The playbook in one paragraph
Wispr Flow runs a performance-based creator program that ships 500 to 700 new UGC ads a month. Creators earn a cut of ad spend instead of a flat fee, the group is kept deliberately small, and culture does the retention work. Hector Serrano built it and published the whole thing on X. Below is the breakdown, step by step, plus the full transcript.
Who made this and why we are writing about it
Everything below comes from Hector Serrano (@hectorserrranoo), marketing hire number two and head of content at Wispr Flow. On 8 October 2026 he posted a 14 minute video breaking down the paid ads creator program he built there, and it has since passed a million views. All the credit for the playbook, the numbers and the opinions in it belongs to him. We transcribed it, explained it, and added nothing to his claims.
If the embed does not load, watch the original post on X. The full transcript is at the bottom of this page.
What a performance-based creator program is
The short version of the model: a creator joins the brand's group, the creator makes a video, the brand launches that video as a paid ad, and the creator gets paid a percentage of what that ad produces. Either a percentage of GMV for ecommerce, or a percentage of ad spend for software. Nothing is paid up front for the creative itself.
Hector's framing is that this is TikTok Shop for every platform. TikTok Shop already pays creators a cut of the sales they drive, but it stops in two places. Brands could not take those creatives onto other platforms and keep paying the creator for them, and the whole thing only ever worked for ecommerce, which left software companies with organic content as their only performance channel. Trybe, the platform Wispr Flow runs this on, opens the same model to software, info products and ecommerce alike, and the ads run on Meta, AppLovin and TikTok.
Two things follow from paying on performance. Creators are motivated to produce a lot of videos, and because every video is competing against every other video in the group, they are motivated to make good ones. The brand stops paying thousands of dollars up front for a creative that may never spend, and stops negotiating whitelisting and usage rights deal by deal. Wispr Flow now launches 500 to 700 new UGC ads a month this way, most of them genuinely new formats rather than variations.
If you want the contrast with the older way of buying creator content, we have written up the differences between organic and paid ad UGC and what paid ad usage rights normally cost.
Step one, the payment model
Pick the denominator first, because everything else is downstream of it.
| Business type | What creators are paid on | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce | Percent of GMV | Sales attribute fast, so revenue share is readable |
| Software | Percent of ad spend | Longer conversion cycles make revenue share unreliable |
Step two, the smart retainer
On top of the percentage, Wispr Flow adds what Hector calls a smart retainer. It is a floor, not a fee. The brand guarantees a minimum payout as long as the creator hits a video quota, and the guarantee disappears as soon as commissions clear it.
His worked example: a creator on a 25 video quota with a $1,000 floor. In month one they earn $500 in commissions, so the brand tops them up by $500 to reach the floor. In month two their videos actually perform and they earn $3,000 in commissions, so no top up is paid at all and the creator simply keeps the commission.
The reason it exists is recruitment. A brand new group on Trybe has no payout history, no reviews and no submissions, so good creators have no reason to take the bet. A floor lets you say: I know we have no track record, I am putting this money up front, you just have to hit the deliverables. Those first creators become the proof for everyone you recruit after them. If a floor is not affordable, Hector suggests finding another way to de-risk the start, like a bonus.
For creators weighing one structure against another, our breakdown of commission versus flat fee earnings covers the same trade from the other side of the table.
Step three, recruit few creators on purpose
This is the step Hector says most companies get wrong, because they assume volume of creators is what produces volume of ads. They onboard hundreds of people who do not care about the product, and get back thousands of talking head videos that all look the same. Meta clusters near duplicate creatives, and once your videos are more than 60% similar it suppresses the reach rather than treating them as separate ads.
The alternative is to start with four or five creators chosen against gaps you can actually name in your ad library. New formats, new ICPs, new regions, different stages of the funnel. Volume only helps if there is intent behind each video.
