How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector Serrano

You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing whisper flow over the past couple of years. You joined whisper flow at 19. I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. Plights like 200 positions have found some company called Blister Flow. I applied, had a call with Tenei, and then I joined. I've never worked in the startup, and I told Tenei like I was like, "I want equity in whisper." And Tenei laughed and was like, "I like you, man." There's always talk about no jobs left for young folks. AI is taking everyone's jobs, and 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 in the best ways to approach these new channels. 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. You 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. 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 board is going to get you the best hire you're in for a rude awakening. Hector, thank you so much for being here and 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. I saw this stat that revenue at Whisper Flow grew 30X in the past year, which is absurd. You guys recently raised it 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. 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, you're responsible for at Whisper Flow. It'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 touch at the end of the day is a very small part of the business. And that's made me 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, 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 figured out how to do it yourself. Also with the ad work that you do, the UGC work that you do, also very effective. So there's a lot that we can all learn from you and what you figured out. Thank you. So just kind of zooming out first. Talk about the growth levers that you have been spending time on. What has been working recently in growing whisper flow/can work for other B2B SaaS 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 that's 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 I just started catching steam in like six months in. I remember it's in a city that was like, wow, we really found PMS. Like it found like we struck gold. 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 through trial and error, doing a bunch of different things, meet testing a bunch of channels, other people testing a bunch of channels. There's like one of the main ones we've landed on now is paid. And we're funneling that with a lot of UGC content. And we have a lot of pillars inside of paid, whether that be UGC video, statics, influencers, in-house videos, found their storytelling. But yeah, paid, ads as a whole, whether it be to meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. has definitely become one of our main pillars out whisper. And it's one of the things I'm leading on the content set 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, none of this will really work if your product doesn't. Exactly. Great if there's not real organic product market fit already. 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 less than one. This needs to be working on its own before you start investing in paid. Yeah, exactly. I have 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, and you're having to force it a little bit too much, and maybe you have to like go back to the drawing board a little bit and like rethink how you're actually positioning the product. Is it actually valuable to your users? It lies in it growing by itself organically. And like yeah, there's who ain't no hack. Besides having a good product and then adding more, more leverage to pull from. So let me ask, when do you think it makes sense to start investing in these organic channels? Well, I think paid is actually one of the best channels to invest on early on. And I learned this from Matt, who's actually our ex-head of growth at Whisper. He's now at Victor. And a lot of his lessons and lessons that I learned from him is like taking this e-com approach to SaaS, which a lot of companies are like scared to turn on. The paid engine. And what happens when you actually turn on the paid engine is you actually learn a lot faster. Like if the messaging actually resonates with your audience, are you actually able to convert this cold traffic into users? And like at the end of the day, most companies aren't that skilled in organic content because it is something very like new. And unless you have like really young people on your team who really understand these organic channels really well, know how to package it, know how to make the content, it's really hard to actually get any clear numbers on does your product actually have legs? Do people actually resonate with it? Are you actually able to track these conversions, et cetera? So I think paid makes sense from the get-go. Obviously, like testing within your limits and your budgets that you have. But yeah, if you're able to like see, I'm able to turn this cold traffic into paying users, then you kind of have like a clear signal there that this same messaging or this product will also work on organic if you like optimize things a bit more. I want to come back to that just like what that early team may look like even maybe pre-product market fit. But what's really interesting about what you're sharing here is people, you know, paid has been around for a long time, running ads on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all these things. Like there's nothing new as a platform. And what you're saying here is there's still a lot of alpha and opportunity to grow substantially and do something different in paid. Yeah, 100%. And like a lot of times people also get scared because they'll say like, oh, I don't want to turn on the paid engine yet or spend a bunch of money because then we're going to like, we're going to reach a point where we like oversaturate this market or this ICP. But at then, it's just like getting smarter with how you're again positioning the product. And there's always new ways 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 OpenAI and Thropic, Cursor, Replic, 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, scam, R-back, and audit logs. Work OS 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 and get permissions just like a person. Work OS handles it all. Agent Auth to give Agents scope revocable identities. Agent registration with Auth MD 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 Work OS. Because they're the best. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Okay, so let's actually, let's dive into this. So let's talk about paid UGC and paid in general. What's kind of the overall strategy that you have employed that has worked so well? I think it would be kind of good to start maybe from what we learned previously actually. So where do we go back to? I think this was 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 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 like basic UGC, I think he was studying finance and wanted to be a lawyer. And she came in and tonight just gave him like a budget and was like just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks. Did a few projects, nothing really worked. And then he found really good success with organic UGC. And this was also around like the clue era when like there wasn't many people doing it successfully. Explain organic UGC, what is that exactly? Yeah, so organic UGC is, you basically got a bunch of creators in a group. These creators will make videos about your product and then they will post that on their own Instagram pages or own TikTok pages. So imagine you join Whispers Organic UGC group and you make an account called Lenny Whispers. And then you just upload your videos into there and then you get paid based off on a CPM metric. So maybe it's like, I don't know, $2 per thousand views. And then it tapers off like as you get higher and higher. And yeah, Tobin set that up for us. And I think in like two and a half months was like 500 million views. super low c And it worked decently well, but I think it was also early on in the organic UDC 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 flows as well. It's a bit harder to get to students to get students to pay for it. So ultimately we ended up killing the program, which I'm not entirely against organic UDC. 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 organic UDC and like not just doing very top of funnel concepts. But yeah, organic UDC does work. We just didn't see that much success or the success we wanted out whisper. And it was also going to be really hard to find someone 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. 