Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:35:26 · Hector Serrano
[00:35:26] S1: Yeah. That brings me to the last step, which is, like, now you have the culture, you have the people in the group, you have... You're at, like, a decent size, you have the the percent of GMV, percent of ad spend. And now one thing that's gonna start to happen is you're getting a lot of ads, and your ads are gonna show, like, in the group, it's gonna show, like, okay, which is the ad that's getting the 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, like, they'll be like, okay. I want... I'm gonna copy those ads as well. I'm gonna 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. In meta, when an ad is, like, more than 60% similar, it ends up grouping it together whether it's, like, the same T shirts, you're in the same setting, you're saying the same words. Like, Andromeda is super complex now. And for example, it'll scan your ad, like, five times over. It'll pull the transcript. It'll pull, like, each frame out. It'll look at the the text on screen. And then if you, like, think about it, like like, nothing is gonna get past that, and it... 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 and that their ads are all at the top is because they kept experimenting, and they they kept leaning into what they weren't actually good at as creators and what interests them as creators. And if you just follow what person a, b, or 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.
00:37:11 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
Like, one example of a really good ad that we had recently was this this creator had his keyboard outside his window on a roof, and it was raining. And it was like, okay. So it's like... It stops you because it's, like, a very interesting visual hook, and then it pans over. 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 raindrops are typing, and then it starts typing random words, and then it says download to Wispr Flow. And that ended up becoming one of our best performing ads. It's like, I don't even know how he came up with that, so kudos to him. But that's what happens when you keep it really open ended, you have a fun product, and you let the creators have fun and just keep experimenting. And, yeah, like, no two ads in our ad library look the same. [00:37:49] S0: Wow. Amazing. Okay. Let me try to walk through the steps here because this was so much juicy gold stuff Advice. So step one, sign up on Trybe. Trybe is kind of where you manage creators and payout and all that kind of stuff. Your advice here is don't work through Trybe to find them because no one's gonna care about you yet, and your advice is go to Instagram, keyword search for things that kind of in your market, UGC, tech, lawyers that maybe wanna make money on the side to recruit the first five. The advice is start [00:38:18] S1: with five. [00:38:19] S0: Don't go too big. [00:38:20] S1: Yeah. [00:38:20] S0: Okay.
00:38:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:38:20] S0: Okay. [00:38:20] S1: And I would I would also... It's not even just start with five or start with lawyers or 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 a 100 with 200 of the same creators, that isn't gonna lead to scale because, again, everything is gonna look the 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 net... Five different creators that can all make net new concepts, and, like, it just exponentially grows the more different creators you bring on board. So it's like not just the the point about bringing a few creators, it's also being very specific about those few creators you're actually bringing in. [00:39:02] S0: And so when you say that, it's think about what customer kind of market, what ICP you're targeting, and what's a creative that will speak to that audience.