On sourcing, he is clear that the platform itself is the wrong place to start, for the same reason the smart retainer exists: you have nothing to show yet. Creator group connections are the best route. Failing that, his method that has never missed is keyword search on Instagram. Search terms like UGC, creators, tech or SaaS, find a few creators at the quality bar you want, then mine their following lists, followers, comments and likes for more of the same. Send 100 to 200 DMs across a few days and you have a starting group by the end of the week.
Step four, build the culture
The most skipped step, because it is the most time consuming, and in Hector's telling the one that decides whether the program survives. What you pour into creators is what you get out of them. Brands that never speak to their creators face to face, and are only there to extract, get felt. Creators leave for brands that treat them better, and the program becomes a permanent onboarding treadmill that eventually gets abandoned.
His instruction is to treat the creator group like a sales team, with the same coaching, community and incentives:
- Dedicated creator coaches who run calls and keep people engaged
- His own calendar link, open to any creator who wants to go deeper on strategy
- A weekly call every Thursday with the media buyer and himself, going through what the ad account is showing, patterns, new ICPs and experiments to run
- Giveaways and bonuses, sometimes cash, sometimes gear creators actually want, like cameras, microphones and glasses, which also raises creative quality
- A first creator retreat, flying their top six creators from around the world into the San Francisco office for a week of coaching, product teaching and brainstorming
The point he keeps returning to is that the strongest creator programs belong to brands that genuinely invest in the people in them. The model lets ordinary people who are not influencers earn real money, and that reputation travels. Word gets around between creators, agencies, vendors and founders, and a bad reputation makes top talent impossible to keep.
Step five, scale from five creators to fifty
Wispr Flow went from 5 creators to 50 active creators over four months. Slowly, on purpose: add too many at once and the culture breaks before you notice, because nobody gets enough of your attention to feel part of anything.
The ladder he recommends is 5 to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 40, and then coasting in the 40 to 60 range. In his view the best creator teams live at 40 to 60 people, all of them strong, and past that you are adding headcount rather than capability. You keep recruiting after that only to fill a real gap or raise the bar.
Two mechanics do the scaling. Inbound applications on Trybe get you occasional gems and not much more: Wispr Flow has received roughly 7,000 applications and accepted about 5 to 7 creators from them. Referrals do the real work. They pay an existing creator $100 for bringing in someone at their level or above, vetted by Hector from an Instagram or portfolio before any onboarding, with beginners explicitly ruled out. Good creators know good creators.
There is also a positioning argument for staying small. Put brand A, which has paid out $200,000 across 1,000 creators, next to brand B, which has paid out $100,000 across 20 creators. Creators can do that division, and brand B is obviously the better room to be in. In a job where every interaction happens through a screen, a group that feels exclusive and well run beats a bigger cheque.
Step six, keep forcing new formats
The failure mode at the end of the curve is creative stagnation. Creators burn out, run out of ideas, look at the leaderboard, and start producing lesser copies of whatever is winning. Meta reads those as the same concept, clusters them, and suppresses the reach, so the whole group's output quietly stops working.
What Hector tells creators stuck in that rut is that the people at the top of the leaderboard are not there because of the one format they landed. They are there because they never stopped testing. A copy of someone else's winner gets grouped under that winner and never breaks out on its own. New concepts are the keys that open new doors, and pushing for them is a permanent job, not a phase.
What this looks like from the creator side
Read as a creator rather than a brand, the playbook is a fairly precise job description. Groups like this want operators who can hit a video quota, invent formats instead of copying leaderboards, and show up to a weekly call about ad account data. The pay is uncapped and the floor, where one exists, is temporary by design. Our guide to UGC creator rates across affiliate and paid content is a useful reality check on how that compares with flat rate work.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability, with filler words removed and two mild expletives softened. Everything here is Hector Serrano's, from the original video.
> It feels like every single company in 2026 wants to scale their paid ads. And I'm 22 years old, head of content at Wispr Flow. And we're currently launching 500 to 700 UGC ads every single month that are all relatively net new formats by using the performance-based model. And we're doing that by using this software, Trybe. And no, this video isn't sponsored. I've just been getting a ton of questions about how we structure the program and how we use the platform. And I wanted to make this video to give you guys a complete breakdown. So this is Trybe 101 and how to scale your paid ads program in 2026.
