Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:27:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:27:37] S0: I love this advice. There's always talk about, you know, no no jobs left for young folks. AI is taking everyone's jobs, and this is a really good example where young people are actually much better at this work. [00:27:47] S1: Yeah. I think, obviously, Tanay's Tanay's super young, and, like, he's one of the smartest people I know. And, like, he'll still bring me into his office or hop on a call and, like, be asking me, oh, like, what's working on Instagram? Like, how are you doing this so fast? Or or just, like, ask me questions about content in general, and I don't... I mean, I don't think I've I've seen this from Tanay and Tahaj and the team in general. It's like, I don't think there's ever a point where you get smart enough to where you need to stop learning. And if you take that mentality of the founder, I think it's, like, the day you stop growing, and it's something I've definitely learned from Tanay. 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. [00:28:22] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And you joined Wispr Flow at 19. Right? [00:28:25] S1: Yes. I had just turned 19. It was, like, three days after my my birthday. [00:28:31] S0: And how long did it take you to feel like, okay. If I kind of figured something out, you said initially it was kinda rocky and not sure what you're doing. [00:28:37] S1: Yeah. I mean [00:28:37] S0: Just give people some context.
00:28:38 · Hector Serrano
[00:28:38] S1: It 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 Wispr Flow on LinkedIn. Well, I honestly I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. I applied to, like, 200 positions. I found some company called Wispr Flow. I applied, had a call with Tanay, and then I joined. And, yeah, it was it was crazy. Like, looking back some of the memories, like, I remember it was, like, one of the first days when we're getting ready for our launch, And I was in my... I think it was my calculus class, and Tanay started Slacking me in class. And I I left to go to the bathroom and popped up my laptop, and I started... I hopped into to the Slack Huddle. And he was basically like, our launch video isn't what it needs to be. Do you think you can edit it on CapCut or whatever tools you have and make it a bit more Gen Z vibes? And, yeah, I got out of calculus, and I just started editing a video. I had some editing experience, but for Tanay, 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 Wispr. I just picked up random stuff. Didn't really have a clear position. I'm pretty sure they didn't really know what I was doing either. I didn't know what I was doing. And, yeah, it probably took me a year to, like, feel actually comfortable, and there was there was a lot of ups and downs. And, actually, one thing I wanna point out as well is I was also doing a finance internship after... So it'd been a year... It had been a whole school year, and then it was my junior year going to senior year. And that summer, I had applied... Well, I had applied to a bunch of finance internships early in the year because I didn't know if content was a real career. And, like, obviously, I was enjoying Wispr and I was making some decent money for my personal brand, but I like, I don't know if this is a a real career. And my parents, like, we immigrated to The US and everything and, like, me being in college and, like, studying finance was a big deal, and they wanted me to go down the traditional route. So I ended up landing a finance internship in New York City, and I was balancing two summer classes, Wispr Flow and the finance internship. And, like, two weeks into the internship, I absolutely hated it.
00:30:36 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
I was like, I do not want my life to be like this. I need to make content and whisper workout. So I would sneak out the office and go to some cafes in Soho and just work on whispering my personal content. And then from there, everything started to, like, click. And then, yeah, that that's kind of how how it went. What [00:30:52] S0: a journey. I feel like we could have a whole other conversation about just the creator path and how to become a content creator on Instagram and all these platforms. That's its own that's its own thing. I'm gonna come back to how you find the creators for this kind of paid UGC strategy.
00:31:08 · Hector Serrano
[00:31:08] S1: If we walked through the whole strategy, honestly, now I think this would be a good moment to to walk through everything. So, yeah, like, I guess, like we were mentioning, the first step is kinda figuring out, okay. Like, if you're in SaaS, you can do percent of ad spend. If you're in e com, you can do percent of GMV. And then from there, you'll set up the group, whatever platform you choose. I think Trybe is the best one. It's the one we use at Wispr. And then once you have your group set up, it's like, okay. Now you have to go actually find the creators. And if you think about it, it's like, imagine you're starting a company from zero, and you lay on a platform, and there's thousands of creators, thousands of brands, and your company has no history. More than likely, you're not gonna 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 wanna work for a brand that has, like, no money... Like, for example, on Trybe, 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 and zero creators, it can be really hard to get creators in. So what I did is I went off platform, and I went on platform like Instagram, and you just look up a bunch of keywords. It can be like UGC creators, I don't know, tech, nine to five, lawyer, doctor, sleep, supplements, whatever niche you're in and just go down a bunch of rabbit holes, and then you'll land on creators that you like, send them a message, and then you also go through their following and follower list, and you also search those same exact keywords because typically good creators know other good creators. And then I say from around, like, a 150 to 250 DMs over a week. And, like, these should be very targeted DMs. Like, it shouldn't be like, well, I'm gonna use some mass software and send 3,000 messages. It needs to be very...
00:32:54 · Hector Serrano
You you need to you need to care about the small things because nowadays with, like, all these automations, like, yes, you can do a lot of things fast. But if you do it very fast, you're probably gonna get a lot of slot back or a lot of bad creators back. And I I think for outreach, it's still better to do it manually. Obviously, it's gonna take a bit longer, but if you do it right, I haven't had to do outreach ever again. 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, I guess, 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. We're flying in some of our best creators from around the world. Like, these little things that you start to do to build up more and more culture. And then from there... So you have a small group of creators. You've also set up the, like, percent of ad spend and percent of GMV. You've also built a culture. Then from there, you can slowly start to add more and more creators. And the way we did that at Wispr is we probably went from, like, five to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20. We probably added, like, five to six creators, like, every few weeks. And since you're now... Since at this point, you also have, like, the five creators and you've probably paid out a bit of money, you'll start to get some people start to apply on Trybe. I think now we probably get, like, a thousand to a 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 a really high bar, and I only accept maybe one or two or three. But, yeah, we grew pretty slowly and now we're like 50 creators. And aside from, like, accepting creators from Trybe, 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 bring into the group. And it's not some sort of, like, MLM pyramid scheme thing. Like, there was a bunch of people on LinkedIn.
00:34:45 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
My post blew up on LinkedIn, and everyone was like, this sounds like a scam. Like, sounds like a MLM pyramid or whatever sales. And, like, we're not paying them to just bring creators in. 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, bring me a 100 creators, I'll pay you for a 100 creators, then we'll pay another 100 creators. Like, this is very tight knit family, and it's just our way of saying thank you for helping us grow the program. And, yeah, those are, like, some different levers we've... You applied to kind of grow the group. And then that brings me to the last step, which... Don't know. Am I going too fast through this, or you probably have some questions right now? [00:35:24] S0: I do have questions, but keep going.