How to Make $150k/mo As a UGC Creator - Content Economy Pod #13

0:00Colin Madden, welcome to the show. It's Content Economy PO podcast where we talk about all things content and you are an expert at this point in time. So, I'll let you do a little intro and then we'll get into your story. Totally, man. Thanks for having me. So, I'm Colin Madden. I've been a UGC creator for the last 5 years full-time, but I made my first YouTube video when I was 10 years old. So, I've pretty much been making content my entire life. Uh, I was a full-time Twitch streamer. I was a YouTuber. I worked at a YouTube production company. I was awarded Tik Tok's top creator of 2022. and now I run

0:29a UGC agency full-time. So that's kind of a little bit of my backstory. Pretty brief. Actually insane that you've done all of that because we have so many things in common. You know, I I played Fortnite professionally. I started YouTube when I was like 10 years old making like Call of Duty videos and stuff like that. Um you know, did the whole thing which is funny. But how do you think that you got into UGC from being a gamer? Like

0:52why did you transition? Well, to be honest with you, like I knew I just wanted to create content forever. Like that was my biggest goal. And of course, gaming was my vehicle, but I mean really more than anything else, I just enjoyed creating videos. I probably had a very similar path to you. Like I grew up watching the Faze Guys, The New York House, so on and so forth. And like I just wanted to do that myself. Um, and

1:12their primary vehicle was also gaming. So I kind of just like fell into that niche, but I really was never a gamer. I just cared more about creating videos. I enjoyed like more of the personality side than anything else. So not a Fortnite professional. When I streamed Fortnite full-time, I was actually horrible at the game because I was there to stream. I wasn't there necessarily to be the greatest player in the world. So I would say how I got transitioned into UGC from that was I basically just followed like the idea of how can I make money by creating content. If I can do that then I'm happy. That's really all I

1:39care about. Yeah. Which is crazy that that's actually like a career path now because when we started you had to be a face guy. You had to be the best of the best and even then you're monetizing purely off of views there. You know occasionally you get brand deals with like scuffs and stuff like that. It was really hard back then. But by the way, what is a breakdown for people who don't know what UGC is and explain the

2:00industry a little bit? Yeah, totally. So, you know, UGC gets thrown around a lot. Like there's a bunch of different ways that you can kind of categorize it. Everyone has their own take, but I mean it's user generated content, whatever that means to you. Um, but the way that I think about it is now is I've heard a bunch of different terms. I call it organic marketing. Essentially, creator creates very organic style videos that don't feel like influence marketing. It doesn't feel like somebody's selling anything. it's just a very organic video selling a product or also advertising that product as something that is great a great use case so on and so forth. Um,

2:31and you can do that on organic markets or you can also run a one paid ad so on and so forth. But that's kind of my take at it. It's hard to explain to your regular person that's not really in the industry. But right what I tend to say is UGC is simply making ads for businesses. And you usually now do that with just an iPhone because they're so good. which makes it applicable for pretty much anyone that's trying to make an extra $300 to $8,000 a month. You know, when I started, I was stuck in the sales job. And I was posting social media content just praying I would hit

3:00some sort of home run to do content for a career because, you know, going to work every day doing sales, no passion there. It was pretty terrible. Um, so I got my first deal was extra 4K a month. What was your first deal like when you started doing UGC? Dude, that's it's such a funny story because how I got introduced to UGC and this is the reason why I say it's so broad was because a lot of the videos that I were doing were for mobile games on paid advertising channels. And I mean this is no news to a lot of people that are in the app

3:27world that mobile games make a ton of money. Um so during that phase I I didn't really understand like what the I was it felt like I unlocked like this whole new world but basically I was creating content. and I had grew my organic Tik Tok following to around half a million trying to blow up my Twitch stream. And then I got invited to a random program called the Tik Tok creator challenge came through in my inbox. I was a little bit confused. I didn't really know what it was. I think the first video I made was for one of those I think it was called Last War or

3:53Top War or something like that. One of those like fake CG mobile game videos. And um I I saw that they had like I think it was like $1,500 up for grabs if you had like the top video or something like that. And so I just like shot my shot and I remember my first ever video making me like $1,500. I called my friend. I called my mom. I didn't even think it was real. Like I thought I got scammed almost. I was like, "Am I ever going to get this money?" Um, at the time it was so new. Tik Tok had just like introduced this program. So they

4:19didn't have like a withdraw option. You didn't see the number like pop up in any sort of balance. So I didn't even know if I was going to get the money or not. Like I actually thought for a second that I like got scammed somehow. I didn't really understand it. So that's like my first experience with UGC was is

4:33very random. I used to hate those ads, bro, because I would be on TikTok and I would I would like download those games like Last War and the ads look great like kind of like round based zombies kind of thing and then you'd actually play and it was never the experience is always mad, you know? I expected more of like Flappy Bird version where it's like you just kind of keep going and it was just never

4:53like that. The app itself is literally designed for microtransactions. Like you get in it, it gets you through this whole like long thing and then it asks you to pay for something. Like that's basically what it's all about. And how they did that back in the day, which was super deceiving, honestly, is that you're, you know, you're just reacting to fake CG content. And that was my job pretty much to be honest with

5:10you. I was the guy everybody hated. Well, the content was really good. Um, you know, one thing I noticed is a lot of UGC creators, usually there's there's two kinds like the high-end meta ad with a camera. Your attention to detail to do that early on was incredible. And I think that was kind of why you're able to differentiate yourself. But now, if you're just getting into it, the iPhone is actually all you need. Not just because the quality is so great, but because that is what brands are actually looking for more. So, the the only caveat to that would be people who are trying to scale through paid. Um, then

5:43obviously sometimes the extra attention to detail or if you're shooting with an influencer. For instance, I looked at Whoop's media ad uh or ad library recently and they only had a single UGC video and it's with Rich Roll. He was like a famous podcaster and that was shot very high-end, you know, motion graphics, all of that stuff. So, yes, of course, that would make more sense, but for the vast majority of people, the iPhone organic, the app space, all that's all you need, which is 100% that honestly, to be honest with you, like that whole style of UGC has

6:12kind of played out at this point. There's really not much room for it as much as there used to be. The opportunity is like not really there. So that's kind of like around the same time that I transitioned. Flash forward a couple years later where I was, you know, starting to realize that the high quality production stuff was not necessarily what was hitting. That's not what people were re like people realize that's ads now. They're not reacting to

6:29it and it started to slow down a ton. So what's the best opportunity for a creator right now? 100%. It's got to be just doing organic UGC. Think really the starting point would be, you know, getting in some sort of community where you can get deals or, you know, joining some sort of agency that's handing out these deals and then just learning fast, learning through

6:48doing a couple of them. Go ahead. What is your agency and like how can creators join that? Like what does that look like? Yeah, so my agency is called Scene Marketing. We do, you know, the basic UGC thing. We hire creators to create one to two pieces of content per day on both platforms, Tik Tok and Instagram. Um, and you can join by applying through our website, uh, or messaging me directly. I also have like a content manager that does it as well. And we hand out deals to new creators a lot because frankly, to be honest with you, new creators are typically our best creators, um, ones that are they care

7:21more. They're not managing 150 deals at a time and they can spend more time on your project, so on and so forth. They're able to take feedback, learn, and understand. So, we're always looking for new talent. What do you pay a new creator on average to take one of these deals? Yeah. So, our starting deals start anywhere between $800 to $1,000 um for one to two posts per day on TikTok and Instagram. So, it's pretty good pay. This is something that I actually took from you when building my UGC agency. I realized that if you want somebody to care, you got to make sure they're compensated correctly. So, this

7:52is something that we, you know, definitely try to do as best as possible. One thing that I've noticed, you know, well, two things, I guess. the the vast majority of business is people and how they're incentivized. So, it doesn't it doesn't make sense to, you know, we've seen agencies that don't align incentives correctly and those campaigns usually don't go well or they have very high churn with creators