>
> So first things first, we have to understand how Trybe works and the model behind it. So it's quite simple. You'll have a creator that joins your group. That creator will then make a video, then you will launch that video. And then depending on how you're paying creators, you will pay them a percentage of GMV or of ad spend. So everything is performance-based. And the reason that this works great is because A, creators are incentivized to make a lot of videos and B, since you have a lot of videos competing against each other and a lot of creators competing against each other, they're also incentivized to make really high quality formats. And it ends up being a win-win for both the brands and the creators, because on the creator side, once you find the unlock and understand how Trybe works, you can make a ton of money. And on the brand side, you're not putting a bunch of risk up front and you're only paying for the ads that actually perform well. Long gone are the days where you have to spend thousands of dollars for a creative that might not spend, might not perform well. And then on top of that, you have to negotiate the whitelisting, the usage rights.
>
> So now let's explain the model behind Trybe. And the way I like to explain it is that it's basically TikTok Shop, but for every single platform. And the way that TikTok Shop works obviously is that creators get a percent of GMV, but TikTok Shop has always fallen short in two places. The first one being that brands were never able to run all these creatives on separate platforms. And if they did, they were never paying the creators. And the second point that TikTok Shop is only for ecom brands. So SaaS companies were left out and the only other performance-based channel that they could use is organic UGC. And this isn't always the best channel for a lot of SaaS companies. So basically, Trybe has enabled any sort of brand, no matter if you're in info, if you're in SaaS or you're in ecom, to be actually able to use this performance-based model. And now you can actually launch these ads on Meta, AppLovin, and TikTok with more platforms to come soon.
>
> So now that you understand how Trybe works, let's get to step number two. And step two is actually figuring out the payment model. If you're in ecom, you're going to do percent of GMV. And if you're in SaaS, you're most likely going to do a percent of ad spend because you might have a longer conversion cycle. And at Wispr, we do a percent of ad spend and we actually do 7% of ad spend. This number is going to vary for you. Obviously, do what works best with your CAC. You don't want to blow up your ad account and pay creators too much. And you also don't want to not pay them enough to the point that they're not motivated.
>
> And on top of the percent of ad spend, we actually also add on something called a smart retainer. And the way the smart retainer works is it's basically us as a brand saying, we're going to bet on you as a creator. We're going to coach you, invest time into you, and you will eventually succeed. And a smart retainer is basically the minimum amount of money a creator will make as long as they hit their quota of video. So to illustrate this, basically, let's say that this creator is going to have a 25 video smart retainer, and as long as they hit that quota, we will pay them $1,000. So how exactly does this work? Well, let's say this creator ends up making in their first month, $500 from commissions. So since our smart retainer is $1,000 and they hit their quota of 25 videos, we are actually going to top them up $500. But let's say that in the second month, they actually end up making $3,000 from commissions, which for us is good because it means our videos are actually starting to perform. Then we won't pay any of this smart retainer because a smart retainer was a minimum amount and they now only keep commission.
>
> So again, it's a way for us as a brand to bet on these creators, show them that we are invested in them, and then our goal is for them to make strictly commissions. And the other thing is that actually having this smart retainer in place is going to help you attract top talent in the beginning, because on Trybe, it's going to be hard for you to recruit top creators when you don't have any history on the platform, you don't have any reviews, you don't have any video submissions. And by having a smart retainer and going off platform to recruit creators, you're going to be able to say, okay, I know we don't have any history, but I'm willing to bet on you this amount of money, I'm willing to put this money up front, as long as you hit the deliverables. And that's how you create these super creators that can then go out there and be your people that are helping you with referrals and helping you bring in more creators and being your testimonies and your stories of, hey, Trybe actually worked for me and I've made X amount of money for this brand. So smart retainers are one of the most crucial things at the beginning of the program, and also just helping continuing the longevity of the program. So I highly recommend them for a lot of brands. If you can do it, I would recommend. And if you can't, figure out a different way to compensate creators and get them in, whether it's like a bonus or something like that.