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 for organic UDC 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. I mean, not even just middle of funnel because you need everything and paid ads. But more just like pitching the product straight on instead of just like screen on text ads. And then I stumbled upon tribe, which I don't know if you want me to get into that now. Yeah, I talk about tribe and it's TRYBE, right? Yes. TRYBE. So Lucas Packter, 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 SaaS companies 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 media. 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 EGC, 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 channels on TikTok and Instagram. And it'll be like Lenny Whispers or Lenny Talks. It can be anything really. But you won't impose 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. It's a, they take a percentage of spend or, uh, yeah. A percentage of spend or GMV, depending on if you're in SaaS or if you're e-commerce or something like that. Awesome. Okay, cool. Yeah. So you've shifted to this model. It's basically performance based EGC. 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 safety. Okay. And we'll talk about the progression that you recommend starting with a couple. So you find creators, you, they make a video talking about how awesome whisper flow is. You use that video as an ad on meta and TikTok and other platforms. And then they get a cut of how that app performs. Exactly. And then you have two kind of approaches to the cut they take. Talk about that. Yeah. So obviously, we don't want to just pay creators just off percentage based, 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 stuck around for the longest and they've understood how the model works. So one thing we actually have included is it's called a smart retainer. And what this is basically like us saying, okay, we're going to back you as a creator. And let's say we're going to, we're going to do 25 videos. And we're going to 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. 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 add joining the group month 1, month 2, month 3. Maybe they're not able to reach over that amount in a 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 pure off the best performance videos instead of paying out a pocket. Also, I think some good background is I'm a creator myself. So I've found out a lot of companies and even at a whisper we were doing this sometimes as well. Like we would give briefs to these creators to make ads for us. And we would give them 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 them the product. And it's like when you send a creator a 10 page guideline on how they need to shoot their content. What they need to talk about, you end up removing the creative aspect that creators have. And there's nothing more to motivating than that. And I know as a creator, like if I have a brand that trusts 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 in it. So it's like this tight net feeling we bring the best to 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 $100 for videos. We're not paying them $50 of videos. It's not $1,000 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 $13,000 a month. And that's not really possible with other forms of UGC or even influencers. They're making more money than then full-time influencers. And they might have like $1,000, $2,000 followers on their own Instagram accounts. But this has just been a way for any creator who's talented to be able to make real like money. Awesome. And the way you do it is if it's a shopping sort of product, you give them percentage of GMV. And then if it's the BDB SaaS product, you give them 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. 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 ads then. 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 where 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 GMV. So the innovation here that has worked really well is giving the creator a kind of a piece of the action of the success of their ad. Exactly. Awesome. And then also capping the downside so that they can actually spend time doing this versus being worried that they're not going to make a living. Yeah, exactly. A lot of the times these creators have to end up having the constantly negotiating with brands or 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. 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 saying whether it was like the whisper note taker or all these different features that we released. 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. So yeah, it just makes for a great experience both on the brand side and in 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 is 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 to the fingers that are excited. Yeah, because we don't turn. Yeah, that was that was honestly because I guess some context as well. I was actually at whisper I was the one making every single ad for like a year and a half. So I made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ads. But I guess that's a testament to how much I love to whisper. I didn't go crazy. 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 you to create the ads? 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 as creators end up being the ones reaching them and telling them what to do. And it's like you would never have someone who's not an ad. engineering team and be like, "Hey, you guys need to solve this problem like this, and do this, and this, and this." They're gonna be like, "What is this guy telling me?" Okay, so let's go down this tangent of to find someone like Hector. What is 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 Toblin, like I mentioned earlier, because we both couldn't be more opposite from each other. If you look at both of our resumes lined up next to each other, and I asked you to pick one or the other, you probably, in your head, will think it's pretty clear, which one would be the right answer, but at the end of the day, both are the right answer. 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 1 Sports, Tobin didn't, and there's all these different things, but at the end of the day, we both ended up being great marketers. That wasn't really evident if you looked at the face value of our resumes, but I think Whisper has done a really good job of seeing one or two really key things, and also being able to see, "Is this person a good state for the culture? Do they seem hard-working?" If they have the same values or the same culture as people already at Whisper, I feel like Tenei, Daniel, and the rest of the team are really good at not only spotting early talent, and seeing one of those key things to look out for, but also seeing, "Is this a good person a good human to have on the team?" I think Tobin and I might be speaking too much for myself, but I think we embody those character traits perfectly, and you might be asking, "What are the traits I need to look for in a good marketing hire?" Honestly, it's not that complex. It has this person grown in account, even if it's 10,000 followers, and do they somewhat understand what they're talking about in terms of creator and they've made content? 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 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. I think it comes on set. Do they seem like a hard worker? Are they a good person? Do they have those minimum 10,000, 15,000 followers? Then taking a shot on them, and you can't just bring a young person in and then be like, "Okay, you're not where I want you to be." You're gone. Tene and Daniel, again, in the whole Whisper team, always gives us a lot of time to learn and fail. I know, for a fact, for the first months at Whisper, I was kind of all over the place. I still joke about it with Daniel. There were some hard conversations here and there where I put tech to do it. They gave me the freedom to keep experimenting and keep trying new things. It didn't really matter if you failed, as long as you're consistently learning and getting better and getting better. That's the same for Tobin. Tobin came in, they gave him some money and some time to experiment. After two months, you found something that worked and it stuck. This is extremely valuable. There was this tweet the other day that came out of just the hardest role to hire for right now is basically someone like you. Someone they can talk about the product, the technical aspects, get people excited, make the product compelling. You're telling us what this profile looks like. 