How I Made $500k with UGC

0:00What's up, guys? It's Owen. In today's video, I'm going to show you how I did over $500,000 in the past year or so with UGC and how you can do it, too. I'm going to be breaking down where I'm getting the best deals, who I'm talking to to get those deals, inbound or outbound, the entire negotiating process, and everything you need to know so that you can print with UGC. And um even the best platform that's dropping

0:21this month in July. Excited to show you. So, first things first, I started as a UGC creator in 2023. This was working with a company called Whoop. I've told this story many times now, but Whoop is a fitness wearable kind of like Garmin. And the reason they reached out to me was because of my personal brand. I was making videos, talking head videos, green screen videos talking about fitness, different products that I was using, and Whoop was one of those products that I really loved at the time. After making a couple videos and product reviews, Whoop actually DM'd me on Instagram asking for my email so that

0:52they could negotiate a deal with me. I was so excited about this. This was my first deal ever. And if you're in a position where you've never gotten a big deal or you never had a deal at all, trust me when I tell you this will actually change your life when you get this first one and it'll make everything easier because you'll have confidence to do it again. So I negotiated with them for a 6-month 4K per month deal. The total ended up being actually like 22,750 or something like that for for 6 months and then I got another 3-month and then another six-month contract extension after that. Also, I started

1:20working with an agency around this time called Nibble. And Tik Tok's content rewards, creativity program beta, whatever you want to call it, was also kicking off. So, I was doing somewhere around 15 to 20K per month really in my first few months trying to do content professionally. And at this point, I was starting to grow my main Tik Tok close to 20 30k followers, and I was starting to get a lot of views. And I thought in 2023 that I was going to be an influencer. I thought that was the path for me. I ended up having a falling out publicly with my ex-girlfriend at the

1:49time, which is really tragic. Um, you know, definitely regret that happening, but um, you live and you learn. Having my face online didn't really hold the same weight that it used to. And I I like doing UGC more because I was doing content and getting paid, but only for making a few videos and I didn't have to perform or tap dance on camera. So, with this skill set of UGC and making money from content without being an influencer, I kind of had a unique situation. At the time, not many people were doing what I was doing, which was full-time UGC. So during this time, I asked my accountant if he knew any

2:19brands because he works with creators. He's a creator accountant that needed creators because I could help source and manage those those creators as a content strategist, UGC specialist, that sort of thing. And he introduced me to the first brand that I ever worked with, which was Honey Plus, as an agency. Now Honey Plus, they're still my friends to this day. Ross, Liam, forget the third guy's name. Apologies. Yeah, I can't remember his name. Um, but that was the first time I managed creators for them and I got them really good creators, like five studs, guys that you probably follow that are fitness creators and it didn't

2:49go well at all. They kind of ran out of product. At the same time, we weren't necessarily getting a lot of views. You know, it was the first time I ever done it. I actually didn't make a dollar from that deal, which, you know, is what it is. But I did get to learn. And so, what I want to emphasize is sometimes you're

3:02either learning or you're making money. Obviously, people want to make as much money as possible generally. Um, but that's not really what meant the most to me. I wanted these creatives to get deals. Now, remember that because it's going to be really important in the future. So, I started working with more apps and brands. Uh, some of those apps were like Minutes AI, uh, TurboAI, sourcing creators for them. Nothing crazy. I still wasn't managing a ton of creators. I was just connecting them because I had all these creators, you know, brands started coming to me asking for more and more creators. So, what I ended up doing was building a training

3:33program for these creators. I was like, listen, brands want good trained creators. that's their number one skill set that they're looking for. So, if you want to get these deals, you just need to be a good trained creator. So, what I ended up doing was training all these creators and then um giving them to the

3:48brands. And then I ran out of creators. So, I had to start getting more creators. So, I started a coaching community and I started showing the results of our creators. And the results were crazy. We had creators doing, you know, 10 20k months relatively easily. like it wasn't not working more than like one to two hours a day for the amount of content that they're making, which means hourly they were doing really really well. And we were basically just teaching them the fundamentals of content, how to build a good UGC portfolio, what content is going to make you go viral or perform well as a paid UGC ad. And then we would

