in and then be like okay like you're not where you where i want you to be like you're gone like 10 a and daniel again and the whole whisper team always gives us a lot of time to learn and fail and i know for a fact for the first seven months at whisper i was kind of uh uh i was kind of all over the place i still joke about it with daniel how um there was some hard conversations here and there where like what's heck they're doing um but yeah they gave me the freedom to keep experimenting keep trying new things and it didn't really matter if you failed as long as

[22:42](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1362) you're consistently learning and getting better and getting better and like that's the same for tobin tobin came in they gave him some money and some time to experiment and after like two months you found something that worked and it stuck. Okay, this is extremely valuable. There was this tweet the other day that came out of just like the hardest role to hire for right now is basically someone like you, someone that can talk about the product, the technical aspects, get people excited, make the product compelling. And you're telling us what this profile looks like. So just to reflect back what you just said, one is evidence that they're very hardworking, evidence they're a good person, that their values and culture kind of aligns with your company. Three, they've actually grown a platform to at least 10 000 followers and this could be any platform like instagram tiktok i would say instagram is probably the highest sign because tiktok is typically like a bit more brain rot content and like instagram is like a bit more polished better packaged and also the followers you get on there as a platform are just better so i just think instagram is probably a higher signal than tiktok it's pretty easy to grow on tiktok like hosting

[23:44](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1424) some brain rot stuff i would say i see what about like x and youtube youtube is is decent but i would say if you understand a platform like instagram you can crack any platform um and yeah that's my experience i mean instagram and youtube i would say if you can if If you can crack Instagram and YouTube, I'm confident, especially if you're a young individual, you can crack any platform. Like I'd never posted on X much until like two weeks ago and I went from like 500 followers on X to like 18,000. And I wasn't really used to posting on a text-only platform, but I figured it out after like a week.

[24:19](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1459) It's like, okay, it's a ball-in game. You need to keep it short, kind of have your own style and like actually give some value. And like that was pretty easy to learn. And I also think if you start on X, it's a bit harder to get into video because video is like a whole nother beast sitting down and filming it's not an easy thing i've had some colleagues like i pushed them to start making videos um shout out to eric he's our he's our media buyer how to make a video and yeah he struggled a little bit in his first one but i think it's good to step out of your comfort zone and try to film some videos but yeah it's definitely not easy so i would say yes instagram and youtube that's actually how i discovered doing x and it's just like blown up on my entire feed is just hector videos recently uh so uh i didn't realize you just started posting in two weeks that's insane clearly another sign of how effective you are at 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

[25:18](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1518) 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

[26:22](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1582) 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

[27:22](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1642) 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?

[28:25](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1705) 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

[29:35](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1775) 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

[30:33](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1833) 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 through the whole strategy honestly now i think this would be a good moment to to walk through everything um so yeah like i guess like we were mentioning the first step is kind of figuring out okay like if you're in sas you can do percent of ad spend if you're in e-commerce you'll do percent of gmv and then from there you'll set up the group whatever platform you choose i think tribe is the best one it's the one we use at whisper and then once you have your group set up it's like okay now you have to go actually find the creators and if you think about it it's like imagine you're

[31:37](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1897) starting a company from zero and you land on a platform and there's thousands of creators thousands of brands and your company has no history more than likely you're not going to be able to get the best of the best um and this is where a lot of companies go wrong they'll start doing a lot of outreach on these platforms and it's like why would a creator want to work for a brand that has like no money like for example on tribe it says how much money we paid out to creators it's like three hundred thousand dollars it says How many creators we have in the group, and then how many ads we have running or whatever.

[32:04](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1924) And when creators see that we've paid $300,000 out, and that we only have 50 creators in, you can imagine the amount of inbound we get. But on the contrary, if you're a brand who has $0 paid out and zero creators, it's going to be really hard to get creators in. So what I did is I went off platform, and I went on platform like Instagram, and you just look up a bunch of keywords. It can be like UGC creators, I don't know, tech, nine to five, lawyer, doctor, sleep, supplements, whatever niche you're in and just go down a bunch of rabbit holes and then you'll land on creators that you like, send them a message and then you also go through their following and follower lists and you also search those same exact keywords because typically good creators, no other good creators.