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. This could be any platform like Instagram TikTok. I would say Instagram is probably the highest sign because TikTok is simply like a bit more brain rock content. Instagram is like a bit more polished, better package. And also the followers you get on there as a platform are just better. So I just think Instagram is probably a higher signol than TikTok. It's pretty easy to grow on TikTok like hosting some brain rock stuff I would say. I see. What about like X and YouTube? YouTube is decent. But I would say if you understand a platform like Instagram, you can crack any platform. And yeah, that's my experience. I mean, Instagram and YouTube I would say if you can crack Instagram and YouTube, I confident, especially if you're 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, it's like, okay, it's a volume 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 other beast sitting down and filming. It's not an easy thing. I've had some colleagues like I pushed them to start making videos. Shout out to Eric, he's our media buyer. I had him 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 blowing up on my entire feed is just hector videos recently. So 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 bullet point I want to double down on there is just this idea of young talent. That's something you talk a lot about just the value and almost like the alpha in hiring young people. Yeah. I mean, also going back to the point that you had just mentioned like how it's the hardest role to hire. I think it's very simple. It just boils down to like what I mentioned like the two resumes. There's no clear path for a good marketer or good modern marketer who understands socials. And if you like look for these things that you might think are high signal whether it's like the best grades, the best school. Certain majors like you're not going to end up with the marketer that you had envisioned. 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 to going or the next heifter or the next x person. So yeah, I like my suggestion if you're trying to find someone similar to me would be trying to not find someone similar to me because you're not going to find the right person. It's just like give a shot to some kid who has like some crazy background and the crazier the better. And obviously it has some some proof in the work. But yeah, the point that you're asking was the importance of young talent, right? Like why that really matters. Yeah. I think I've seen this example on the scene a lot of different industries. I don't know if you've heard of Jimmy Farley, but he's like one of the TikTok shot like OG guys like he's been on there. I don't know since he was like 17, built a huge agency where to some of the biggest brands. And recently I think his agency got acquired by physicians choice for like two million dollars. And now he's like in house with them and also to 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 econ brands are always like just talking about how like having a Jimmy next to you is so much alpha because up 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 in 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 SAS or an econ, 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 if you do your best now to dive into TikTok shop or into tribe, like you're still going to struggle because you're not going to be able to connect as much with the creators or you're not going to understand certain things and it's just going to take you a lot longer time to get used to those things instead of like putting your time into something that you're better at and then bring someone that can kind of manage those things for you. I love this advice. There's always talk about, you know, no jobs left for young folks. Hey, I was 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 is today super young and like she's one of the smartest people I know and like they'll still bring me into his office or hop on a column like be asking like, Oh, what's working on Instagram? I'm like, how are you doing this so fast? Or just like asking questions about content and general and I don't, I mean, I don't think I've seen this from today and I had in the team and I was like, I don't think there's every 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 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 Whisper Floyd 19, right? Yes. I had just turned 19. It was like three days after my my birthday. And how long did it take you to feel like, okay, if I kind of figured something out, you said initially it was kind of rocky and not sure what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, give people some context. It was a it was a weird transition because I had just quit division one soccer like three days before as well. And I literally went home looked up Whisper Floyd LinkedIn. Well, I honestly, I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. I applied to like 200 positions. I found some company called Whisper Floyd. I applied how to call with today. And then I joined. And yeah, it was it was created like looking back some of the memories like remember it was like one of the first days when we're getting ready for a launch. And I was in my I think it was my calculus class. And then they started slacking me in class. And I left to go to the bathroom and popped up my laptop. And I started. I helped into the slack. And he was basically like our launch video isn't what it needs to be. Do you think you can edit it on couch or whatever tools you have and make it a bit more Gen Z vibes. And yeah, I got a calculus and I just started editing a video. I had some editing experience. But for today on my one of my first weeks to ask me to do that was pretty scary. But yeah, that was pretty much summed up my first year at Whisper. I just picked up random stuff didn't really have a clear position. I'm pretty sure they didn't really know what I was doing either. I didn't know what I was doing. And yeah, it probably took me a year to like she actually comfortable. And those those a lot of ups and downs. And actually one thing I want to point out as well as 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. In that summer, I had applied, well, I had applied two 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'm in a planning finance internship in New York City. And I was bouncing two summer classes, Whisper Flow, and the finance internship. And like, two weeks into 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 in Whisper workout. So I would sneak out the office and go to some cafes and so ho 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 went. What a journey. I feel like we could have a whole other conversation about just a creator path and how to become a content creator on Instagram and all these platforms. That's its own thing. I'm going to come back to how you find the creators for this kind of paid agency strategy. If we walked through the whole strategy, honestly, now I think this would be a good moment to walk through everything. So yeah, like I guess, like we were mentioning, the first step is kind of figuring out, OK, if you're in SaaS, you can do percent of AdSpen, if you're an e-commerce loop percent of GMV. And then from there, you'll set up the group, whatever platform you choose. I think try to do the best one. It's the one we use at Whisper. And then once you have your group set up, it's like, OK, now you have to go actually find the creators. And if you think about it, it's like, imagine you're 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. 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 $300,000. It says how many creators we have in the group, and then how many ads we have running or whatever. And like, 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 that we get. But on the contrary, if you're a brand who has $0, paid out at 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 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 the following and follow our list. And you also search those same exact keywords. Because typically good creators, no other good creators. And then I say if I'm around 150 to 250 DMs over a week, and like you should be very targeted DMs. Like it shouldn't be like pulling them, use some mass software and send 3,000 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 going to get a lot of slot back or a lot of bad creators back. And I think for outreach is still better to do it manually. Obviously it's going to take a bit longer, but if you do it right, I haven't had to do it outreach ever again. And yeah, from those 150 to 250 DMs, you 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, which is like just doing all these, yes, events and things for the creators, whether it be like meetings, 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, more flying in some more 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 ads, then 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 