4:19do coaching calls with these creators every day of the week. Right now, our coaching community, Content Economy, I think has eight or nine coaching calls every single week. So, every day of the week plus some. And then we even bring in guest speakers and famous influencers and stuff like that. I know you're thinking, "Oh, I thought you were a UGC creator." I am and I still do UGC to this day. The last deal that I have, you know, through all of this has been working with a guy I met through my personal brand. So, if you're asking how do you actually get these deals, all of

4:47my deals have come from my personal brand. I don't go on platforms. It's all connections, relationships, that sort of thing. So, what I would recommend doing is going out and building a personal brand account where you can talk about content and social media and anything related to UGC. That's by far gotten me all the connections, all of the introductions, all of the deals and made me, you know, multiple six figures in content alone. So, fast forward past the UGC deals. Now, we have been running content economy for CJ and I started I think at the beginning of 2026, but prior to that, Content Circle is what it

5:20was called before and that was just my UGC group. Now we do both UGC and Tik Tok shop. So creators are able to kind of do whatever feels best for them. The creators who do Tik Tok shop actually have huge months. So we have guys that are doing like 30 50k months profit which is a lot bigger than UGC but it's not as consistent. UC itself is way more consistent. So I kind of like to tell creators to go that direction when starting. And so with this growing creator community and all of these deals that I've been personally managing, the only thing that makes sense is building

5:50a platform to connect our creators that are trained by us with apps and app founders cuz that tech UGC, by the way, is the best way for creators to make a lot of money. So that is what I've been doing. I've been building our techch. Rekch is a platform for apps so that they can get good trained creators from us mixed with all of our market intelligence from working with all these different apps and creators. and actually grow their apps effectively with the right creators, the right strategy, the right formats, everything that an app founder needs in order to grow. And we make it so simple, anyone

6:22can do it. My own app, the iOS version of Rtech prior to the platform did over $100,000 in revenue in its first few months post launch. And that was a really hard niche. So, with everything that we learned with all of our creators, all of the different apps that we've seen grow from all of these different creators, which is a crazy network effect, um all the deals that we've seen creators get and which creators have actually done best, the creators with personal brands rip so much harder. It's honestly really important at this stage in the game in 2026 to have a personal brand. content economy now is somewhere around 950

6:54different UGC creators and the vast majority of them that are active are doing 5 to 10k per month on average. Again, some of them do 20 to 50k months, but those are people who are really committed, you know, like the our best creators. So, I only have one UGC deal left and it's with a company called the Deep View. Um, they're actually an AI newsletter and they have about 1 to 1.5 million uh subscribers, I believe. And the reason for that is because I have my own product now. I can't be, you know,

7:23the face of another company's product. Doesn't fully make sense. Even though my ads convert really well, you know, they they keep saying that they don't want to use different creators. I've tried to introduce them to different creators, but for some reason, mine work really well. So that's my personal goal is building out RECK so that it's absolutely dominant as a UGC platform for creators because it was great helping hundreds of creators do content full-time but at the end of the day it's still only hundreds of people with a software platform we could do maybe 100,000 maybe more you I don't really know what extent it could go or grow to

7:57but I know for a fact if it existed what we're building when I was in college I wouldn't have gone to college cuz I would have just done UGC on the platform. So to wrap everything up, what's most important is UGC personal brand or having a personal brand but talking about UGC. And when you're talking about your personal brand, you want to talk about results. I worked with this brand. I got them this many views or I got them this this much in GMV and spent. Whatever the result is,

8:20that's what other brands want to see. Other brand owners and founders, they just are normal people. They will be scrolling and looking for creators. That's kind of what they do. So, if you make a video saying, "I work specifically for CPG companies and I'm really good at it and these are the videos I made and I got this brand, this

8:36result," they will probably hit you up. So, put your email and bio, make a bunch of content every day. Take it like a career. Most people still don't want to set up the camera and talk. You have to remember that if you're a creator, most people are not willing to do what needs to be done in order to be great. It's just as simple as it gets. And if you are an app founder and you want to go that direction where you're actually starting to hire these creators, just use our tech. I'm telling you, it will have everything you need. I can't even fully get into it yet because it's not

9:01live, but it is an actual incredible product. We've been working on it for seven months now at this point. The the web app platform version, I never thought it would take that long. Um, but it's a really good product and that's what it takes even with AI and Fable and all of that stuff and a cracked CTL. So, is what it is. But, you know, if you guys you guys want to stay up to date

9:21with me, follow me on all socials, Owen. Um, thank you guys for 2,000 subs on YouTube as well. Talk later.