[32:45](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1965) And then I say from around like 150 to 250 DMs over a week and like these should be very targeted DMs. Like it shouldn't be like, well, I'm going to use some mass software and send 3000 messages. It needs to be very, you need to care about the small things because nowadays with like all these automations, like yes, you can do a lot of things fast, but if you do it very fast, you're probably gonna get a lot of slot back or a lot of bad creators back. And I think for outreach, it's still better to do it manually. Obviously it's gonna take a bit longer, but if you do it right, I haven't had to do outreach ever again.

[33:15](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=1995) And yeah, from those 150 to 250 DMs, you'll probably get like five or six really good creators. Then from there, you onboard them to the group. And then that's where you get to the next step, which would be actually building out the culture, um which is like just doing all these yes events and things for the creators whether it be like meetings um like we host weekly meetings now we're at a stage where we have creator coaches that help keep our creators engaged as well we do giveaways we're hosting a retreat in san francisco next month um we're flying in some of our best creators from around the world so it's like these little things that you start to do to build up more and more culture and then from there so you have a small group of creators you've also set up the like percent of ad spend a percent of gmv and you've also built a culture then from there you can slowly start to add more and more creators and the way we did that at whisper is we probably went from like five to ten ten to fifteen fifteen to twenty we probably added like five to six creators like every few weeks and since you're now since at this point you also have like the five creators and you've probably paid out a bit

[34:15](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2055) of money you'll start to get some people start to apply on tribe i think now we probably get like a thousand to a thousand five hundred applications a week so i go through those creator applications and then from there since we now have a lot of creators i keep a really high bar and i only accept maybe one or two or three but yeah we grew pretty slowly and now we're like 50 creators and aside from like accepting creators from tribe one of the things we've done actually is we've introduced a referral program where we will pay creators a hundred dollars per creator they bring into the group and it's not some sort of like mlm pyramid scheme thing like those are a bunch of people on linkedin my post blew up on linkedin and everyone was like this sounds like a scam like sounds like an mlm pyramid or whatever sales and like we're not paying them to just bring creators and it's like we're paying them to send a creator over if i think they're a good fit then we bring them in but we don't want more people in like we're capped at 50 it's not like oh bring me 100 creators and i'll pay you 400 creators then we'll pay another 100 creators like this is very tight knit family and it's just our way of saying thank you for helping us grow the program and yeah those

[35:14](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2114) are like some different levers we've applied to kind of grow the group and then that brings me to the last step which i don't know am i going too fast through this or you probably have some questions i do have questions but keep going yeah that brings me to the last step which is like now you have the culture you have the people in the group you have you're at like a decent size you have the the percent of gmv percent of ad spend and now one thing that's going to start to happen is you're getting a lot of ads and your ads are going to show like in the group it's going to show okay which is the ad asking the most spend the second will spend the third spend and your creators can see these things and like obviously you want them to see it but it can also backfire if you're not like good at coaching your creators because these creators will see the top performing ads and like they'll be like okay i want i'm going to copy those ads as well i'm going to copy what they're doing and if you end up doing that what ends up happening is you get 300 ads that all look the same, they all feel the same.

[36:03](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2163) In meta, when an ad is like more than 60% similar, it ends up grouping it together, whether it's like the same t-shirts, you're in the same setting, you're saying the same words. Like Andromeda is super complex now. And for example, it'll scan your ad like five times over, it'll pull the transcript, it'll pull like each frame out, it'll look at the text on screen. And if you like think about it, like nothing is gonna get past that. And that's why you can reach ad fatigue really quickly if you're constantly repeating the same formats, the same messaging, the same people. So what we do is we continuously push these creators and remind them the reason these creators are making so much money and that their ads are at the top is because they kept experimenting and they kept leaning into what they weren't actually good at as creators and what interests them as creators.

[36:46](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2206) And if you just follow what person A, B or C are doing, then your ads are just going to rank under them and you're not going to get any spend. So we constantly push creators to just keep experimenting, keep doing crazy stuff. And when you look at some of the ads in our library, it's like that's why I say like the creators sometimes understand the product better than me and come up with better concepts and ideas better than me and that's why I stay away from briefs like one example of a really good ad that we had recently was this this creator had his keyboard outside his window on a roof and it was raining and it was like okay so it's like it stops you because it's like a very interesting visual hook and then it pans over and on the thing it says what is my keyboard trying to say?