8:14because the creators aren't happy there. But most creators can go work for you, make $1,000 a month, you know, spending five minutes a day making a video with an iPhone and be generally happy and the barrier to entry is just much lower. So, I think you're crushing. What are some of the brands that you've worked with as

8:29an agency? Yeah, we've at this point we've collected quite a few. Um, our biggest case study that a lot of people know me for is Go Wish, which has been absolutely amazing. They've been great to us. They're more quarter 4 than anything else because it's a digital wish list platform for Christmas and so on and so forth. But, um, so we have a small deal going at the moment, but we're ramping that up soon come September. They're one of our number one clients. We absolutely love working with

8:52them. Um, we helped them hit number one. Yeah, I was going to say, what is the case study that people know you for? Yeah, we helped them hit number one on the app store. Um, they were spending over $300,000 a day on ads. A lot of people don't know this. Yeah. So, I don't know exactly where they get their money or how they do it, but they were huge on paid ads. And one of the biggest things that they were running into, though, is that they weren't cycling in enough creatives. Like, they were

9:14spending a ton of money on paid ads. They didn't have enough creatives to really facilitate that sort of ad spend. So, they were spending money on bad videos. They didn't care because somebody that's spending $300,000 a day on ads, they don't really understand that that's an issue necessarily. They're just full force on it. So, I came in and I told them about organic marketing. They'd never heard of it before. So, I basically had to teach them absolutely everything. And there was a bunch of different upsides for them. One, they were able to get a bunch of creatives at a very low cost that they can cycle into paid ads. Also, we

9:40tested on organic platforms to figure out which videos were performing well and what could even be thrown in the paid ad sector. um as well as building that organic presence at the time was just perfect. Okay, so to paint this entire picture, this company is spending 300K a month on paid and they don't hire a lot of

9:56creatives. 300k a day on ads. Yes. There's no way. I've never like that's this is what I heard in the call. It doesn't make any sense. But I mean, if you really go in and you take a look at Go Wish, they were also hiring like I remember they hired David Dober as an influencer. They hired I there was rumors when I was in uh client calls where they talked about hiring Kim Kardashian and some other Kardashians as

10:17influencers to promote their product. Like bro, yeah, they had the budget for it. Yeah. Well, that's a huge benefit. You know, it's crazy though. Despite all of that, they only went number one after doing organic UGC. Yeah. Um so what did that look like? That process like what are those creators look like and those creatives that ended

10:33up popping off? Yeah, totally. So, we really, you know, one thing a lot of people don't know about this case study specifically is we didn't have it all figured out in the first month. Around 15 days in, we had males on the campaign. That was just like not the ideal character that we were looking for necessarily. We wanted to test it. It ended up not being a good

10:51thing. So, we decided to kick them off. It wasn't until like half a month to a month and a half in where we really started to pick up momentum. And what we singled in on was just very Gen Z style, aesthetic style female creators. That's what really took things off for us. like the Gen Z native, you know, if you're scrolling, you just assume this person's a creator because of what they look

11:10like. 100%. Yeah. It was just Go ahead. So, what what do you I I have this opinion and you know, I always ask people I asked Brier Cochran this and you know, many other content people. Can you tell if a video is going to go viral in the first frame? like like I I feel like if the visual is there and the text hook is there and the packaging looks right, people might like that video right when it pops up on their feed without even really watching the whole thing. So like what do you think when

11:37you're looking for a good video? Yeah, totally. I think everyone has their own take on this. I think everyone has their own taste and honestly it's so hard to explain. Like when we're hiring creative managers and so on, like I try to like dive in deep inside my brain and figure out how I can have them think like me and it's just really tough because it does take an expert and you have to watch a ton of videos to really figure it out. But I agree. I mean, everything matters. Text placement, is the text on top of like a noisy background? Where's your head placement

12:02at in the frame? What are you wearing? What's on your face? I mean, all those things actually matter. It takes an expert to really know these things, but it's all very important when it comes to a video. So, I would say yes, you can definitely tell a viral video from the first frame for sure. That's where I'm at, too. But even more than that, trying to make organic content that also performs with paid is pretty interesting. Um, a lot of people say, "Oh, if it performs for organic,

12:26it'll automatically perform for paid." But I guess it depends what kind of paid campaign you're running. Because if you're doing like a CBO campaign on Meta and you're using a organic Tik Tok video that went viral, sure it might perform for top ofunnel or it might have a high whatever, but it's usually not going to convert really well. So, do you also mix in high converting maybe middle bottomfunnel organic content as well for campaigns or are you trying to go purely

12:50for views? Yeah, totally. So, everyone's case study is a little bit different. Um, I think for Goish specifically, it was a lot of like just awareness, top phone awareness because they're running so much money on paid ads, but what we did actually is we also facilitated them some paid ad creatives as well, which were a little bit more sales like, and you're exactly right, we hit it right where it needed to be. You did a little bit of both. You kind of r that fine line between organic video that doesn't feel like an ad, but plus enough sales like for it to actually convert. So, that was that we

13:17did. And so all these people um that you're working with like those those two girls went that went viral that one girl um were they brand new creators that you were working with or did they have any experience prior? Yeah, the creator that went like mega viral did 100 million views. She was actually she's been a creator for a very long time. She's never she had never done organic videos before. This was new for her, but she was doing a lot of paid

13:38ad creative stuff. I have to comment on the 100 million views because that's just insane. I don't think many people will ever see that. Businesses, individuals. um how much of that was organic versus uh spark ad or essentially boosted via paid after it was already performing, right? It's kind of hard when you mix the two. Um we know that it definitely did over 10 to 15 million organic before

14:01they actually turned on the spark ads. We allow our clients to use Spark ads for free if they want to. We just give them the code and they can do whatever they want with their team. If they work with us, obviously it's a different story. But what we theorize, and I think this is like the general consensus around the room, is when you spark a video that's already growing organically, you typically have like a nuclear video. Like if you do it at the with the right timing, you can also hit organic audience and paid audience all at the same time. So it's a little bit hard to really know exactly what those

14:29metrics turn to. I would say that I know for a 100% that it did 10 to 15 million organic. The rest was likely to be sparked. Yeah. Which, you know, it contributes to both. So, you know, if you if you spark a video and you I mean, I know like how much was paid and like that sort of thing, but if you were to spend $8,000 on any organic video, you're not getting returns like that. It only the creative matters matters so much. Um I'm I'm just blown away. Like 100 million views is insane. And um you know, if you're if you're a brand and you spend 10k for a collaboration

15:03with an influencer or you you know, pay an agency like yourself and you have three to five creators that are making these videos every single day for like the same budget. Like how is that not better? You know, like like do you have any brands at this point that are like, "No, we want to do influencer marketing

15:19over this." No, I would say no. Well, I mean, we I've heard a few things where some people, you know, there are a few products that are influencer marketing marketing heavy that still work, but no, abs, you're absolutely right. Like, there's still so many people that don't really necessarily understand that short form really rewards like consistency. It doesn't really matter what your follower count is, so on and so forth. There's still like there there's so few people figuring that out. So, you know, it's

15:44time. I think you'd be I think you'd be surprised. I most people have no idea. And I talk to people every day just because we see this stuff all the time and you know we understand what's going on in in these spaces. The vast majority of people have no idea what's going on. So when I when I talk about taking anyone off the street and becoming a content creator, you do that apparently. Um I've done it a few times for my own appeals creators make better content. I for our UGC creators, I personally try to find the ones that have like three to five deals, have gone

16:18viral before with Talking Head, right? Um so that way they don't, you know, I don't I don't want to work with people that do have like 10, 20 deals and had too much going on. They're full-time creators, right? I am looking for people that are kind of like transitioning in and get their first viral video because they're very motivated. They're like,

