Canyon Pergande - How To Grow Your App 23x Faster Than The Competition

Once a program passes ~10 creators, the first hire is a generalist manager / admin-ops: ideally a creator who has gone viral and has worked with creators or on the brand side. They do video reviews, daily creator updates, check-ins, push new formats and do research, spending ~10-15 hours a week on the brand. Start them on a one-month pilot with a retainer of ~$2-4K/month depending on program size (about $150 per creator as a baseline). Add a bonus of ~5% of all bonuses the creators earn on the campaign (e.g. when creators are on a $1,000 retainer + $1 CPM), so the manager is incentivized to block bad content and find the best creators and formats.

Briefs are short, scannable pages: reference videos, hook ideas, where the CTA plugs in with CTA options, and messaging themes; no word-for-word scripts, which kill the creative freedom that produces new formats. In the early days, review every video before it goes live (lift the requirement only for proven, self-sufficient creators). Check basics: good lighting, pace, dead space cut, a strong hook, a story that makes sense, and a product integration that doesn't feel like a straight ad. Reviewers record Loom videos dissecting videos that need feedback, plus Looms comparing good vs bad videos side by side, to tell bad messaging apart from low-quality execution. In the discovery phase the founder or a strategist/coach should do this; once formats are proven, the role shifts to recruiting more creators.

Look past view counts on past campaigns (they may have ridden easy text-on-screen formats). Prefer creators relatively new to UGC (a campaign or two, some success) who haven't seen high retainers, so they come in at low rates and become loyal, in-house creators. Quick filters: a face people want to watch, talking-style storytelling to camera, and how they behave in onboarding (responsive, ask good questions, show up to the onboarding call excited). Avoid creators on more than ~5 campaigns; they ghost within a week or two if results don't come. Some other campaigns across niches is good: they bring over hooks and formats. Zero campaigns is a mild flag unless they are new.

Over the past 3-6 months programs shifted weight from TikTok to Instagram, and many companies are layering in Facebook Reels. Cross-posting to Facebook is nearly effortless for creators (schedule in advance, one click, copy captions), so with a good bonus structure most creators will add Facebook with no or a nominal increase in base pay. TikTok is especially strict on 'monetization' apps (trading, crypto, side income, SideShift-like), with frequent shadowbans.

Choose audiences so narrow they feel too small: knitting, ballet, wrestling/MMA. Content speaks to a very specific audience, and with few competitors winning formats are easier to find and last longer. Most such niches can comfortably reach ~$10K/month; to grow past that, pull in adjacent audiences (e.g. from ballet to the whole dance community) with new product capabilities, formats and personas, and grow the market itself by bringing in people who didn't care before. Contrast: the broad 'monetization' niche (side hustles, UGC, crypto, settlements) is saturated, formats get cloned by dozens of teams and die quickly.

Consumer Club first gathered app builders obsessed with distribution in a Discord, then went after people from info products, e-commerce and other non-tech spaces who want to get into apps and are strong at marketing.

Make the product available internationally to widen the creator pool. LATAM creators of similar quality cost ~$15/video vs ~$25 in the US. Companies use these markets as cheap testing grounds for new formats, then carry the winners to other markets. Start one market at a time with a test pool of 3-5 creators; for LATAM bring in a fluent Spanish-speaking manager. Europe and Asia (Korea, Japan, Singapore) are also picking up: high purchasing power, far less UGC, so audiences haven't seen the formats. Build a playbook per market that new managers can tweak.

Give the best-performing creators managerial tasks (recruitment, strategy, creator coaching, video reviews), see what each is good at, and build the team around that. They already know the content strategy and how you work with creators, so need little hand-holding. SideShift is using this to train managers outside Tier 1 countries. If you have no good creators yet, hire an outside manager first.

Get usage rights to creator content and run organic videos as partnership ads / Spark Ads from your own ad account. Pick candidates where a video got 5-10x the creator's usual views, 8-10%+ engagement, and strong comment sentiment (people asking about or naming the product). Flops can still work as ads, so test beyond the top organic hits. Set rule-based spend, track ROAS, scale winners and kill losers. Creators can be paid a percentage of ad spend or revenue driven (or triggers on trials, sign-ups, installs) instead of only a retainer or CPM, which de-risks the deal for the brand.

SideShift revamped its affiliate program so affiliates can refer brands and creators and get a percentage of creator earnings and subscription revenue; people running creator programs earn when they pay their creators and when those creators land jobs with other brands. Goal is to pay out millions of dollars to affiliates.

For brands without bandwidth or know-how, SideShift onboarded agency partners that take a brand's budget, run the creator program, and teach the brand to bring it in-house later, managed through a campaign managers dashboard. It also built a campaign manager course (sourcing, content strategy, best practices) offered to brands and to creators who pass thresholds on SideShift; graduates join a discoverable manager database with specialties (recruiter, strategist, ops), with plans to onboard dozens to hundreds of managers.