[37:26](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2246) And it pans over to his laptop and it's like the raindrops are typing and then it starts typing random words and then it says download Whisperflow. And that ended up becoming one of our best performing ads. It's like, I don't even know how he came up with that. So kudos to him. But that's what happens when you keep it really open-ended, you have a fun product and you let the creators have fun and just keep experimenting. And yeah, like no two ads in our ad library look the same. Wow, amazing. 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

[38:28](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2308) 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

[39:27](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2367) 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 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 or isn't maybe a bit more serious,

[40:32](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2432) **Hector Serrano:** the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform.

[40:36](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2436) 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. 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?

[41:09](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2469) 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. 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. Part of the reason is to discover the ones that are working.

[41:40](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2500) 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. 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 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,

[42:48](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2568) 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

[43:51](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2631) 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.

[44:26](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2666) 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.

[44:56](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2696) 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.

[45:27](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2727) 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

[46:27](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2787) 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

[47:29](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2849) 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.

[48:00](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2880) 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.

[48:31](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2911) 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.

[49:24](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=2964) 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.

[50:37](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3037) 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 that ugc videos are the way to go versus your own ads that you're just kind of creating so are you kind of comparing to like what I was doing versus what we're doing now you know just like when you think paid ads on Facebook Instagram TikTok most people think I create a video promoting my product or create like an ad unit that is hey Whisperflow isn't the best thing and what you're doing here

[51:49](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3109) is you're having other people create the videos and then running that as the ad yeah so the way I look at it is like I was basically an in-house UGC creator and it got to a point where ad spend was getting I think too high. And like, I'm only human and I couldn't, I couldn't make that many videos. And it was also getting into like a year plus of making ads. So naturally, I was getting pretty burnt out being a one man show and like, okay, I have the skill set. I'm a decent creator. I can spot like good creators as well. Why not just build a team? And that's like an extension of myself. And yeah, that's, that's basically what we did. And we're able to scale a lot faster, test more ideas. Since we have more ad spend, we obviously want more concepts running and also like once you get to a pretty high budget on ads your ads are typically going to reach fatigue a lot faster and especially with andromeda now ads reach fatigue even a lot faster because before in 2024 when we were running ads i could have an ad running for 12 months and that meant my output would be a lot less but now an ad with not only the new updates

[52:51](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3171) **Hector Serrano:** but also how much ad spend we're running an ad once it hits like a hundred thousand dollars in ad spend will be dead and that can be hit in like a month or in two weeks three weeks so we

[53:01](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3181) constantly need more output more volume etc and i think if you look at our ad library we might have like 5 000 lifetime ads and maybe like 800 live currently or something like that or 900 live currently and it's because again they reach fatigue and then we have to turn them off but our ad our ad set or ad library isn't only full of ugc videos there's a lot of different things as well um and yeah everything from like statics to like high celebrity slash influencer videos to in-house ads to like launch videos that we package as ads to like founder-led things so there's a lot of variety in there and this is just basically i guess just having as many formats as possible because again we have a lot of ad spend and we want the more variety the better at the end of the day.

[53:44](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3224) Okay, so this is just a core leg to the stool of paid ads, 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.

[54:26](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3266) 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.

[54:57](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3297) 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.

[55:31](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3331) 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.

[56:00](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3360) 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.

[56:27](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3387) 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

[57:25](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3445) 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.

[58:01](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3481) 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?

[58:54](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3534) 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

[59:53](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3593) 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.

[1:00:31](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3631) 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.

[1:01:01](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3661) 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.

[1:01:58](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3718) 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

[1:03:02](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3782) 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 i'm realizing is i don't think we've once mentioned ai as part of this work That you do, which is really interesting, because it's, you know, it's all anyone talks about these days. And you actually had this tweet the other day, the best marketers are allergic to AI. Talk about just what you think with how AI plays into this and how AI should not play into this.