out whisper is, we probably went from like five to 10, 10 to 15 to 15 to 20. We probably added like five to six creators like every few weeks. And since you're now at this point, you also have like the five creators and you've probably paid out a bit of money. You'll start to get some people start to apply on tribe. I think now we probably get like 1,000 to 1,500 applications a week. So I go through those creator applications. And then from there, since we now have a lot of creators, I keep really high bar and 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 $100 per creator they bring into the group. And it's not some sort of like MLM pyramid scheme thing. Like those amongst people on LinkedIn, my post blew up on LinkedIn and everyone was like, this sounds like a scam. Like it sounds like a 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'll bring them in. But we don't want more people in like we're capped at 50. It's not like, oh, bringing 100 creators and I'll pay you 400 creators and 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 are like some different levers we've even 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 have some questions on how? - 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're out like a decent size, you have 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 like, okay, which is the ad that's going to most spend, the second most 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 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. And Meadow, 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, and drama is super complex enough. 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 going to 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 like push these creators and remind them like, the reason these creators are making so much money in that they're ads or 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 interest them as creators. And if you just follow what person A to your C are doing, then your ads are just gonna rank under them and you're not gonna 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 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 'cause it's like a very interesting visual hook, and then it pans over, then on the thing, it says what is my keyboard trying to say, and it pans over to his laptop, and it's like the rain drops are typing, and then it starts typing random words, and then it says download a whisper flow. And then it'll be coming one of our best to follow me ads, and it's like, I don't even know how we came up with that, so crude as 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, 'cause this was so much juicy gold stuff, 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. Your advice here is don't work through tribe to find them because no one's gonna care about you yet, and your advice is good Instagram, keyword search for things that kind of in your market, EDC, tech, lawyers that maybe wanna make money on the side to recruit the first five. The advice is start with five, don't go too big. Yeah, okay. And I would also, it's not even just start with five or start with lawyers or whatever, it's like you have to look at your ad library and look at your product and be like, okay, what specific gaps do we have that we actually need to fill in? Because more isn't necessarily better, and like that applies to everything in life, but specifically in creators, if you just bring 100 or 200 of the same creators, that isn't gonna lead to scale, because again, everything is gonna look exact same, but when you bring in five creators that each speak to a specific audience, each speak to maybe a specific messaging of your product, you get 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, let's think about what customer kind of market with ICP or targeting, and what the creators don't speak to that audience. - Exactly, so Whisperer, we have everything from like moms to lawyers, we have like the awesome thing about Whisperer 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-commerce founder that loves Whisperer so much that he just makes ads for us. And it's like I find that pretty incredible, like something dude who has a successful e-commerce business, he loves Whisperer 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 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 and they'll be like, "Oh well, I have a dev tool or I'm in this sleep space, I can't make content for my brand." How many? and 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's probably gonna 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. For example, our technical ads at Whisper, when you're speaking like this older demographic who isn't really on Instagram that much, or maybe isn't maybe a bit more serious, the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform. And that can be something as simple as like a screen recording of someone using your product. It could be like a minute, 30 seconds long. It can be super long. Like some of our best ads, you would look at them and you'd be like, holy cow, these are ugly. These are such bad ads. But they actually perform the best for those specific audiences that maybe are a bit older, maybe are a bit more technical. And it's like the same thing for a sleep product. Like if you have an expensive product and you sleep in a sleep knee shirt industry, whatever. And you have an 18 year old kid selling it. Why are you or why am I going to buy a $3,000 product from a kid? Probably it's not going to work that way. You want to buy from someone who maybe speaks the same way you do, who works in the same things you do. How's the same problems you do? And yeah, I think UDC works for any company. It's just the maybe more upstream you go and the more expensive your product is and the more you should 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 need to make 700, 500, that was an ads a month. Part of the reason is does discover the ones that are working. Exactly, yeah, because ads, I would say, is almost weird in an organic 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. So that's why I think it's just good to experiment. You don't really have such a high bar for like, oh, the ads isn't work this way or that way, we're not gonna run it. Like again, some of the ads that I made a year ago, it's literally like a string recording of someone using the product with some text at the top, nine by 16, super long video. And there are best ads and there are ugliest ways as well. This season's supporting sponsor is DX. 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So I'd say 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 come across a lot of creators. And from there, it's like, they already follow you. They probably already like your product. So that's really easy. 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 relatively new thing for creators like here, this new model. And a lot of them are skeptical at first, which I understand why. But even like seven months ago, six months ago, it was even more like new. So even then, like today, I still wouldn't start with that and like go straight into pitching super hard. I'd just be like, "Hey, I love your content. Well, those time you can be part of our creator group. Are you interested?" From there, you're gonna response back the probably ask you for some more details. And then I have like a PDF that's like super simple. I just kind of explain the program structure, how much we pay, how much some of our creators are making. And then from there, I'll just hop on a call with them, close them, and get them like onboarded in Discord, get them with your flow code, and then get them making videos. And the other way is if they don't follow us and I'm doing outreach, is I'll just send them a DM and be like, "Hey, if some of you are part across your content, I really enjoyed it." I'd love to have you be part of our with your 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, it's a summer creator myself. I also have a lot of, which is also the pros of hiring people who are in content. Some of our best hires at Whisper in content have been doing me posting on Instagram stories or our best creator hires. I'll be like, "Hey, I'm looking for UDC 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 and you're interested in me and you're sure they make high-value content is, they can also be used as a very good hiring mechanism. And yeah, it depends. If you have someone who's a creator, I think it works pretty well. You'll obviously get a creator face, whatever. And then also if you're a really well-known brand, obviously if you're a creator getting a message from Nike or whatever, you know what I mean? 