16:31"Wow, this is actually going to work. I'm going to make money from this." Great. Um, what does that process look like for you for training a creator that's brand new to getting to, you know, a viral creator? Yeah, totally. So, you know, the thing is is that you're right. Obviously, if we had access to these creators that are transitioning and they have had viral success and are only managing three to five deals, and that is honestly the perfect archetype, like that is what you're looking for. But we were going so fast that we didn't we didn't have like the means necessary really to find all

17:00those creators to fit all these spots. We were a new agency growing. We went from one really big deal to 10 like that and we had to find creators fast. So, how we did it really was just sharing how awesome UGC was um to some of our friends and then having them reach out to their friends and basically when we were like filling out these roles, what would happen is we would have a girl with one of her best friends on the campaign too and we would try to put them in pairs on the same campaign so

17:27they can help each other grow as well. they could help each other get better at videos or film videos together and so on and so forth. So that really helped us out a lot in the early beginnings. Um, and then just basic stuff. I mean, every campaign we have, we have a quick we have a call with them and we we walk through everything in detail, even if it seems redundant. We talk about text on screen, text placement, using certain audios, when and why, so on and so forth, which helps out a ton

17:49as well. Okay. You know, obviously you're an agency, you come in, you help different companies, and you have great systems. If you were, one of the biggest questions I get is, "Owen, please help me build out like our own creator funnel so that we have good creators coming to us to work for us. What would you tell a brand where they can build out their own creator funnel, creator system, and

18:09begin begin using uh UGC?" Yeah, totally. So, when it comes to creator sourcing, I mean, it's it's always great again to to have some sort of in incentive for the creators to kind of share your deal around, so on and so forth. whether that looks like a little bit of a like a referral bonus, so on and so forth. Like that's that's really what helped us out a lot was referral bonuses. Um having people kind of do the recruiting for us, uh you know, convincing their friend that UGC is also like so great and so easy to get started. Um and then we did a lot of it

18:36on Sideshift too. Sideshift helped us out a lot. Uh a lot of our job posts around Sideshift. You have to weed through it a little bit more. You have to know what you're looking for. Of course, not every application is a great application, but that also helped us out for sure. Let's say you're working for a I have a

18:52friend that has a very specific brand. It's called Infinity Hoop and it's like a fat loss hula hoop. Have you seen it? Uh I don't think so now. Okay. Well, they have affiliates that are, you know, big people that are using their their weight loss products. If you had to find a very specific demographic and build out a system for them, what

19:08would you do? Yeah. Um you know, it's it's funny you asked. So, I'm going to kind of relate this to one of my stories. We just onboarded a mother's education program. um which was something that was tough for us because we had to find creators that had newborn babies that also wanted to create UDC at the same time. It seems like an impossible task. Um I actually went to Sideshift directly and asked if they had any creators in mind and they were able to help me find them immediately. So this is not necessarily

19:34an ad for Sideshift, but they are great. That's exactly how I was able to pull that off. But when it comes to that specifically, when you're looking for like an actual like a very specific person, there's a bunch of different ways you can go about it. Twitter's also a great platform. Uh I've used it a ton of times. I actually grow a lot of my following on Twitter just by reaching out looking for UGC creators. There is a huge community on there. Um and I know there's other platforms you can do it as well, but realistically it's you just got to get your first couple creators

20:04and then those referral things are huge as well. Um it's incredible. One thing I wanted to say is yeah, Sideshift is incredible. I love working with those guys. They're awesome. Great platform. For those of you who don't know, Sideshift is a essential essentially organic UGC marketplace. So, if you're a brand, you can go in there,

20:22get an account, and you can have my app. Rekch has like 850 applicants on our job post. These are all creators that want to that want to create content. Um, yeah, again, some of them aren't great, but you're really just looking for like two to five creators that are good. So, you're going to find them there. Um, if it's more specific, though, first of all, with the mom thing, you should ask me. I have uh this girl, Taylor. Um, she she's a mom. She has two or three kids now and she joined content economy which

20:47is my community. That's awesome. So but same thing it's hard to sometimes get them deals but she has a long UGC community. Also Sideshift I've asked for very specific creators before. They've even made personal introductions to me you know for creators. So hopefully people don't hear this and overwhelmed them but they are such good guys and

21:05they go above and beyond for brands. They're trying to grow their platform um which is awesome. So people need that, go to them for infinity hoop specifically. This is something that I wanted to test where it's a product. So usually it's a shop thing, but I could imagine, you know, this new era we're in with AI UGC, having creators that understand good content go use like an AI character to make someone big using the product and then weight loss. Uh like a hook

21:35plus demo kind of thing with with AI. Have you played with that much yet? Are you still mostly working with your own uh creators? Yeah, to be honest with you, I'm still working with a lot of our like just creators. I haven't really looked into it all that much. Of course, I see it on Twitter, but I'm really sticking to my my own lane here. Um doing real creator content. I think that it's really important. Um I I don't really It's another thing for me as a business owner. I'm not trying to confuse anybody. Like I still get people that will come through our calls and be like,

22:01"You guys are doing really good with AI content." I'm like, "Where are you seeing this? We're not We're not doing AI content. There's just so much fluff. I don't want to confuse anybody with their offerings or anything at all. So, I've really just been like sticking with the real creatorled stuff and it's really all I know at the moment and I feel very confident in. Um, but it it is a crazy world with that and I would love to hear more information on I've I've seen the same Twitter threads that you that you see and occasionally I'll see people do fat loss stuff using AI and this new model of Clling Clling's

22:31new model came out and it's apparently fantastic and I actually have a guy on my team for our app doing product launch videos who uses it and he's incredible. I've been blown away by the stuff that they've been able to make, but at the end of the day, if you don't understand content, you're still not going to make

22:45good content. Yeah, I agree with that 100%. So, I I think there there could be a world where creators are making the content and the the people that become most valuable in this space are people that really understand good content like content strategist or UGC engineers like Sideshift is pushing recently. Yeah, totally. Um, so if AI becomes so good where any creator can just hop on and make the perfect person, then there's going to be some counterposition that looks different from the AI content and it'll swing back for back to more organic native stuff again. So, it's kind of like it doesn't really matter what works. People are just going to

23:23pivot to it and just, you know, pump out content. Yeah, I agree. It's crazy, man. I mean, every time I see one of these new Twitter threads pop up, then plus you got new Cloudbot and so on and so forth where people are just pumping these things out automatically. It's It's very interesting, dude. It's It's

23:36mind-blowing for sure. The nerds are printing money right now. It It's complete gold rush for sure. It's funny. It's crazy. It's like I'm sure you feel this way, too. Like, as an entrepreneur, I've tried so many different things. Like, you know, mostly it's all driven by content, but I've hopped around a lot and tried a bunch of different things. I finally find a vehicle where like I really feel like I have my calling and then there's people over here doing this whole AI thing and like I don't necessarily have the time to really transition into fully diving deep into that right now. But trust me, I'm very

24:04like I really want to I really want to learn more about it. But I've been trying my best to kind of just stick and stay in my vehicle that's really brought me here. You know what I mean? Which is super important. I right now focus is more important than anything in in the space that we live in. There's that hormosy thing, the woman in the red dress from the Matrix. There's always going to be something that takes your eye off the ball. And as much as you can have those blinders on and have pure tunnel vision, the more successful you're going to be. There's too many

24:29opportunities. There's too many people texting you. We're all connected. You have to kind of be ruthless with your time and and your focus. And over time, by the way, Colin, if you continue doing what you're doing, you're already an expert. You're already one of three people I know that have agencies doing six figures a month, right? Um helping brands grow. That's extremely valuable and rare. How old are you, by

24:47the way? 22. 22. you're 22. Imagine 10 years from now. I maybe it's just purely AI content, whatever, but you're still going to be the expert. So, it doesn't really matter uh what the vehicle is, which is crazy. Yeah, I agree. You know, we utilize AI, of course, um within the business, but nothing to do like creating actual content. Um and yeah, it's a rabbit hole that I definitely I believe I'm probably going to go down eventually, but at the moment, I'm just kind of like making sure that I'm staying focused on what you you know, like you said. Um, so at this point I would love to learn more