[1:04:15](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3855) I just think like overall, when you look at a lot of the work done, like even like looking at the top labs, like they are some of the people that have the most amount of humans actually working on a specific asset. And like maybe, yes, they have a lot of the research automated or a lot of different steps like internally automated. But the actual production of the asset, whether it comes to the video, the design in Figma, the editing, the post-production, et cetera, it's all done by teams of a lot of humans. And I think there's not going to be a real way to get around that, at least not anytime soon.

[1:04:47](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3887) And especially in the environment we're in now where a lot of people are very, I guess, turned off by AI and it can be a scary thing to talk about. If you're an AI company like Whisper, who in theory, we enable humans to do better work, we don't want to replace anyone's job, want to give them, I guess, the tools to be able to be more productive, to do more work and to sound more naturally and to sound like themselves more naturally. If we on the other side go out and start making AI slop ads and videos with AI influencers and I don't know, AI designs and AI statics, it's probably not going to be received really well.

[1:05:23](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3923) and it just it looks off and like when i say that i think it goes more towards not automating the work that's going to be the final product that people are looking at um because i think you see it a lot of times like it'll it'll end up blowing back on on the companies where whether it's like an animation that they made with claude or um some sort of asset that they made and maybe there's typos or maybe the writing is like all jumbled up like what happens when you do it with with open it with chat dbt or whatever um and yeah i think it's it's not worth it like the risk first reward is not worth it so the alpha what i'm hearing here is like don't use ai for this work yeah for for the final output especially on the creative side like what other people are going to see i don't think ai should should touch yet that is really interesting like you know people it feels like everyone's hearing lean into ai uh use it even uh even one of the most bullish people on guy that i know um matt who is now a victor or excited growth he has the most automations i've

[1:06:23](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3983) **Hector Serrano:** ever seen in the whole wide world but even then like that last um like 10 that's the most important always has a human on the endpoint because you can't sacrifice as a brand having something blow

[1:06:34](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=3994) up because you had something screw up or come out wrong or or whatever and yeah i think with everyone i think with everyone also just shipping so much volume and like whether it be on x on linkedin on instagram on youtube like you're able now to make videos with cloud you're able to to have the edit of them you're able to make um what's it called you want to make like a doppelganger of yourself with ai and and all these different things and get content out faster and have these automations for tweets and have it like post news articles and whatever and retweet it in whatever way there's so much noise like you're saying that if you actually focus more on the quality and less on the quantity and less on building all these crazy automations and hitting volume for just hitting volume sake it gets so easy to cut through the noise and like if you actually have real value you package it well and you post like not a lot you post with with purpose and for actual reason um you can cut through really easily as a brand or as a company I think another good example of this is also today's YouTube channel.

[1:07:37](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4057) We started it around like, what, three months ago? 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.

[1:08:08](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4088) That's actually where I was going to go. And this could be our final thread to chat. There is just this other lever, which is, I don't know if you described it as founder-led growth or... Yeah, founder-led content. Founder-led content. Just give us kind of a sense of that growth opportunity, what you're seeing there, the opportunity to drive growth for your product through founder-led content. Yeah, I think it also ties into what we were just talking about, like so much AI and so much ads and companies, et cetera. And at the end of the day, it also ties back to everything in content creator and people.

[1:08:39](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4119) **Hector Serrano:** Like at the end of the day, people buy from people, people invest in people.

[1:08:42](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4122) And I think having a founder who can put his face out there, can talk on camera, you can use in ads, you can use to tell a story, it makes the company and the product feel that much more human. and like when you compare two products um i would much rather like even from my own experience like if i follow um i don't know let's say i follow george heaton who's the founder of represent he has like a clothing brand and then there's another ad that i see for a clothing brand i'm much more gonna buy the product george's product because i know how he works i know his routine i know the type of person he is i know what he stands for um i know how hard he works um for his company and what he actually puts into it and i think people really appreciate that and again such a digital age like being able to connect with the founder behind the product and you not only like create super fans and like people who already use your product but now also love you you also bring in like this new group of people who have never seen your product they don't really know who you are and then slowly they start to like like the content you're putting out they start to buy into the mission they start to buy into the company and then they actually try the