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. And I'm 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." What's like downboarding look like? - These creators are very used to just being used. And like, just, 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 day and age where everything is digital, everything is virtual. Most people are working remote. Most creators are remote. And they create community. The same way just like a regular person would create community. And we just make sure that we connect from the get go. And like, it's like at the end of the day, it's like friends. We're like working together. I don't see them as just a creator that I'm going to extract some videos from and never talk to again. I get on a call with them, like you said. And I have this whole slideshow, but before I go to my slideshow, like asking 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 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 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 is like another pack as well. Like you want to keep your creators motivated and the hired of dopamine rush they can get. And the more money you get them early on, the better. 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 like a sales deal. You don't want to get them on the side and then you let them get off. And then you have to chase them down. It's like you're going 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 the 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 you're okay. You're gonna make money. You just shut up, don't worry about it. And I think this is actually really good alpha as well. I think the companies that will win long term are the companies that have the best relationships with creators because words, words 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 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 I'd say one really big thing we focus on out with spirits, like not even just with creators, but any external agencies or anyone we work with, we always want to treat everyone with a lot of respect. And yeah, I think it's, the companies that do that the best will win long term as well. - What does the early team look like to start this initiative? Is it just a Hector that is running this so low 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. We spent 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 other day, I was at the office and I was like, holy cowly. I just had like 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 CHI specifically to get something like this running, all you really need is someone like me to kind of be the comms with creators, come up with new concepts, approve videos, kind of get everything kick-started. And then you need a media buyer. It's pretty rare to find someone who's a creative and also a media buyer. I don't really like numbers that much. I'm not really much of a numbers guy. And I don't like staring at meta ads manager. I've heard it's a headache. So I'm happy I don't have to do that. But yeah, we have Eric on the media buying side of things and he likes structures or add 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 or? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, Eric basically just lives in our on the media buying side of things on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera. God, it's your kind of like the creative. You're like the content supply and then this person takes it [BLANK_AUDIO] is responsible for running the ads, watching performance optimists have spent, got it. Okay. And then is there anyone else that you find important value ball on that team early on and even later on? Really, like if we go back to early, early days, the marketing team was Daniel or CMO, Matt who was our head of growth before Eric came. And then it was me just like as a soul creator kind of just making to add to myself. So and then we had some external agencies here and there. And then slowly we added on design, we added on and house like director and how produce films and much videos. Then we introduced like PR recently and like even even now I think we're so 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 that helps us close celebrities 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 middle management and then poor our poor CMO Daniel who is an absolute legend. He just had a bunch of director reports. 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 does have work. There's 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 it's 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 whisper flow is the best thing. And what you're doing here 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 a in-house UGC creator and it got to a point where ad spend was getting too high and like I'm only human and I couldn't I couldn't make that many videos and it was also going 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. Try not just build the team and that's like an extension of myself and yeah 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 then 2024 when we were running ads, I could have an ad running for 12 months and them and my output would be a lot less but now when ad with not only the new updates but also how much ad spend we're running and 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 constantly need more output, more volume etc and I think if you look at our ad library we might have like five thousand lifetime ads and maybe like eight hundred live currently or something like that or nine hundred 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 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 let things. So there's a lot of variety in there and it's just basically I guess just having as many formats as possible because again we have a lot of ads spend and we want the more variety to better out the end of the day. So this is just a core leg to the stool of paid ads as UGC, exactly. Clearly working. Do you think this will work from every company? Is this something most abuse? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I think this works for everyone and it's like it goes back to what I was saying is just finding those users that can speak to the users you want to acquire and then they 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 do you say? Like a solo customer or whatever to download the app they use it then they tell a friend in the company and then more people in the company start using it and then maybe you chase down those enterprise clients and actually close the deal and 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 from like companies are made up of people and you just still get it like that and you think okay how do I want to sell to these people and how would these people respond well say getting sold to I think you just have to break it down super simply and you're like oh yeah this would work for anyone okay that makes sense also what I'm hearing those is probably most effective for kind of product leg growth bottom-up sort of product it's not like a work day or sales force more like yeah whisper flow or motion and yeah exactly like that awesome and you know like if you think about it it makes so much sense why this would work an influencer innately 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 works yeah trying to convince them I also I also think that a good distinction as well as I guess not just an influencer or creator I almost think that creators with no following end up being better investments for brands because influencers kind of are seen now as sell outs a lot of the time and like when you see a big face or big celebrity like selling a product it's like oh my gosh this person has been selling me things 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 known who the person is and they're not famous they don't have a lot of followers and if you have like these partnership ads coming from their account it just feels a lot more genuine as well so it makes sense like the less they look like an influence exactly unless they look like they're trying to convince you and they're just talking like a regular human about exactly what's in your product is I get why that would work and like what I think about right now is there's that survey that they someone did a while ago just what do you want to be when you grow up and for young people it was like creator influencer first but yeah stream I think a lot of people were saying they want to be a streamer a streamer like yeah I personally astronaut a lawyer 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 better like wait maybe this could be a career for me someday maybe I should explore this creator life I need 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 need 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 sounds dumb but a lot of times I'll have a lot of