Drew Levin - I Studied 1,000,000 UGC Ads, This Is What Will Grow Your App

AI products should lean into the fact that people hate AI (Suno's TikTok comments are full of 'this is unfair to artists'); health/peptide brands do the same with 'this is so bad for you'. Get under people's skin while still showing value, without putting down other brands.

To recruit creators, SideShift's co-founder Nick posted his own non-talking video (April of the prior year): big on-screen text 'I have a master's degree / PhD and couldn't find a job' at the bottom, pointing at a screen with facial expressions (hook + demo), riding job-market anger. Once cracked, the format was given to all creators; variants like 'I graduated from Yale and can't even get an interview'. A year later a campaign manager turned it into a one-minute talking-head story ('denied from a cashier's job, I have a master's degree') ending with 'but I'm making money with SideShift'.

A founder or campaign manager must be hands-on at the start: find videos already going viral in the niche and give them to creators to copy; in the first three days of a campaign, review every video before it posts and give lots of feedback. Hire a campaign manager as soon as affordable. Be patient - week-one virality is not the norm.

Campaign managers keep creators posting on time with good CTAs, recruit new creators and fire weak ones quickly (low-ticket videos mean high churn). Ratio 1:10, up to 1:15; under 5 creators per manager wastes money. Content coaches (optional) work on delivery: pace, tone, eye contact at set moments. Founders hand off once CPMs hold under ~$4-5; the top 50 SideShift programs' founders only do payouts and month-end check-ins but step in when CPMs rise.

Rank candidates by comment sentiment (e.g. 'what is that app?') first, then engagement rate, then average views. Spark when engagement is above ~7.5-10% or a video does 3-5x the account's average views. Let organic climb first: if still gaining (e.g. 100K/day) wait 1-2 days. Start with ~$20 (SideShift runs $50-100/day per video for a week); keep running while CPMs don't rise; CPMs usually rise when engagement falls from ~15% to ~5%, then kill it. Exclude sparked views from creator view bonuses. Can add an app-install anchor to track CPI. Spark can also be targeted by country/language/age.

An agency on SideShift ran GoWish's UGC campaign and pushed it mainly through Spark ads.

Partnership ads (creator gives a code, brand runs the post in Ads Manager) are Meta's Spark equivalent and work even on small UGC accounts with a few thousand followers. On Meta use targeting early; on TikTok Spark optimize for reach. Both beat whitelisted ads from the brand account. Have creators OAuth accounts so Spark codes are delivered automatically.

Each video is posted to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat; the view-based pay (CPM) is paid only on the best-performing of the four (SideShift detects it automatically). Recommended for all creators since cross-posting is little extra effort.

Top programs: $800/month for 60 unique videos (2/day, each cross-posted to 4 platforms = 8 posts/day) for creators with 1-2 prior campaigns; new creators $200-300 or CPM-only for the same package. View bonuses are tiered but not stacked (hit 1M -> the $1,000 tier replaces the $100 tier at 100K). Cap the last bonus at a view count (e.g. $500-800 at 1M views), not a time window, so creators feel they're winning; views after the cap are 'free views', which matter a lot above $30-50K/month spend. Don't outprice the market.

A startup capped a creator's monthly CPM payout; he got ~180M views in two weeks (one 45M-view video) and was paid ~$4K instead of ~$75K uncapped.

Brand asks creators for e.g. 10 ad creatives with nothing up front, paying a percentage of ad spend or of tracked sales if an ad is run and wins.

Brex used SideShift UGC to acquire credit-card customers; Spark lets B2B brands target specific audiences with organic-style videos.

Instead of a new account per brand posting 1-2x/day, a top creator grew one account to 10K followers for one brand, then reused it for other brands, posting daily 10-minute storytelling videos with the CTA dropped at minute nine.

Rather than recruiting existing creators, SideShift 'mints' supply: anyone can join and take a ~6-hour Duolingo-style course on making UGC for apps (more money and time went into it than into the product). Creators progress to campaign managers, then to their own UGC agencies run on SideShift, which SideShift supports with referrals.

When a brand fails to pay a creator what they're owed, SideShift pays the creator itself, costing up to almost six figures a month.

Suno (guest's estimate): ~8 creator managers who also coach; a few also create content; they manage, oversee and recruit creators. No separate coaches.