[1:09:47](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4187) product and it's like this long like horizon type play i'm really this like long-term play that you have to make and it's an investment because you can't just start a youtube channel or found a lead brand and instantly start selling at people because people are just going to switch off and be like okay i don't want to be part of this anymore but if you just give a lot of value you over share you over deliver and you just open up the doors into like what the culture is like what you're building people really appreciate that and you get them to buy it and like drop their guards and then maybe a year in we actually like maybe have like a soft seller maybe we have and they have a hey guys here's like some support thanks for getting us to 100 000 subscribers just want to drop this code blah blah and then people are actually willing to support you um so i think again like in this world where everyone's just trying to get like instant growth and everything super fast and optimize everything from the start these like channels that maybe don't have any direct correlations in the present moment end up being some of the best long-term plays and also brand building plays what are some of the kind of angles slash stories that seem to work well when

[1:10:43](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4243) you're doing this sort of founder-like content is it like here's the story of our company yeah is there anything so the way we kind of thought about it at whisper is it's like whisper honestly any company you're at is like every company is going to have some sort of story or some sort of mission that they're building towards for us at whisper it's getting to one being one billion daily active users and that's like everything everything we do at whisper is to get towards that goal and when we look at the content we make everything needs to play back into that story and it's almost like you're building this netflix series where each episode is obviously going to be different but it all ties back into the overarching theme and like whether you're again building in uh medicine or um dev tools or whatever it is there's going to be some sort of mission that you're chasing as a company and you want to bring people along for that ride and if you tie that into every episode or to every linkedin post every x post um obviously like the formatting and the messaging is different on every platform but if you like kind of tie all this together, like brings everyone along for the journey and it makes it a lot easier to grasp and

[1:11:42](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4302) also a lot easier to build off of because you're like, okay, this is the vision, this is what we're building towards and this is how each step actually leads us to that submission. It's almost like a physical representation of like a product roadmap or what's actually happening to the company, like showing it on display to the world, the ups, the downs, the struggles. Everything. That's kind of how we think about it at Whisper and how I think other companies can think about it as well. That's awesome advice. Basically, have like a... North Star, like a North Star metric that you're chasing. Yeah, and the journey there and things you're learning, things you're discovering, things that are surprising.

[1:12:13](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4333) And we'll point people to the channel to give them a sense of what you're actually doing there. Yeah, it's just Tanei Kathari. And yeah, we just document everything on there. Like the episodes, we've basically done everything from like showing how we launched our new product, note taker to Tanay going to India and doing wedding shopping and like also working remote and how he balances that and his relationship with Sahaj to like just a week in the life of a founder. We also did a whiteboard breakdown where I spoke with Tanay. And it's like all these different formats that all might feel different and look different, but they end up like building towards this like bigger vision of what Whisper is building towards. I imagine there's already some innate interest in Whisperflow by when you started it. It's like a company people when they see it. Exactly. So there's probably a bit of like, you can't start that from the beginning when no one cares what you've learned because no one cares about your company yet?

[1:13:00](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4380) I honestly think you can start it, though. Maybe it put us in a bit better position, but there's founders who don't have as brands as big as Whisper who have found success with personal brand content. And again, it's like a gateway into the actual brand. And it's like, what easier way to make that accessible than through a person who's just telling their story and giving value. And so interestingly, this is just another, let's say alpha opportunity to grow which is the founder sharing their story in a really compelling way and you see like everything starts to tie in as well because the more places you show up organically and the more touch points you have with the customer the cheaper it's going to get when it comes to paid because what is i think a customer needs to a person needs to see a piece of content of the company like seven times before they actually make a purchase if you're able to hit them on youtube long form which is a bunch of trust built up since this is a long form platform and then you're also posting Instagram reels from the founder.

[1:13:56](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4436) You're also posting on LinkedIn. Then when they get to meta on the first ad they see, they're going to convert. So like I think these organic channels work hand in hand with paid. Like the more that you have activated and the more you have running, the cheaper all the conversions get across all platforms. And then your paid platform gets credit for that conversion. Exactly. 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

[1:15:07](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4507) 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.

[1:15:41](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4541) 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% From your story. Okay, so one last tidbit you shared in this video that we'll share is, so you have this head of content, there's Hector, there's someone filming, videographer, there's YouTube team, short form. You actually shared the YouTube packaging team, if you had to kind of pick which needs to be stronger, you found the YouTube team is more important than even the quality of the video.