friends reach out and like hey I want to get started and I've had this happen for like maybe last three years where people are like hey I want to get started I want to start being videos like you and I hop on a call with them for like two hours I send them over a bunch of different guys 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 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 re-film things and they have like specific things that they do to like walk back in whether it's like weird noises they make with their mouth they're 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 open over again and they'll put a pen in their mouth and we'll like open their mouth bigger and like talk and announce and then see it so how you say it and then see the words and like I guess more and then when they stop and they take the pen out of their mouth then they were going to pronounce it better so it's like it's like a natural thing as a creator like even if you're doing this for five ten fifteen 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 re-film for ten 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 and stop looking for for more advice there's no better way to lose a creator 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 you want to you don't see how much people struggle doing this stuff like you see this polish video and you don't know they have to put a pen in their mouth for it's first or cuss out their camera yeah like even even my video that I went kind of viral on X like I think it's what fifteen minute cut it's probably I did two cuts before that or probably each like thirty minutes and then I did that last one which is probably again like thirty minutes and then I cock it into a nice video it's like I do this for a living and I manage our tried group the last seven months and I know like the 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'm thinking it needs to be perfect so great to hear it because watching my video you're just so chill so relaxed just sitting there talking with little iPad and like yeah people see that are like I will never be as good at this so that's really helpful to hear when I think about starting to create a being content creator I feel like I need to get a little fuzzy mic or something if you like the step one or taking a little it's a cannon and it's a cannon and I create it unless you have a tiny fuzzy little way yeah I'm gonna ask you one final question along these lines say someone's like amazing I'm gonna do this we're gonna commit to this we're gonna hire we're gonna find someone to run it what are some And when 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 I'll LinkedIn or whatever with too high of salaries or too high like, I guess like requirements. And you're not gonna end up attracting the best people. Like if you put out an offer where you're gonna pay on a, you're like, oh, these people who are running EGC campaigns are in super high demand. I'm gonna put out a job listing for 250K, 200K base salary, generous equity. You're gonna end up attracting the wrong type of people. Like when I joined Whispering, when I joined Whispering, I can tell you if we were doing 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 throw money out there and looking for someone with the best grades or the best school or the best experience, isn't gonna get you the best hire to run this for you. You're in for a rude awakening. And yeah, I would focus on just finding a scrappy kid who's hungry and willing to learn and like, I don't know if you just get a good feeling from them. I was talking to Tenei recently as well all the day. Our first call. So I had a first call with Julia, which she was like leading on marketing team initially or in those like four people. And then I had a second call with Tenei. And I remember like, mind you, they're hiring me as a EGC creator. I'm 19 years old. I've never worked in their startup. And I was probably not earning much money. And I told Tenei like, I was like, I want equity and whisper. And Tenei laughed and was like, I like you man. And like, maybe it was like a stupid thing the same, but like I think it showed how like, I don't know, I was naive but also hungry and like I believe in the company and I want to be part of the company. And just like queues 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 'cause you're gonna talk about people. - You're a couple awesome tweets along these lines. One is that everyone looking for a marketer with the best resume is gonna end up hiring a bot. - Yeah. (laughing) - And then the other is this really important tweet that the most successful founders, investors, creators that met aren't the most talented. They're delusionally confident. They out work everyone and they love what they do. - Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up. And also another one that I resonate with a lot that I put out recently was the sports I'll look on hiring. Sports teams, I come from a very competitive sports background. I played over in Spain. I played with the W and La Liga Academy. I played that most next in the US. I played Division One in college. And 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 if you're over in Spain or over in Europe, you eventually 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 getting a homegrown contract and they join like your first team. And it's like I think a lot of startups should kind of adopt them. And so I think there's a lot of companies that actually don't do internship programs anymore. They don't think they're valuable. And I think they're one of the most valuable things. And if you can find the right people, it's not a very expensive thing to do. It's not very time consuming. And yeah, I think they're like taking a chance on young people and giving them some money to test things with and giving them some freedom to test things with and allowing them to fail and continue learning. It was like one of the best models, I think you can pick up some sports. And obviously it works. I don't know if you're very familiar with soccer, but I mean, look at Lemme Niamal, just won the World Cup at what? 19 years old, 18 years old. And I think that same approach can be applied to a startup world, like fine young talent investing them, let them get real reps in the real world. And then eventually they might become one of your employees. I love that. And I love that also part of this is giving the 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 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. - 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 you say 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 and 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 gonna be a real way to get around that, at least not anytime soon. And especially in like the environment where 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, where we don't wanna replace anyone's job, we wanna give them, you get 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 slot ads in videos with AI influencers, and I don't know, AI designs and AI statics, it's probably not gonna be received really well, and it just, it looks off. And like when I say that, I think it goes more towards not automating the work, that's gonna be the final product that people are looking at. Because I think you see it a lot of times, it'll end up blowing back on the companies, whether it's like an animation that they made with Quad, or 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 OpenIt, with ChatGBT or whatever. And yeah, I think 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 the final output, especially on the creative side, like what other people are gonna see, I don't think AI should touch yet. - That is really interesting. Like, you know, people feels like everyone's hearing lean into AI, use AI to even use videos. Even one of the most bullish people on AI that I know, Matt, who is now at Victor, or ex-setup growth, he has the most automations I've ever seen in the whole wide world. But even then, like that last, 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 up, because you had something screw up or come out wrong, or whatever. And, you know, 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 have the edit at them, you're able to make, what's it called? It would make like a doppelganger of yourself with AI, 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, and whatever way. There's so much noise, like you're saying, that if you actually focus more on the quality, unless on the quantity, unless 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 purpose, and for actual reason, you can cut to really easily as a brand, or as a company. I think another good example of this is also Tene's YouTube