25:18about you because we we know now how you got into it, your your love, your affinity for content, your case studies and results. Why at 10 years old were you driven to do YouTube, do social media? How did that all begin? Like I want to hear about your upbringing. Dude, it is so funny you asked because honestly this is something that I've thought about a lot. Like what really called me to picking up the camera, trying to make videos. I think it was really just like one of my earliest memories was watching other YouTubers and being so excited to see like whether they're playing Minecraft or playing

25:47Call of Duty. Like I was just into that. That was my thing. But it's funny you asked because I'm like I love to teach people. I've been a mentor myself uh in the Tik Tok creator challenge program. I help people make tons and tons of money online. I love doing it. Um and occasionally somebody comes to me and says, "Well, Colin, I I don't know what I want to do with my life." And I can't help them because I can I could never relate. I've always known what I wanted to do. And that's one of the biggest things that kind of like hurts me when it comes to being a educator. Like I I

26:16don't really know how to reason with those guys cuz I've never had that problem. And so it's kind of unknown what really like brought me to wanting to make videos. It's just like the first thing I ever wanted to do. And I just love it. My dad is actually a he's a regional vice sales president of a trucking company. They sell 18

26:37wheelers. Wow. So, he has experience essentially maybe high uh charisma, uh high openness to experience, some of those traits that translate very well um in the big five personality trait thing to totally to content. Sounds like that could be part of a reason. You're just genetically predisposed to liking social media. You get to be out there, show your face, all of that. Um super

27:01interesting. What about your mom? My mother was a real estate agent for a very long time. Now, now we're getting the picture. Now we're understanding, okay, these people, their careers are essentially built on relationships, talking and having charisma, right? Um, pretty incredible. How much do you think so? Do you think anyone could be a creator? If if you're genetically predisposed to being a creator, do you think that anyone can get past those barriers to do it or do you think they

27:28should be faceless? 100%, dude. I mean, I was like I had the most social anxiety out of anybody in the room all the time. Um, and like I probably necessarily didn't like and you know I kind of grew past this, but there was times where I was making YouTube videos and I was scared of what people would think and so on and so forth, but

27:43I was I was able to grow past it myself. So I believe more than anything I'm I'm not necessarily special. I just I really enjoyed content. I kept pushing and then eventually it happened. So you think it's more of like a reputation thing rather than a pure predisposition? Yeah, I mean I would say honestly it's it's it's a pretty content itself is really like a lot of people actually know how to create content. They just don't realize it. Whether they're creating content for their sorority or doing it for the coffee shop that they work at, a lot of people know how to create content. I know people that are

28:14spending tons of time making their Instagram carousels for no reason just to 500 of their friends. So, you know, the the actual skill is right there. They're just not packaging it correctly in order to monetize and so on. This is the craziest thing that I have noticed. One, courage is in greater demand than intelligence. That's like a quote from someone, but it's so true. Content is having courage to put yourself out there and be judged. If you're willing to do that, you're going to be very successful. I know two people in my life that, you know, I've done content for a career. People look at me as an expert

28:45for social media and content. And I've taken people off the street and oftent times they make better content that performs better than my own stuff. And I experience that with the agency every single day. It's crazy. Like I see new creators that join our agency and they go viral within their first month of creating content. It's it's crazy to me because I'm like we all we all live in this world where they're seeing social media content short form all day every day. They know exactly what it should look like. So when they go to do it, they're already great at it. They just need like this

29:15push to be like, "Hey, it's it's okay. You can go make money online through content. It's not like, you know, it's actually for you. That's why this world exists. agree, which is such an interesting way to look at it because I I swear the people off the street who have just consumed a lot

29:31of content, they're just great at it. It's so funny. And there's something to be said about it as well. Like I I believe you're probably in the same boat as me. Like when I'm an every time I see a video, I'm kind of like analyzing it. Like you know, why did it go viral? Why? Like

29:42that's just kind of how I view content. I don't necessarily just mindlessly scroll. I will, but I'm also at the same time kind of analyzing the content itself. I think from like a fresh perspective of a creator that's just like just now getting into things, they're not overthinking anything. They're just creating the organic content. And you know, I there's something to be said about that. I believe I totally agree. And the things I've I'm so hung up on right now like in content I always get every few months I switch like opinions or like get hung up on things in content in short form. And I've been testing hooks and tonality and

30:13like this tone. You know, if you watch like a Shelby video, she uses this tone that kind of like it just gets you involved. I can't explain it, but I I have like some spam accounts on TikTok. One's for politics, one's for like content, social media, one's like kind of my personal brand. Have a few writers

30:28and I keep my stuff separated by niche. So, I'm like, "Oh, I want to talk about, you know, something political. I go to that account and that account because it's like my actual raw opinions, it comes across so natural and charismatic versus content. It's just like this is what I'm talking about sort of thing." Um, it's such an interesting thing. So, I think to grow in social media, like if you're going to do that, you need to have that kind of, you know, for instance, you can start talking like clear your throat, just super organic stuff. Um, that seems to rip. I'm not

30:58sure your opinions on that. I agree. Yeah, I absolutely agree, man. I've played so many characters online, like it's from doing, you know, I was a streamer, then a YouTuber, then I was playing games, and then I did UGC, and I've done UGC for thousands of brands at this point. Um, it all comes down to just being able to feel like really authentic, be able to like produce actual compelling storytelling in your videos. Um, and you know, there's a bunch of different ways you can go about that. Like one, taking deals that only

31:25resonate with you, so on and so forth. Like there's a bunch of things that you can kind of point the finger towards on why it happens. Um, so I totally agree. You know, I typically find my best performing videos are when I'm not even thinking about it. I'm just like making a video on the spot.

31:39Mhm. Took you 10 seconds was supernatural. you came across natural. It's your true opinion. People just sense that and it's very important to come across that way. The only people I've seen who can do that are actors where it could be any brand, they don't care, but they can just get into character and and do it. That's crazy to me. I for our app, Rtech, one of our creators, Josh, is an actor. Um Yeah. So, he ended up going viral for motion. So, I recruited him to create for our brand and uh I was just

32:10blown away by that. you get onto character. It's crazy. Well, I think it's funny though. I mean, UGC kind of teaches you how to be an actor as well. Like I've definitely got a lot better at my on camera skills when it comes to like being thrown around in different directions like like I mean by being, you know, playing different characters. Um, but tonality itself is really important. Like that's something that does take a lot of practice. You know, you can sit there and read a script and play like kind of a character and put on an accent, but it's really about like how you're messaging. you

32:36know, 100% tonality, hanging on words, emphasizing things, mispronouncing things at times, like all of these different things contribute to good content. Um, you know, a lot of times people are like, "Okay, here's my script. I'm going to make sure I say it right." And it's actually not about saying it right. It's about being the person where it relates to people that are that you're targeting, so it feels natural, which is super interesting. But yeah, there's a big misconception, man, when it comes to UGC. Like people It's really hard. Like the biggest thing I

33:03see is that people are being too salesy. like you're you're just being way too salesy. Like you're it's like you're trying to push something and you can sense that from a mile away, right? But what what do you tell creators to come off more natural? Yeah. I mean, it really does just come down to like just take a deep breath, understand like what we're doing here, you know, because it's it's easy to get lost in the sauce. I mean, I do the same thing every day. Like I also create content and I'll be like reading a script or whatever and I'm like, man, I just I sound too salesy. And I'll redo

33:30the video 15 times. But it really takes time to just like take a deep breath, calm down, really find like yourself and just like chill out when you're recording your video. I think that's the biggest thing. Like people will just kind of like rush it out. They're just reading the script word for word, you know, sort of thing. So I always tell them just to kind of, you know, relax, really understand like this is supposed to be organic. And if you, you know, if you do, it comes down to a lot of things like maybe don't follow your script, maybe just read the script. Make sure