>
> And that next step is actually how you're going to recruit the creators. Because a creator program can't work if you don't have creators. And this is honestly a step that a lot of companies mess up because they think that to have a successful creator program and get a lot of volume, you need a lot of creators. So what ends up happening is that they bring on hundreds of creators, but these creators are like mercenaries. They don't care about your product, about your brand, about you. And they're only here for your money. So what ends up happening is that you actually get thousands of talking head videos that all look the same. And Meta does not like replicates of videos. If your videos are 60% similar plus, Meta will actually cluster these videos and suppress the reach and the algorithm will just not mess with your video.
>
> So instead of doing that and shooting yourself in the foot from the get go, what you want to do is start very intent based with four to five creators. And you want to see what gaps do I specifically have in my ad library that I want to fill in. Maybe you want to create new formats, or you want to target new ICPs, or you want to speak to different people in different parts of the world. And in doing so, you're going to build this intent based creator machine and build very intentional creatives because obviously volume is great, but not if there's no intention behind them. And again, if all the videos just look the exact same, you're just going to end up targeting the same people and the same type of people over and over again at the same stage of the funnel.
>
> And now you're probably asking yourself, well, where am I going to find these creators? Well, you're not going to find them on Trybe because what's going to happen is on Trybe, you don't really have any info. No one believes in you. You don't have any ratings. You don't have any creators in the group. You haven't paid out anything and it's going to be really hard to actually recruit top creators from the platform. So instead, what I would recommend is if you have connections to creator groups, I would go that route. And if you don't have connections, the one that has never failed me and that I think is the best is the keyword search on IG. And what I mean by this is you're going to go into Instagram and you're going to look up all these different keywords, UGC, creators, tech, SaaS, and in doing so, you'll find some creators that match the quality you're looking for, the ICP you're looking for and fit maybe the new formats you're trying to test and you'll scroll through their following lists, through their followers, through their comments and their likes, and find other creators that match that style that you're looking for. Then you'll send out a hundred or 200 DMs over a few days. And by the end of the week, you should have a solid group of creators that you can get going with. And again, a small group of creators that is built intentionally will always outwork and beat the creator groups with hundreds and thousands of creators.
>
> And that leads really nicely into our fourth step, which is actually building that culture. And this is honestly a step that most companies skip because it is the most time consuming, but also the most important, because what you pour into the creators is what you will get out of the creators. And most brands, what they end up doing is just checking off the box. Again, they bring on all these creators, they don't speak to them face to face. They don't actually treat them like people and they're only there to extract all they can get out of them. And creators can feel this energy and eventually what will end up happening is you're going to have a bunch of creators churning. You're not going to be able to retain top talent because they're going to go to other brands that treat them better and actually reward them for the hard work. And you're just going to be stuck in this constant cycle of onboarding more people, onboarding more people, onboarding more people, losing your top creators, losing your top creators, and this is going to be a never ending cycle. And you're probably going to end up quitting.
>
> So what do I mean by culture? Well, you need to treat your creators like a sales team. And the same way that a sales team provides a lot of coaching, a lot of community retreats, bonuses, giveaways, et cetera, you can do the same exact thing for a creator group. And the way we do that at Wispr is we actually have creator coaches and these coaches are hosting calls with our creators. They're sending them messages, keeping them engaged. Aside from that, they also have my calendar link. So if they want to book any meetings and go deeper into strategy or ask me any questions, that's always available. We also host weekly calls with our media buyer and myself, and these are on Thursday and we actually go deeper into things we're seeing in the ad account, any patterns, new ICPs we might want to target, experiments we might want to test. And then on top of that, we also host giveaways, we do bonuses, and in these giveaways and bonuses, sometimes it can be cash and other times it can be prizes that they really value, like things that a creator would want, like camera gear, microphones, Meta glasses, et cetera. And not only do they really value these things, but it also helps us get higher quality creatives.