channel. We started it around like what, three months ago, and five YouTube videos in, where 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 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 that for you put into it. - And that's actually where I was gonna go, and this could be our final thread to chat. There is just this other lever, which is, I don't know if you just grab founder-led growth, or-- - Yeah, founder-led content. - Fender-led content. Just give us kind of a sense of that growth opportunity, while you're seeing there, the opportunity to drive growth for your product through founder-led content. - Yeah, I think it also ties in to what we just talk 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. Like, at the end of the day, people buy from people, people invest in people, and I think having a founder who can put his face out there, can talk on camera, you can use an ad, you can use to tell the story, it makes the company and the product feel that much more human. And like, when you compare two products, I would much rather, like, even from my own experience, like, if I follow, I don't know, let's say, I follow George Heaton, who's the founder of Represent, he has 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. I know how hard he works 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 know, 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 product. And it's, like, this long, like, surprising type of play. I'm really just, like, long-term play that you have to make, and it's an investment, because you can't just start into a channel or found a lab brand and instantly start selling at people, because people are just. I'm just gonna switch off and be like, okay, I don't wanna 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 and it's like, what the culture is like, what you're building. People really appreciate that, and you get them to buy in and like, drop their guards. And then maybe a year in, we actually like maybe have like a soft seller. Maybe we have today have a, hey guys, here's like the support. Thanks for getting us to 100,000 subscribers. Just wanna drop this code ball well. And then people actually willing to support you. 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, is 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 ingles/stories that seem to work well when you're doing the sort of founder like content? Is it like, here's the story of our company. - Yeah. - Is there anything like that? - So the way we kind of thought about it out Whisperate is it's like, Whisperate, honestly, any company you're at, is like every company is gonna have some sort of story or some sort of mission that they're building towards. First out Whisperate's getting to one billion daily active users. And that's like everything, everything we do at Whisperate 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 gonna be different, but it all ties back into the overarching theme. And like whether you're, again, building in medicine or dev tools or whatever it is, there's gonna be some sort of mission that you're chasing as a company, and you wanna bring people along for that ride. And if you tie that into every episode or to every LinkedIn post, every ex-coast, obviously like the formatting and the messaging is different on every platform. But if you like kind of tie all of this together, like brings everyone along for the journey that makes it a lot easier to grasp and also a lot easier to build off of, because you're like, okay, this is the vision, this world of building towards and this 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 and like showing it on display to the world, the ups, the downs, the struggles, everything. That's kind of how we think about it out Whisper and how I think other companies can think about it as well. - That's awesome advice. - Basically have like a, in 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. And we'll point people to the channel to give them a sense of what you're actually doing there. - Yeah, it's just a Teneca Thari. 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 notetaker to Tenei going to India and doing wedding shopping and like also working remote and how he balances that and his relationship with the hedge to like just a week in the life of a founder. We also need a whiteboard break down where I spoke with Tenei. 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 mentioned there's already some innate interest with Whisper flow by when you started it. It's like a company people when they see it. - Exactly, I wonder. - So there's probably a bit of like, you can't start that from the beginning when no one cares about what the, when no one cares what you've learned 'cause no one cares about your company yet. - I honestly think you can start it though. Like maybe you put us in a bit better position but I mean 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 getting 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 gonna 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 can 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, you're also posting on LinkedIn. Then when they get to meta on the first ad they see they're gonna convert. So like I think these organic channels were 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 platform gets credit for that conversion. - Exactly. - Now, final thing I just wanna 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 'cause I think this is really important for people. I will point to the video where you go deeper. Basically it's ahead of content, a videographer to film you a YouTube team to package it and short form editor to take it in great clips. - Yes, exactly. - The content person would that be you? Like are you that person also doing the UGC paid stuff? - 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 and that's why it's important to find someone with a following as well. Because again, I understand how to build a following and I know how to build a team now and the funny thing is like how it's mentioning previously is like every person that's part of my team, whether before UGC or whether it be for the sound of that 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 a few of the right fit. I had 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's an American vacationing in Australia and he seemed like a great fit and he flew him out to San Francisco like on 3D notice and we got him started. And then same for the YouTube agency, we met through Instagram and now there's some of my close friends. So it's like, it took me the best social people. You also find on social platforms, sort of how it goes. - There's just so much wind from having an audience. That's when we're going take away 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 a YouTube team short from. They actually shared the YouTube packaging team if you had to kind of pick which needs to be stronger. You found the YouTube team needs to, is more important than even the quality of the video. - Yeah, YouTube is generally one of the hardest platforms of just why when you said Instagram or YouTube, I backtrack and I was 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 and 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, but if you put a bad thumbnail and a bad title, that doesn't intrigue people to click on it. 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 in a rank, the highest, you're not gonna get the results you want. And that's why I think the YouTube side is so important because it's not only the thumbnail, it's not only the click-through rate, it's not only the title, the watch, or the average duration. It's also the storytelling, the pacing, how you package it, the intro, how the thumbnail needs to tie into the video and there actually 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 gonna stick along to actually watch the video. And the better your YouTube team is, the easier it 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. A lot of our short-form editors are from Germany. We have one as well in Romania, I think. And then one in Australia. And they're really good at short-form editors, but they, again, want to get a lot of clicks out. So they're not gonna pay as much of attention to the actual storytelling and they're not gonna 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 a clean slate with no titles, no music, et cetera. And they can just click the best moments and make it into really good short-form pieces. And 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. YouTube videos can run on for ages and ages. Even on my own personal channel, I've had a video that's been up now for five years. And I think a year ago, it was at like 40,000 views and now it's like 600,000 views. And