33:57you understand like, okay, this is what I'm trying to pull off here. And then just do it from the brain. You know what I mean? Just take your phone out and film your video. 100%. What are you betting on as a creator right now? By 2030, the tech is going to be insane. Like where are you spending your time day-to-day? So that in a few years from now, you're going to

34:15be very well positioned. Yeah, totally. So I do a little bit of everything. People think it's crazy that I actually create content myself, but I always say you can't own a bakery if you don't know how to make bread. And that's my goal. Like I want to always do UGC. I always want to make content. So, I create content myself. Position myself as like also a great creator. Not only a great creator, but also, you know, great at the UGC side and running these campaigns as well, but I, you know, I'm really well versed in a bunch of different things. I think this comes from being creative at 10 years old

34:43making videos. Back then, we didn't have editors. We didn't have people we could go hire, thumbnail designers, so on and so forth. So, I learned how to be fluent in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro. I was editing on Sony Vegas back in the day. Like, I can do pretty much everything. I'm a videographer, too. I have the best videography equipment in the game. I know exactly how to shoot and log and how to color grade footage and like all these different things in these rabbit holes that I went down as a creative. So, I think that's one thing that I always have at my disposal is that I've pretty much I can do pretty

35:12much all things creative. Um, and that different ways. It's actually beautiful that you've skill stacked all those different, you know, niches within content. People think content, they think short form or long form, but even in videography, there's so many different little niches being behind the camera and they all translate really well over time. And so, you build up this entire essentially like your own LLM for how

35:36you should look at content. For my business, I didn't I didn't hire a website developer. I made the website myself. I didn't hire a logo designer. I made the logo myself. I literally drew it on my iPad, put it in Illustrator, vector traced it, and threw it on the website. Like, I did every single thing when it came to the creative direction of my business. So, it also feels authentic to me as well. And I love it because I'm the one that kind of created it. I mean, my phone background

35:58is our logo. That was our logo. Like, it's everything to me. I ended up doing the same thing. Like, that's my my app, dude. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Like, I want to be reminded by it, bro. Like, that's that's really what it is. So, yeah. You know, the funny thing with my logo, like I don't know if people can actually see this, but it's basically just like a little mountain, right? So the it's the R techch logo and my last name is Nurman and if you were to connect every letter on the keyboard it's that logo but upside down. So I just flipped it. It looks like two

36:30mountains and I was like like arctic mountains and then Artech is actually a play on words. Um Steve Jobs used to say you should combine if you're going to build you should build between art and technology. And I was like wow art techch perfect. And so it's kind of like taking my last name and make the mountains and then you know building an app which I think it helps creators make better content. Content is art and it you use technology to do it. I was like this is perfect. You know shout out to

36:56Steve Jobs. Dude, that's so awesome you say that because I feel like a lot of people get tripped up during that stage of like trying to come up with their business name and they'll put all that thought process into doing it like you just did but then never start the actual business. That's like I I fell into that trap. I fell in love with like building the like building the art, building the name, building the logos, building the uh the marketing assets, but then not actually following through. Like that was my biggest hurdle when it came to starting like businesses and so on. Um so that for seen it was the complete

37:24opposite. It's just you see videos, seeing the logos and eyeball, it's just quick and easy to understand. Um I didn't great. Yeah. I was more worried about honestly it was like we already had an active deal before I even had a name. Like I was just like, "Oh crap, I got to get started here." So that's just what I

37:39came up with. That's how it should be. By the way, if you're a creator, like a lot of people are like, "Well, you know, my portfolio isn't perfect." It's like, I I don't actually care. You just need to have a portfolio that I can send to a brand. If I can't send to a brand, then you're not

37:51getting a deal. Like, yeah, I agree. So So get to work. Look, it's it's hung me up a lot. I'm so visual and I I love art and I want everything to be perfect. I mean, I've redone my website for absolutely no reason, like four times now, just for me. Most people are not even really looking at it. They're just going to the

38:05call booking page and that's about it. But I still spend time on every single detail because it's just important. Question for you, more number stuff. Now, if we're going to like if I'm a business or tech and I want to pay you, u we don't have to talk about like specific details, but let's say you run a campaign, you get a million views on that video, like what can I expect as a

38:26return? Yeah. So, this is really tough. There's a big disconnect. I actually have a case study built on this specifically. We drove users through an invite only code. Now, that is a big friction point. This is not something that I recommend people do, but we really wanted to see it. The company that hired us also wanted to see how the traffic converted. What we found is that typically you can expect a 1% conversion rate. That seems to be the number that's thrown around the room. It is a big disconnect when you have an organic execution partner like us because there's no this is not paid ads

38:55here. We can't actually track exactly where the user is going and why. But that's what we have found. This is this gets thrown around a lot. It's really hard to really pinpoint it, but that would be my answer to that. Okay, that's pretty much what I tell people too. You know, now that I have more organic analytics tracking and all of that, I can pretty much confirm for

39:14us it's been around 1% give or take. Occasionally, things can convert very well. So, uh Brier Cochran, content strategist and adviser and RTC genius, has done Tony, uh personal brand stuff for like Chris Williamson, Tony Robbins. Uh he just signed Chris, so like not yet, but uh you know, huge personal brand people. And um Brier ended up doing a post saying he coded his mind in an app and he has such a loyal following that you know our super wall metrics for the day were like 50% initial conversion rate which was you know normally it's like 35 or something. So basically you know out of our payw wall rate was like

39:5092% everyone went through the payw wall nine out over nine out of 10 people and then people that actually started a trial was one out of two people. So, you know, from those thousand views, more people went. Um, so instead of just one person or, you know, 10 people, we had probably like 15 to 20 and then more of

40:07them converted too. And that's the, you know, I I am against influencer marketing as a whole with just working with random people, but if you have someone that's an expert in your space as a founder and they make perfect content and you're friends with them, why would you not work with them? Yeah, I agree. You know, that that would be like the only caveat of of doing influencer marketing. Brier has like 100k followers and he got like 60k views and we made as much that week. We made more money with the app than, you know,

40:35a lot of our different campaign stuff. So, yeah, totally. It was crazy. But for the vast majority of organic UGC, my experience around 1%. Yeah, if you know your uh revenue per install kind of thing, your average revenue per paying user, you you're going to be very happy knowing um all those metrics and stuff,

40:53which is fire. Yeah, I agree. There's a big disconnect. Like I mentioned, it it's it's tough to really, you know, to really figure it out and get an a super correct answer, but that seems to be the general consensus. We see it as well. Okay, sick. What content styles do you think brands should be focusing on right

41:08now? Yeah. And not styles, I mean like formats. Yeah, totally. Um, so I think there's a huge like this is a huge thing. I mean, we do it ourselves as well, um, from time to time when, you know, building these accounts and making sure that they're getting niched into their correct spot and warmed up and so on and so forth. But there's a lot of I think there's a lot of a lot of noise in the UGC space right now when it comes to content formats. Um, and I would love to hear your theory on this, but there's a ton of videos that people will go chase

41:37after where there's like no product demo, nothing's being shown, and then they just stick their app name in the text on screen. It's a 7-second video. This can work only if you're controlling the narrative in the comment section. But I see a lot of people also miss that, too. And I think that's like the biggest noise in UGC right now. So, we try to steer away from that as much as possible. Um, and you know, I think that's just really it. like we just want to make sure that we're relatable but

42:03also showing the product in the video. Um and I think another thing that people do is that they force content to be relatable when it's not and they're like yeah so we have done a bunch of different things. Um Go Wish for example we noticed like creators were forcing relatability in videos and things that

42:24didn't really necessarily make sense. Um, I guess an example of that would be like, so Go Wish is a digital wish list platform. People would make POV relatable videos where it's like POV, you're hiking a mountain, but instead you'd rather make your Go Wish wish list. That doesn't necessarily make sense. It's not one to one. It No. Yeah. It's just like, okay, I get it, but you're like forcing the product in your video. I mean, and maybe it gets views, but it doesn't really make that much sense. So, there's a fine line

