How Wispr Flow Built a Paid UGC Engine with Young Creators and Performance-Based Pay

Hector Serrano joined Wispr Flow at 19. He said he searched LinkedIn for creator jobs and reviewed roughly 200 listings before finding the company. He applied, spoke with Tanae, and joined, and said he had never worked at a startup before. He told Tanae he wanted equity in the company, and Tanae laughed and said he liked him.

Hector argued that there is a common assumption that AI is taking jobs from young people, but that young people are in fact much better suited to this kind of work. In his view, a 30- or 40-year-old founder does not understand what an 18-year-old who spends every day in Discord chats and scrolling Instagram and TikTok understands about what actually works. He said it is effectively a simple matter to have someone like that on a team.

He also linked this to the quality of marketing. Referring to a tweet of his that the best marketers are allergic to AI, he said that running low-quality AI-generated ads would probably not land well, and that with so much noise in the market, focusing on quality rather than quantity makes it easier to get heard.

He added that the role that is hardest to fill right now is someone like himself, and that anyone who believes the best employees come only from top grades or elite universities is in for a surprise.

Wispr Flow first ran an organic UGC program. Hector said it produced about 500 million views, but that this did not translate into the success the team had hoped for. He said the program focused heavily on vanity metrics, which did not necessarily lead to many conversions, because it is harder to get students to pay for a product of this kind.

The team ultimately ended the program, though Hector said he is not opposed to organic UGC in general. His point was that teams must make sure they do not chase vanity metrics again. He noted that Tobin applied the approach more successfully at Polymarket, where he cracked the code with organic UGC instead of pursuing only top-of-funnel concepts.

Hector said that when Tobin left, it would have been very hard to find someone to take over his role, so the team decided to stop the organic program. Paid advertising had worked relatively well for the company in the meantime.

About seven months before the conversation, Hector said he noticed that paid advertising was working well, and that he personally produced all of the paid assets. He then asked what would happen if the company applied Tobin's organic UGC strategy, which involved building a community, a roster of creators, and pay for performance, directly to paid ads, with more product-focused messaging rather than only text ads on screen.

Wispr Flow moved to what Hector described as performance-based paid UGC. The company now has about 50 creators, and Hector said the roster produces 500 to 600 ads a month. The model was inspired by Tribe, which Lucas Pacther founded after building the clothing brand Squid House quickly on TikTok Shop.

In the model Hector described, a creator makes a video about how useful Wispr Flow is, the video is run as an ad on Meta, TikTok and other platforms, and the creator receives a share of that ad's performance. Hector said the company does not want to pay creators purely as a percentage, especially at the start, because if a creator makes 30 videos and earns only a $100 commission, that is demoralizing.

To address this, the company uses what it calls a smart retainer. Hector gave an example: if a creator is expected to make 25 videos and the company pays $1,500 on that basis, the company pays the retainer once the creator reaches that quota. Depending on how much commission the creator earns, the company may top up the payment or drop the retainer entirely. In one example he gave, a creator who makes 25 videos and earns $500 in commission receives an extra $1,000 for hitting the quota, while a creator who earns $3,000 in commission keeps only the commission.

Hector said there is no cap on what creators can earn per video or per month, so a creator is not limited to $100 or $1,000. He said some creators now make around $13,000 a month, which he described as more than many full-time influencers earn, even though these creators may have only 1,000 to 2,000 followers on their own Instagram accounts. He said this is simply a way for any talented creator to earn real money.

He explained that pay is calculated differently depending on the product. For a shopping product, the company pays a percentage of gross merchandise value (GMV). For a B2B SaaS product, it pays a percentage of ad spend. He said the ad-spend model is especially useful for a freemium product where it is hard to track direct conversions, because the company does not want a situation in which it cannot tell whether people are converting from the ads, leading it to pay out on ads that did not deliver.