it's like YouTube videos have so. The longest half-life out of any platform, it's truly insane. Like some of the videos we post on tonight's channel might be like five, six million views in a few years. And that's what's cool about YouTube. It's like a long-term investment. - I have discovered very similar things with YouTube. It's a wonders 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 film one piece of content you post and you gotta make the new one. And it's obviously with YouTube, you have to as well, but you reap those rewards as well. Long-term, it's not like on Instagram, where you post a video and in 48 hours it's dead. Like a YouTube video, you put a lot of effort into it. And we look at some of the charts on tonight's videos and like we're still getting 10,000 views. And like the last 48 hours, even though it's been like three months since it's been posted. And like it's still working for us. It's still getting new eyeballs and new customers. So yeah, YouTube is amazing. I assume also with how many podcasts you have as well, like the amount of views you're getting from like the years and years back, or whatever it is, it's pretty insane. - Yeah, it's fun to watch videos that kind of climb the ranks over time. I had a little bit of stolen on the podcast. She's C-P-T-O at Netflix. And she slowly has climbed the charts. She's right behind number one now. She's like climbing on, she's approaching number one. And so, 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'm like, oh, I did not expect that. - I don't know, I don't know. get a little bit more. A lot of those are just inflexed, but it doesn't grow and it's like, wow, I didn't know that was still growing and anyway, Hector, this was incredible. Before we get to a very exciting, lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share or anything else you want to kind of double down on and leave listeners with? I guess my last coin, which I have mentioned lies, I would just urge other founders out there to give a chance like young talent and just find those people, believe in them, trust in them, give them opportunities and not only will they turn into some of your best a-pliers, but also the amount of loyalty they will have to is quite incredible and whether they stay at your company or they go on to do other things, they will always be there to help you or help you bring in other young talent or guide you in the right direction when things, when new alphas out there, and yeah, I'm super grateful to Tenei and Daniel and the whole whisper team for like taking a shot on me and there's no better place I think I could have landed and I'm like forever in debt or however you would say that I'm super grateful 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. And I've seen these in the five guests, won't be a surprise. 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 going to give one book. I'm going to give one really good book. It might be a cliche one, but Naval Robocons Almanac, I remember reading that about two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, and it was like kind of in this moment where I wasn't. I was sure I wanted to do content, but I also didn't understand why it wasn't important or why it mattered so much and like I read it the first time, it 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, 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 on the internet and it will continue to work for you. And like I started to see that compounding effect over time, like me putting myself out there and it's a book I continue to find myself coming back to and reading. I bought it from my little brother as well recently and it's like something I'm always sharing with friends and always passing on to read as well. And I feel like it gives direction a lot to like young people as well in this crazy world that we live in. So obviously that's one of my favorite books. I've read. And I've all went through this error of just sharing this profound advice on Twitter and then you kind of slowed down and I love that there's a book that collects it all. And I love that so much of advice you to like you see it really, yes, fine. And then you think back to wow, he was so damn right. Have you have you read what's the ego is the enemy is that a book or is that one of his lines? No, it's a new book. I think it's called something. I was just wondering if you read it because I was interested in reading. I was about to buy it. I need to go to a bookstore. There's not any books for the Puerto Rico, but I'm looking for a new book. So if anyone wants to drop some comments on the video, okay, does Amazon delivered to Puerto Rico? Yes, but it's like a bit, it takes a while living on the island. Everything is a lot lower, a lot slower, less dopamine rush and I'll get a 24 hour delivery. I love that. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show? You have really enjoyed it. I just watched the Elizabeth Holmes movie with my girlfriend and dad. It's not? Yeah, I'm not going to spoil it, but wow, that was a really good movie. I think that someone shared from the trailer, this is no spoiler, when 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 so funny, yeah, he turns out when he's trying not to laugh or just get great character, he puts his tongue against his mullers and just presses against him to keep him some from laughing. How about that? I didn't know that, 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 whisper flow. Honestly, I got to, I commented on your post all the day, me, so I don't know, did you end up downloading it or not? I just tried to check it out. It's like a travel old tool, right? Yeah, it's a travel agent and I travel a lot. I think I have like 55 flights for 60s or so far this year, 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. And I recently came across this product when they launched on X and I deemed the founders on Instagram and I was like, "Yo, get me off the waitlist, I want to try this out." And ever since I downloaded it, it's not been like three months, like I can't stop using it and recommending it to friends. And just an example, like the other day, I slept through my alarm and I missed my flight to SF and 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, I took care of everything, booked me on the next flight in like two hours, I just chilled, didn't have to pay anything extra. Yeah, it's like the best travel agent I've tried by far. Like obviously instinct is a good agent and everything but I didn't think for travel, it's anywhere as fast and then what's also cool about me so is they have humans on the back and that will escalate things, like if the agent gets stuck, they have direct connections to every major airline and everything and they can escalate things and take care of it for you. It's like a lifesaver, I can just text now here, I want to fly it and nose and nose descends me and I'll get a book from like a few minutes. That is extremely cool. I looked it up, it's just me so.com, myso.com, what a amazing domain, I imagine no affiliation, you're just a fan. Yeah, no affiliation. So cool. Okay, go me so. Okay, two more questions, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and work or in life? Yes, I have a life motto that I like a lot, I don't know if I'm going to butcher this so maybe you can help me but it's from Steve Jobs that you can't always connect the dots looking forward but you can always connect them 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, my parents were always pretty frustrated with me, I had really bad ADHD, like soccer was the only thing I had and then I lost it and then I was like lost for a few months even though I was at whisper and I didn't really understand all the things that were happening or why you didn't picked up a camera when all was 16 or why I started posting on YouTube or why I played sports and like now look them back like everything is so clear and 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 all makes sense at the end and like yeah, I think that's one of my favorite quotes I went back on. I also find that to be very true and Steve Jobs nailed it again. Hector, this was incredible, thank you so much for sharing so much, you're awesome. Final question, how can listeners be useful to you? I mean, if you guys want to follow me on X or on Instagram or YouTube, whatever you guys want, come join the journey. And your handle is just Hector Serrano, Serrano Shia, it's pretty, it's pretty similar across platforms. It's like Hector Serrano, you'll find me one way or another, but yeah, Hector, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, thank you, 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'sPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.