42:50between doing both, you know? Yeah. You know, when you're talking about that format that people are doing to just essentially game the algorithm and get views, text on screen, the reason why it works and it's a six or seven second long video is because it's increasing the average watch time and people take time to get through all of this video. If it's six seconds long, it takes someone seven, 10, whatever seconds to get through the entire thing, then the average watch time is going to be higher than the duration of the video, which mean it'll get pushed out more. But that doesn't mean it's going to convert for you. average watch time,

43:22save rate, those are like the most important metrics that I've seen for going viral. Um, but if you're not showing why the product is solving a problem, then you're just going viral. I used to do this as a my grow my personal brand. I would get 400k views putting something relatable on text. Um, you maybe get like 50 followers or 100

43:41followers from it for 500k views. Useless totally doesn't do anything. and people that do that, you know, this style of content, you know, no offense to the agencies that run it and, you know, the brands that do it, but those don't convert matter of factly. Same and same with slideshows. I agree. In my opinion, it's just an agency game. At the end of the day, organic agency is the only thing and the only metric that we can really attach

44:05ourselves to is views. Realistically, it's all we can attach ourselves to. So, when I show up to that bi-weekly call with my client, I want to make sure that there's a ton of views on the table because if not, they're like, "What's going on here?" and I'm trying to explain to them like, oh, oh, here I'm making this content for this reason and it's got this product demo in it and that's why these agencies do these things, but it's a bunch of noise in the community right now and eventually it's going to get it'll fizzle out. Um, I'm not saying we're we don't do that from time to time. I mean,

44:29you have to ride that fine line between producing views and then also driving conversions. And we do a little bit of both of them and there's theories on why we do it, but yeah, that seems like a problem. What do you think is the highest conforming for converting format that brands would care the most about for organic? And then two, um, let's say you

44:46have three to five creators for a brand. Do you do you split up which creators are just going to get views to make sure the campaign is like going okay or do you go all high converting? Totally. There is some strategy here. Uh, and it really comes down to setting the client up with the right expectations. You don't have to do a viewfarm/con conversion farm split when the client knows exactly what the goal is here. If I tell the client, hey man, I'll be honest with you that our first bi-weekly call, we might not be able to deliver you 150 million views. We're probably going to be talking about low

45:17metrics because this is what we're doing. So, you ask what's the format that typically performs best? It's talking head, but typically we find that talking head videos typically produce lower views on average time after time until you have that one video that does really, really well. That is what it looks like. And it sucks because your client is watching these videos and they're like, "These

45:37guys are barely even breaking 300 views. What am I even looking at? What is even the point here?" And then that one video takes off and they're like, and they're happy. I get it. I get it. They check their notifications and their phone is just blown up and they're like, "Wow, we just made a lot of money."

45:51Great. Yeah. It's like, it's kind of like gambling a little bit with the algorithm. But I found that there's a way to negate that. And I think that's with a three-month minimum contract. If a parent can can commit for three months with good creators, you're going to go viral. You know, one month sometimes it's a coin flip. You know, it's a little sketchy and I don't like running the test like that. I'd rather like, hey, let's just get you results. It might take two or three months, but

46:12you're going to be way happier with me. I'm going to get more client referrals. You know, that that would be my suggestion. And just to kind of add on to what I what I had to say, like there is ways that you can also make converting formats through the seven sec second videos. I mean, there's other ways that you can do it. North, we have a bunch of theories on that. We also test it. I'm a super visual person, so I have like a huge board of like why videos convert

46:31and why they don't, so on and so forth. Um, and it's funny that you say that. Definitely over a three-month period is where you're going to find your most success. I tweet this out almost every day. I say it I show it to all my clients. The guy mining for diamonds. One of them turns around when he's this close. This guy's like trucking for the

46:46diamonds and he's about to hit it. That's UGC. It really is. Like most people will give up right before they they strike the diamonds and it's just because they didn't test enough volume. Bro, it's so funny. I see you tweet that out like all the time. It's It's so It's so relevant to every client I've ever worked on, every case study. It's so relevant for It's almost a value of despair graph,

47:06too. Do you know that one? I don't know. When you when you start out and I don't know like the X and Y axis turns, but basically like X-axis is time. So when you start out um and it's maybe it's like confidence level or something on the y- axis and you start there's no time and you're very highly confident and then you know you start going maybe you're a couple weeks in you haven't got a viral video your confidence goes down because you're like whoa I thought this would just work right away and then you know a couple weeks in you're like in this valley of despair and everyone has

47:34to go through this for every business venture no matter what it's just part of it and then over time you'll get that viral video and your confidence goes back up and then you you might have a break again but you're not going to go that far down because you know there's ups and downs to something like organic

47:47social media or just life in general. So now if you have ups and downs let's say for Go Wish having number one in the app store for you peak like there's that's that's literally the number one metric we look for is is that but then over time you can tell your clients like look like I get this you know it's ups and downs that's just how it goes. So, it's uh yeah, I agree. And like it's there's a the agency life is a little bit different like when it comes to making these clients happy that are and it just depends again it really comes down to

48:13like setting them up with the right expectations. It also comes down to your messaging. If I'm messaging out one of my biggest case studies where I helped app hit number one in the app store, people are signing up as a client because they want to hit number one on the app store. But it doesn't always work that way. And it's my job to relay that over and say, "Hey, I'm here to be your strategic partner and put you in the position that's going to give you the most amount of success. And this is what it looks like." But your agency, your strategic UGC partner, UGC engineer, they're going to make

48:38mistakes. It's how that person reacts to those mistakes and what they do moving forward to fix them. I can't, you know, I'm learning about your product 30 days ago. At the end of the 30 days, I've delivered a couple million views. I feel like that's pretty good. I'm just now learning about your product. You know what I mean? It takes a little bit of time, and typically that happens over a

48:54three-month period. So, how do you manage expectations prior to beginning a campaign with a brand? Yeah, totally. So, it just depends. There's a bunch of different buckets why people hire us. Um, and everyone kind of has their own specific use case, but my goal really is to educate as much as possible through the process. Um, and I'm a super visual person. So, if you looked at myro boards right now, like it would it would blow your mind how many just like different kind of graphs and things that I build out. And it's really just to set our clients up with like, hey, here's what we're doing and why

49:22we're doing it. This is what the actual dayby-day process looks like. Here's where if you're a week, look, if you're, you know, after one week you're looking at our content and you might feel like, oh gosh, this is not good. This is why it's because we're testing right now. It's because we don't even we don't even think we're really going to go viral in a week. And if we do, it's basically just kind of up to social media to do its thing. Like you just flipped a coin and it worked out for you. And that's great. We love to see it. But typically, this is what you should expect in this

49:47week. This is what you should expect in this week and so on. And it's really about walking them through step by step and educating the entire way. Totally makes sense. So you said you do bi-weekly calls with them. Um yeah. What does other communication look like to make sure make sure that they're happy

50:01until they get their viral video? Monday is my favorite day of the week, but it's also one of the hardest days of the week because I'm on camera all day long. I share over Looms. Each client either gets their own customro board of a breakdown of what's very relevant in the campaign at the moment or I just go through the data through our live data tracker and I make a 10 to 15 minutee video for every client. There's sometimes I teach lessons, sometimes I just go over very basic data. It's just

50:25depends on what's relevant at the time. I've worked with a paid ads agency before for my own, you know, personal brand stuff and uh they would do that for me like Monday morning loom call 8 am. I was like, "Wow, this is like the best thing ever." It is, man. You know, we went through a bunch of different like a bunch of different phases of doing this. We were super call heavy for a very long time. It was like, "Hey,

50:46let's have a call every single week." But then we realized like there's really not much to talk about week by week all the time. You know, it's like pulling a chain. You just got to keep on pulling and keep on pulling and then coming up with new things and fixing and fixing and fixing and then eventually you see the upside. But on these calls we were just wasting each other's time. So it's easier for me to just like provide a ton of education value as well in this 10 to 15 minute loom you know to make sure everybody's on the

