Hand one winning video format to under 20 creators, then move on to new formats

Joseph… You have the the algo instinct, and so when you're designing the Cluely UGC program, it seems like this was at a scale that was bigger than like your drop shipping or like your YouTube channel even. Like, this this was, you know, 200 million views. Could you just explain like what was the Cluely UGC program? Cuz I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions around this, too. Like people a lot of people just don't even know that this was a thing.

Dris ElamriEarly on, uh, Ben and and I, we we started with, uh, like finding viral formats and and sourcing creators. And yeah, we immediately found a a format that started to work. Uh, it was kind of the the Snapchat format, and then we once like a like the same thing with formats, once it works, you just send it to other creators, see what works, and a lot of the reasons that a UGC program fails is because they are not experimenting enough, and they find one format, and they they stick with that even if it is not like the most converting

Dris Elamrior, uh, most viral it can be. Um, so after that, uh, we we kind of killed the format and we expanded to other things, and, uh, another team member took over like scaling UGC from, uh, 100 to, uh, a million. But yeah, like like the Cluely UGC, I I believe it was it was very successful and very converting, um, for anyone who is not on tech or Twitter and that's the main way that people heard about Cluely, like the average person, average student.

Dris ElamriUm, not just because they thought the the videos were entertaining, uh, but because they thought Cluely might have been a useful product and downloaded it, and, uh, and paid for it, which is the the goal of most companies.

JosephSo how many creators did you have in the UGC program?

Dris ElamriUh, actually, I I believe like not very many. Like I think less than 20, uh, consistently posting. And that's another misconception about UGC, like you do not need, or like want or need scale immediately. It is always best to to have a solid foundation, start with a a few creators that are able to consistently, um, get you views, and after that, you can, I don't know, scale to to many more creators.

Dris ElamriUm, but managing Like I was talking to another company, uh, they were telling me about their UGC program, and I asked, "How many creators do you have? How many views do they have?" Um, they said, "In the last month, they got 500,000 views." And they told me they had they had 2,000 creators, which is, uh, pretty crazy. Like, you do not need a lot of creators. Like ideally, you have one creator generating like, uh, I don't know, a million, 10 …