Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:39:10 · Hector Serrano
[00:39:10] S1: Exactly. So at Wispr, we have everything from, like, moms to lawyers. We have... Like, the the awesome thing about Wispr 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 8 figure ecomm founder that loves Wispr so much that he just makes ads for us. And it's like, I find that pretty incredible. Like, some dude who has a successful ecom business, he loves Wispr so much, and he just wants to be part of the community. And he's, like, 45, has kids. And, yeah, like, we have basically anything you can imagine. Engineers, lawyers, moms, sales reps, agency owners, any any type of ICP you can imagine. And I get this question a lot as well from a lot of founders and different businesses reaching out, they'll be like, oh, well, I have a dev tool or I'm in the sleep space. I can't make content for for my brand or I haven't had success with UGC. And a lot of times what happens is people mistake UGC for thinking it's just college kids making content, but UGC is user generated content. And if you're a dev tool, your user is probably gonna be an older technical person, and you can't get you can't you can't get by bringing on 18 year old who isn't technical to talk about your product, and those ads might look a lot... Might look a lot different. Like, for example, our technical ads at Wispr, when you're speaking to, like, this older demographic who isn't really on Instagram that much or may... 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, a screen recording of someone using your product. It could be, like, a minute thirty seconds long. Like, 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 for a sleep product. Like, if you have an expensive product in the sleep in... Sleep nature industry, whatever, and you have an 18 year old kid selling it, why are you or why am I gonna buy a $3,000 product from a kid? Probably, it's not gonna work that way.
00:41:07 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
You wanna buy from someone who maybe speaks the same way you do, who works in the same things you do, has the same problems you do. And and yeah, I think UGC works for for any company. It's just the... Maybe more upstream you go and the more expensive your product is and the more niche it is, it gets a little bit harder, but it's just like, okay, how do I find users who wanna make content about my product? [00:41:28] S0: And this unexpected element of what works is part of the reason, I imagine you run so many ads. You mentioned you do 700, 500, a thousand ads a month. Part of the reason is to discover the ones that are working. [00:41:40] S1: Exactly, yeah, because ads, would say, is almost weird in inorganic content. Like, I can kinda 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. Don't really have, like, such a high bar for, like, oh, if the ad doesn't work this way or that way, we're not gonna run it. Like, again, some of the ads that I made a year ago, it's literally like a screen recording of someone using the product with some text at the top, nine by 16, super long video, And they're our best ads, and they're our ugliest tweets as well.