51:09same page. That's pretty sick because at that point you're you're almost info product like you know I've talked to founders and when you share them like content advice and stuff like that they love it. Like a lot of founders are just genuinely smart curious people. Um, so if you're doing that on these calls, they get a 10-minute loom, they're probably excited. They're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. That's really cool. That makes sense." Like, and then they feel like you're holding their hand more,

51:30too. If you look at any of the big UGC like info people in the space, um, or anybody running a big UC agency, there's one biggest thing that you'll see all the time, and it's data. They always talk about learning from the data, the data, the data, the data, the data. And a lot of clients don't understand that

51:45necessarily. All they want is results. like and I could understand that but I make sure that they're educated on the on the ideas of like hey this is why we're doing these things so we can learn the data first so then we can produce the results but we have to go through this phase typically it's only the first month like the first month kind of goes that way where they're maybe they're just a little bit anxious about how things are going and it's because they've never been through this process before and it's my goal to make sure they feel comfortable and that's where it's really really important to provide

52:09as much value on the education side as possible. Do you have any Well, a couple qu questions real quick. What do you use to track your campaigns? Side. Okay. Sick. Same. Yeah. Side is great, man. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sick. And then, um, in terms of managing client expectations and setting up setting them up to understand what's going to happen that first month, do you have any long form YouTube content that kind of explains like a three-month UGC process or like some pre-all, pre-sales call thing that you

52:36can send them to set up expectations? Man, to be honest with you, at the moment, no. Um I don't have any long form uh content. I typically do things um I the sales process typically is a two to three call system where we really go through like the entire process from front to end. Uh where I do most of it you just um first of all I I totally agree it's not like a one call close thing. Yeah. I I think building rapport, understanding people and then again you got to disqualify a lot of brands that don't have the money you can't work with whatever. I I mean if you pick the wrong

53:07founder to work with it'll be the worst month of your life. Um, so you know, have to be very careful there. But in terms of qualifying people, what I do now is I'll send people a YouTube video like full breakdown. This is 20 minutes, explains everything. Maybe, you know, a little bit of nuance

53:24is left out per person, like per client. But it kind of gives them before their first intro call with me a good expectation and like kind of reality check on what this actually is. Because they hear things, they're on Twitter, they see Claudebot. Like I I know right now I'm hyped on Clawbot. If I went and bought one, I'd be like banging my head against the wall probably for a couple hours getting it set up. You know what I mean? So I just like to send them like a reality check like, "Are you sure you want this?" Um, you know, I saw you scheduled a call. Please watch this

53:53video beforehand. It'll just make things way simpler and we'll we'll have better communication going forward. Right. Right. So that'd be like a little thing I would I agree. It's definitely something, you know, YouTube is something that I definitely want to get into. super like I love I love education. Um I love doing it. I love teaching people. So this is something that's definitely on the radar

54:12for me. The thing the thing is is it's essentially the Loom videos you're doing right now you can just upload to YouTube and people would be so happy. Maybe you get 100 views, 200 views on them organically. I have a friend who does info and he has like he just uploads looms like every day

54:27like 10-minute loom to YouTube 200. Like that pump dude prints money. Yeah. Okay. print money and people are Yeah, I have another friend who does like a I I'm I have access to his W so I actually know exactly how much he's processing every week. Yeah. Um, and he's doing very well, like over six figures a month. And you know, his

54:48average reel on Instagram is like 7K. And then he just takes those people funnels on YouTube and that's where, you know, all the nurturing and selling happens because in order to really buy comfortably for for someone, that's why webinars are so powerful, which by the way, I think it would be really cool if you hosted like a UGC agency webinar,

55:04maybe you only get 20 30 people, right? Um, but if you have 20, 30 people live after consuming your content for an hour or an hour and a half, asking questions, whatever, they're going to trust you so much because the short form stuff, the tweets are good for mind share, but in terms of actually converting, that's always downstream of having a very

55:22thorough nurturing process. I agree 100%. Yeah, I would like to see you do a webinar. Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely something I've been thinking about. Um, I know Julia did one and it was a huge success for her. Um I think she was Yeah, she was doing something specifically for their like analytic tracker and so on.

55:38Oh, tracker. Yeah. Yeah. Which was great. She killed it. Like I think she had a ton of people on the call. So this is definitely something that the UGC community has seen and probably wants more of. Um or the founder community. So yeah, I think it's great and I absolutely agree with you. You know, the thing about social media is I hear people say this a lot, especially in the UC community. It's like it's a shots on goal game, but you just want to make sure that your shots are calculated. But we do have to remember that it's a shots on goal game and sometimes not all things work out in

56:03social media. So it's really important that people understand the process. They understand what they're getting themselves into and it's important that they understand what what that means. Like I've had clients come to me and say, "Well, what are we actually getting here?" And it's like, you're the one that came to me and said, "Hey, I want to try UGC. You came to me because you believe in UGC and so do I, and that's why we accepted you as a client. what we're getting here is that we're learning how to make this a profitable uh you know a profitable marketing solution for you. Um yeah, and it's my job to to to teach them on

56:33that. Yeah. And I don't want to say that you know organic social media is a gamble because it's not. We've gamified it. We can repeatedly go viral. All those things, but sometimes it takes time and reps. But, you know, the predisposition should not be like paid ads where you put a dollar in, you get a dollar back. That is not what this is. It's a little bit more like if there's two ends of the spectrum. If you go to Las Vegas for a weekend, you know, I've been a few times. I will I will put aside a few thousand dollars and I'll think to myself,

56:59this money is gone. You know, it's gone. Like, I will not see this money again. And if cool, like if you know, roulette hits a few times and I make more money, great. But for the most part, I'm willing to do to go do this, have this, you know, risk for what desired outcome I ultimately want. Um, which I think most people I agree. I I've said this before. where I say UGC, people come to me and say, "Well, I thought UGC was a cost-effective solution." I say it is at scale when it's working and it does take

57:25a little bit of time to get there. The the best UGC campaign I've ever seen was Tobin at Whisper Flow. I agree. Did you know the details of that campaign? 100%. Yeah. I actually I know a ton about it. I did a bunch of research on that and I was actually like I was going to be a creator on the Whisper Flow team for a while and then I decided not to to

57:43go forward with it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I talked to Tobin. I had a call with him about it and he broke it down for us and his entire system, but he did, you know, this 500 million views, 93 cent CPM, three months. Um, you know, one of the funny things that Tobin told me, and again, everyone listening, grain of salt or not,

58:04whatever, this is just what he told me. He said that he was scripting heavily for people and he couldn't break 10K views like their first month or, you know, first few weeks or whatever. And then eventually he just incentivized that incentivized them to go viral with performance benefits and let them write the scripts and let them make the content as long as the video qualified by showing the product demo in the video. He was happy. And so the stories were crazy super native viral content and as long as people were using Whisper to like type the emails that they were

58:34sending, it worked great. I absolutely agree that that's one of the best ways to run a program. The thing about that is you have to find very solid creators as well. And that's where it takes an expert because you want your creator to yes, they they need to be passionate about the content that they're creating. They want to be happy about the videos they're making and then they want to be incentivized about the results, too. Um, and yeah, Tobin absolutely crushed it. I I know a lot about that case study. Again, I was going to be a creator on it. We had a few complications. I ended up not

59:02following through. And I I know the deal structure and it was very good for a creator and it it sets up a creator to to for that to be one of their main deals. They don't have to take 15 deals at a time in order to pay their bills. They could just take that one and do

59:15really good at it. I think the first tier was $40 for every video over 1k views, I believe. Something like that. Which means I mean it just incentivizes you because a 500 view video and a 1K view video not like like if I'm a creator and I'm stuck in 300 to 500 view jail, but if I I know if I if I try a little bit harder and I get to 40 views, trying a little bit harder could be the difference from that video really popping off and getting a million views