He said that for a product like Wispr, where attribution is difficult or takes time, it is best to stick with a percentage of ad spend. By contrast, for a product like a water bottle or a T-shirt, where it is easy to track whether someone came to the site through a given ad and bought, a percentage of GMV makes more sense. Hector described the key innovation as giving the creator a kind of stake in the success of the ad, and he said this also limits risk, so creators can focus on their work rather than worrying about their livelihood.

Hector said that growing on TikTok by posting low-effort content is fairly easy, but that anyone who understands a platform like Instagram can crack any platform, especially if they are young. He said that until about two weeks before the conversation he had not posted much on X, and that his following there grew from about 500 to about 18,000.

He said he was not used to posting on a text-only platform, but that after about a week he got the hang of it. In his view, X is a game of volume: content has to be short, have a personal style, and actually provide value, and this was fairly easy to learn. He said video is a harder format to start with because it is a very different challenge, and that sitting down and filming is not easy.

He said he pushed some colleagues to make videos, including the company's media buyer, and that the colleague had some difficulty in the first month but that stepping out of one's comfort zone is useful. He described the result as his feed now being almost entirely Hector videos.

Hector said he joined Wispr Flow shortly after his 19th birthday, about three days after it. He had just quit his first soccer league three days earlier. He said he went home and searched LinkedIn for creative jobs, applied to about 200 positions, and found the company.

He described the first period as rocky. He recalled being in an analysis class when Tanae messaged him on Slack about the launch video, which was not what it should have been, and asked whether he could edit it with CapCut or another tool so it looked more like Gen Z content. Hector said he had some editing experience, so he started cutting the video during the class. He said it was fairly daunting for Tanae to ask him to do that in one of his first weeks.

He summed up his first year at Wispr as taking on whatever came up without a clear position. He said he was fairly sure the company did not fully know what he was doing, and that he did not know either. He said Tanae taught him that you are never too good or too smart to keep learning, and that this can apply even to a 19-year-old like himself.

Hector described a tension in his path. His parents immigrated to the United States and wanted him on a more traditional finance track. He applied early for finance internships because he was unsure whether content could become a real career.

He said he took a New York finance internship, but after two weeks he hated it. He said he did not want his life to go that way, and that he would sneak out to cafés in Soho to work on Wispr content instead of doing the internship work.

Hector said that for specific audiences that are older and more technical, the uglier and more boring the ad, the better it performs. He said some of the company's best ads are plain screen recordings of someone using the product, with a bit of text at the start, shot in a 9:16 format and running longer than a minute and a half. He called them both the best and the ugliest of the company's ads.

He argued that creators should match the buyer. Using a hypothetical $3,000 sleep product, he asked why someone would buy it from an 18-year-old, and said buyers would rather buy from someone who speaks the way they do, works in the same fields, and has the same problems.

He said UGC works for any company, but it gets harder the more premium or niche the product is. The main task is finding users who want to create content about the product.

He also said ads can be stranger than organic content. He can sometimes tell what works organically, but he sees ads that puzzle him and that then become the best performers, so he argued it is good to experiment rather than rejecting ads that do not work in a predetermined way.

Hector described two ways of recruiting creators. In the first, when a creator does not follow the brand, he sends a direct message saying he came across their content, liked it, and would like them to join the Wispr Flow creator group, and asking whether they are interested. If they are, he follows up with more details, including a PDF that explains the program structure, how much the company pays, and how much some creators earn. He then calls them, signs them, brings them into Discord, and gives them their Flow code to start making videos.

In the second, Hector sometimes posts to Wispr Flow's Instagram account or to his own Instagram Stories asking for UGC creators, a videographer or an editor. He said some of the company's best content hires came through this, and that creators who consistently produce high-quality content can also be an effective hiring channel.

Hector said he used to make the ads himself, first as an internal UGC creator and later as a one-person team. Ad spend grew until he could not keep up, and he burned out, so he decided to build a team that could extend what he was doing.

He said that in 2024, an ad could run for 12 months, but now, because of higher spend and Meta's Andromeda update, ads fatigue much faster. He said an ad is effectively dead once it reaches about $100,000 in ad spend, which can happen in a month, two months or three weeks.