[1:16:19](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4579) Yeah, YouTube is generally one of the hardest platforms, which is why when you said Instagram or YouTube, I backtracked and I was like, actually, YouTube is very important. And that's actually where I started as well. And I saw how much goes into making YouTube videos. Like, it's not just, oh, you make a video, you post it and you put a thumbnail on some sort of picture and then you're good. It's like, at the end of the day, the way I like to think about it is you could have a masterpiece of a video. You can make a Hollywood production movie,

[1:16:41](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4601) **Hector Serrano:** but if you put a bad thumbnail and a bad title that doesn't intrigue people to click on it,

[1:16:46](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4606) no one's actually gonna know how good your video is. so you might have invested all this time all this money all this energy and effort into making this masterpiece of a video but if you don't understand how youtube works and how it's actually going to rank the highest um you're not going to get the results you want and that's why i think the youtube side is so important because it's not only a thumbnail it's not only the click-through rate it's not only the title the watch or the average duration it's also like the storytelling the pacing how you package it the intro how like the thumbnail needs to tie into the video and there actually needs some needs to be some sort of payoff because if you don't then you're gonna have more of a drop off rate and people aren't going to stick along to actually watch the video um and like the better your youtube team is the easier makes it for the short form side because typically the people that you're using for short form maybe aren't as i guess they're not as committed because they typically have a lot of clients and they're overseas as well like a lot of our short form editors are from germany um we have one as well in romania i think and then one in Australia

[1:17:46](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4666) and they're really good short form editors but they again want to get a lot of clips out so they're not going to pay as much of attention to the actual storytelling and they're not going to be that good with the clip selection so if I send them 40 hours of footage I might not get back the best clips whereas if my YouTube team is really good in the post-production they put a super good 15 minute video then I can send that to my editors in like a clean slate with no titles, no music, etc. and they can just click the best moments and they get into like really good short form pieces um and that's that's kind of the reason why i say the long form team is the most important part and it's also the one that has the most likes like youtube videos can write or can run on for ages and ages like even on my own personal channel i've had a video that's been up now for like five years and i think like a year ago it was like what 40 000 views now it's like 600 000 views and it's like youtube videos have so like the longest half-life out of any platform and it's truly insane like some of the videos we post on today's channel might be like five six million views in a few years um and that's what's cool about youtube it's like a long-term investment uh i've discovered

[1:18:45](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4725) very similar things with youtube it's a wondrous platform it's maybe the only platform where you can discover where new people discover you at scale yeah it's insane and it's like a lot of these platforms i like trust me i enjoy making content but sometimes it's like a bit demotivating when it's like oh you filmed one piece of content you posted it you got to make the new one and so obviously with youtube you have to as well but you reap those rewards as well long term it's not like on instagram um where you post a video and in 48 hours it's dead it's like a youtube video you put a lot of effort into it and we look at some of the charts on today's videos and like we're still getting 10 000 views um in like the last 48 hours even though it's been like three months since it's been posted like it's still working for us it's still getting new eyeballs and new customers um so yeah youtube is youtube is amazing i i assume also with how many podcasts you have as well like the amount of views you're getting from like years and years back or whatever is it's pretty insane yeah it's fun to watch videos that it kind of climbed the ranks over time i had um elizabeth stone on the podcast she's cpto at netflix and she slowly has climbed the

[1:19:47](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4787) charts to she's right behind number one now she's like climbing on she's approaching number one and so yeah like you think these are like stuck at that number but they just keep going yeah it's like this and all of a sudden it just goes like this and i hope i did not expect that i don't know I don't know. I don't get a lot of Those are just inflexed, but it does grow. And it's like, wow, I didn't know that was still growing. Yeah. 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?

[1:20:19](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4819) 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

[1:21:27](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4887) 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

[1:22:34](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=4954) 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

[1:23:36](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=5016) 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.

[1:24:14](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=5054) 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

[1:25:17](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=5117) 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.

[1:25:50](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=5150) 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

[1:26:53](https://realalpha.app/v/KzS5Qs7vSMg/?t=5213) 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.