59:41plus, you know? I agree. So it's it it was a great incentive structure. I personally took it for Rtech and I dropped that 1k to 10 Q 10K view uh milestone down to like $10. Yeah. Yeah. I just wasn't willing to do um I I don't have pockets like Whisper Flow, you know. Maybe we'll go raise 30 million and we can do it. But look, I was going to say, man, you know, to be honest with you, it's you can build a pretty successful UGC program as long as you've got the money for it, too. Um% you definitely have to you have to have the pockets for it, too, if you really

1:00:13want to build like the biggest case study in the world. like it it takes some spin for sure. Well, love it, bro. Um, it's been great chatting. Is there anything else that you'd like to to touch on? Like where do people snag you? That sort of thing. Yeah, they can find me on Twitter, Colin

1:00:28Madden UGC. Um, that's co. Actually, the last thing I want to talk about, people ask me, "How do I get more agency clients?" Twitter. What do you What do you do? What? Like, I don't know how many times I have to say. I'm like a broken record. The founders are on Twitter because they're smart and they like to read. It's that simple. If you looked at my Twitter engagement right now, which is pretty healthy. I mean, it's not it's not horrible, but I'm not getting a 100 likes to 200 likes a tweet. I mean, I'm only getting a handful, but they're qualified people. I only have 2,800

1:00:53followers, but it's all qualified people in the right niche. I've talked with some really big people. I mean, I've talked to a guy that was ex Tender. He helped them grow for a very long time. I've talked to some huge people on the tech consumer world from Twitter, which is just wild to think about. But yeah, my engagement's really not that crazy. I just I'm actually tweeting out real value and you know there's a game to it as well. But you it's it's it's it's really awesome to see how many real qualified people there are out there

1:01:19that are just scrolling Twitter. Is it you tweeting or do you have a ghostriter? No, I do it myself. They're great tweets. Um do you use a tool to like organize your tweets or anything? Bro, it's I actually use I was going to say Whisper Flow. I actually use Aqua Voices which is their competitor, my client. Um and I I just do it with Claude. I'll just sit there and yap to Claude. And you know, of course, I'll go through a couple rounds of it to make sure that I'm actually like putting everything in detail, but I just pump them out myself. I think the biggest

1:01:46disconnect I see with a lot of these guys that are doing the Ghost Rider stuff is that there's a couple things that are not they're just kind of like off. Yeah. And I want you to know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually did Ghost Rider for a little bit on Twitter. Um, at the end of the day, if you're in the content space, you kind of got to make your own

1:02:01content. I agree. I agree. And you can Yeah. I was going to say there are obviously are a lot of people like Horoszi pays millions of dollars a year for his content team. He's still in front of the camera, you know, he's still there doing it. Um it's not like they're if you take a look at the info that I put on Twitter, most of pretty much every tweet also comes with the visual or something of actual value. It's not just like random slop like I'm actually spending time and like thinking about, okay, it's it's a different way to think

1:02:27about things. That's what I mean. There's obviously a game to it just like there is short form. Um, but I think about like how I can attach a good visual that's actually going to resonate with people, so on and so forth, and actually bring value to every single tweet. So instead of producing a hundred tweets a month, I might only make 10, but every single one of those actually brings value. And that's

1:02:44what do you what do you mean by visual? Are you adding images or do you mean like literal like what your copy is visualizing for people? Yeah, images. And then I've even done videos on Twitter as well, which is been a success for me. I've done just like sit down talking videos like you would on a short form platform but for Twitter and that's brought a lot of value to people as well but I like to show like very relevant stuff whether it's a visual whether it's a video stuff like that people are people have no idea the average intelligence of like a Twitter user versus like a Tik Tok or Instagram

1:03:13it is totally it is multiple standard deviations difference um the first time I got a client from Twitter it's a friend of mine he recognized me from Fortnite he's like yo I saw that you tweeted out about UGC I'm actually looking for UGC creators right now for my app. Minutes AI does like you know a few hundredk a month at the time and uh this guy had like 200 followers with like an A9 anon

1:03:34profile pick. I was like wow. Yeah. You know um so just tweeting about it and just putting out things I think people care about social proof and if it worked for other people and then they're like oh it worked for them it'll work for me. I that's what I try to prioritize in content now when I'm

1:03:50trying to get clients. Yeah I absolutely agree and you're right man. I mean, even I shifted my focus on Twitter. Like, I don't scroll on TikTok and Instagram like I used to anymore. Um, frankly, to be honest with you, I don't do it as much. I hate to say that cuz like I'm a UGC expert. I should be consuming content a lot, but I'm not necessarily consuming like my for you page is UGC. Like, I'm seeing UGC videos. That's what I see on my accounts. I don't see like just regular brain rat stuff. But I am spending a lot of time scrolling on on Twitter for sure

1:04:18and just like really consuming a lot of people's stuff. It's so funny. my my girlfriend now anytime she'll see any type of mention of a product or like anything like that she'll be like that's UGC you know like she knows I mean dude it fools me sometimes like I'm like it does oh that's good that's really good did you did you see the Josh going viral account for Rtech yeah I did I listened to that also as well I listened to the podcast so wait did you like it yeah it was great man it was great it was awesome I I love what he had to say

1:04:47I think the whole thing was great okay sick okay Great to hear you, Colin. Um, you know, been super fun to get to know you for the past few years. Like when we first met you, you you were in that creator program and now you're one of the top dogs in the UGC agency. Do you remember? Do you remember how we met? Actually, I called you on the

1:05:04phone. I asked for your number. I called you on the phone. I was like, "Ow, dude." It was on Tik Tok. On Tik Tok, right? I think so. Yeah. And then we get your phone number. I called you. I was like, "Dude, I know you're running a content circle at the moment. I really need to do something outside of just Tik Tok videos." I could already sense that like this style of UGC was starting to slow down a lot and it kind of scared me a little bit. So I was like, man, I need to I need to probably like try something else. And so I turned to you. I was

1:05:28like, Owen, what can I do next? Like, bro, you're running up an education community. Is that something that maybe I should get into? And we just chatted for a while. And then I think you let me in a content circle. I didn't spend a bunch of time necessarily at at that time because I was still doing TikTok. And then I used that I ended up using the resource later down the road to help me out on a you were one of those people who joined to new content like better than me basically. So um I was like all right like you should probably run an agency

1:05:55if you had the business mind. Um so I'm I'm just very happy that you ended up doing that and you know who knows what you're going to do. Do you think you're going to stick with the agency for a while? You think you'll launch your own app or product? I know you talking about the woman in the red dress, but yeah, I want to launch my own app eventually, but at the moment, man, to be honest with you, like I think that there's such a huge market for another big agency to step up and change the narrative a little bit. And I think there's really only like one other

1:06:20agency that I would recommend people other than yours. Yeah, I agree, man. You know, there is a ton. There's a bunch of people that can do it and there's a bunch of people that are capable of doing it, but realistically, when you actually look at the competitive landscape, there's only a few top dogs and I really want to position myself there. And that's what

1:06:34we're striving to do. Okay, let's let's do some more. We got to get you on YouTube uh doing more form and nurturing and sharing your knowledge because a lot of people will by default go there and want to buy from you more. Um I think I think that's that's helped me the most is channeling people from short form to long form, but for you it'll be Twitter and then just be like, "Yo, by the way, if you if you're a founder and you want to like do organic UGC, well, I just made like a 20-minute

1:06:58free guide. Just watch it." Yeah. Yeah. Stuff like that. People would ramp. I appreciate it, man. That that's where I'm headed to next for sure. Okay, sick. Great to see you, Colin. Totally. So, so fun. Great to chat. And everyone, go follow Colin. He is going to be, if he's not already, one of the top dogs in the UGC agency space. Congrats on all your

1:07:15success so far and we'll talk soon. Couldn't do it without you, bro. I appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much, dude. Take.