He said Wispr has about 5,000 lifetime ads and about 800 to 900 live at a time. The library mixes UGC, founder-led videos, launch videos and celebrity or influencer content, so the goal is variety of formats. Hector said that scaling the team let the company test ideas much faster, which mattered given the volume of concepts it wants to run.

Hector suggested that creators without large followings can be better investments for brands, because influencers are often seen as sellouts today. He said that when a relatively unknown creator runs a partnership ad from their own account, it seems much more authentic.

His rule of thumb was that the less a creator seems like an influencer trying to persuade viewers, and the more they simply talk like a normal person about how good the product is, the more it works.

In the conversation, he pointed to a survey in which young people first named creator, influencer and streamer as what they wanted to become, rather than astronaut or lawyer. He noted that many people now earn money from being creators online.

Hector said he draws on his background in competitive sports. He played for Real Vigo in La Liga's academy in Spain, in MLS Next in the United States, and in NCAA Division 1 in college. He described how sports clubs scout young talent, train and develop players over roughly 10 years, bring them into an academy or a second team, and sometimes sell them to a top club or promote them to the first team.

He argued that many startups should adopt this mindset. He said many companies have stopped offering internships and do not see them as valuable, but that internships are one of the most valuable things a company can offer, and that they are not very expensive or time-consuming if you find the right people.

He said giving young people money to try things, freedom to experiment, and room to fail and keep learning is one of the best models sports offers. As an example, he pointed to Lamine Yamal, who won the World Cup at 18 or 19, and suggested the same approach applies to startups.

Hector argued that if a company focuses on quality rather than quantity and avoids elaborate automations and sheer output for its own sake, it becomes much easier to stand out from the noise. He said a company that has real value, packages it well, and posts with purpose rather than in volume can stand out easily.

As an example he pointed to Wispr Flow's YouTube channel, which launched about three months before the conversation. After five videos, he said, the channel had millions and millions of views and roughly 20,000 to 21,000 subscribers on a platform that is hard to grow on.

He said many people assume a new YouTube channel must post three videos a week, but he argued that a well-told story, made with time, effort and intent by a strong team, produces a strong final product, and that audiences see the effort put into it.

Hector said founder-led content works well even for founders who do not run big brands like Wispr. He described it as a gateway to the brand itself, and said there is no easier way to make a company accessible than through a person simply telling their story and adding value.

He said that the more organic touchpoints a company has and the more places it reaches customers, the cheaper paid advertising becomes. He offered a rule of thumb that a customer needs to see a company's content about seven times before actually buying. In his view, if a company reaches customers through long YouTube videos, which build a lot of trust, and also posts founder Instagram Reels and LinkedIn posts, the customer is more likely to convert when they see the first paid ad.

He argued that organic channels go hand in hand with paid ones: the more a company has activated and the longer it keeps these channels running, the cheaper conversions become across all platforms, and the paid platform then receives credit for the conversion.

Toward the end of the conversation, Hector said he wanted to encourage other founders to give young talent a chance. He said they should find these people, believe in them, trust them and give them opportunities.

He said that these young people will not only develop into some of a company's best players but will also show a remarkable degree of loyalty. Whether they stay at the company or do other things, he said, they will continue to help the company find other young talent or point it in the right direction when there are no new alphas. He also thanked Tanae, Daniel and the wider Vista Equity team for taking a chance on him.

In the lightning round, Hector said he had taken about 55 to 60 flights this year, roughly 89,000 miles. He said he recently missed a flight from Puerto Rico to San Francisco, and that the AI travel agent Miso rebooked him within two hours without any extra fee. He said the service works through connections with major airlines, and that its human staff can escalate issues when the AI gets stuck, so he can simply text it that he wants a flight and it books it within minutes.

His favorite saying, he said, was Steve Jobs's line that you cannot always connect the dots looking forward but can connect them looking backward. Hector said he was not the smartest kid in school, had severe ADHD, lost soccer as something he had, and felt lost for a few months at Wispr, and that looking back, his path makes sense. He said sometimes you just have to keep going, and that everything will make sense in the end.