>
> And then the last thing we're actually doing and something that we're just testing now is we're actually hosting our first ever creator retreat in our offices in San Francisco. And we're flying in our top six creators from around the world for a week with us to go over coaching, explaining our products better, coming up with ideas, brainstorming and building that really in-person face-to-face connection that can't be created over a call. And by us doing that, we're separating ourselves from other brands. We're going to be able to retain top talent, bring in more top talent and just build the best culture.
>
> And ultimately, the top companies, any of these huge companies that you see with really good creator programs, the reason the creator programs are so successful is because they actually care about the creators and they actually invest into them. And that's what's so amazing about this platform and this model. You're able to work with people that aren't influencers and help them make thousands of dollars. And in turn, they also help you make a ton of money. And what better feeling than seeing a mom or a college student or a dad be able to actually make more money from content than they do from their regular job. Like I can't name a better feeling as a brand owner, knowing that not only is the product we have amazing, but we're also providing a lot of money for people to buy a car, to rent a better apartment, to buy better food, to take care of their family better. And yeah, I think the more you can lean into that and see them as people, give back to them, the more you will get out as a brand. And that's why culture is one of the most important things and one of the most overlooked as well, because most people nowadays just want to check the box in everything they do and are too transactional. They don't care about the relationships they're building. And that's top down from the creators to the founders, to the people in between, to the agencies you work with. You need to build a good culture and good community with everyone you have touch points with, because word gets out, whether you're working with a vendor, an agency, a founder of another company, creators, and people will know what your company is really like. And if you have a bad reputation, it's going to be really hard to retain top talent.
>
> And now that brings us to step number five, which is actually scaling the program. Because now that you have the creators and you've built up the culture, you can now gradually start to scale it. And for context, at Wispr, we started out with five creators and over four months, we got it to 50 active creators. And the reason you want to start slowly is because again, if you bring on too many creators at once, you're going to mess up the culture, you're not going to be able to attend to everyone and give them the time they need to actually feel part of your community and be fully bought in. And the way I would actually recommend scaling is going from five to 10, from 10 to 20, from 20 to
- And then once you get into the 40 to 60 range, that's when I would start to coast and only bring on killers. I mean, you should be bringing on killers throughout the entire time, but at 40 to 60, you generally don't need more creators. The best creator teams have 40 to 60 people. They're all killers and you don't need anything more, but you should obviously always be looking to bring in some people that might be able to fill in different gaps that you have, whether it be new formats, new ICPs, et cetera, or to just raise the quality bar overall.
> And the way we do that is we go through Trybe because on Trybe, there are some gems here and there, but for context, we've probably gotten like 7,000 applications on Trybe. And since our group is already really full and we have a really high bar for the quality we want in our group, we've probably only accepted about five to seven creators from the Trybe applications. And then another thing we've actually implemented into the group is we actually have a referral bonus where we will pay our creators $100 if they bring in someone that's at their level or above their level. And we make this very clear. We do not want beginners in our group, so they'll send me their Instagrams or the portfolios of their friends and I'll be like, yes, no. And then from there, we'll onboard them, get them going and pay our creators $100 referral. But again, this is a very easy way to scale your program, especially in the 10 to 20 range when you actually need more creators and higher quality creators. The referral route is one of the best to go because good creators know good creators, the same way good employees know good employees. So yeah, the referral program is one of the key things that we actually use to scale our program from five to
50.
>
> And one of the main reasons you actually also don't want to have too many creators is because creators are smart. They're going to see two brands. Imagine you have brand A over here and brand A has, let's say paid out $200,000, but they have a thousand creators in the group. And then brand B over here has paid out $100,000, but they only have 20 creators in the group. This seems a lot more exclusive, a lot more intentional and creators understand this and also understand that there's more opportunity over there for them. And creators are going to value culture over money any day of the week, because in a profession like this, where everything is virtual and you're on your phone 24/7 and you're making videos and every meeting is through a screen, that actual feeling of community is very rare. So again, tying back to four and five, it's basically the same thing. You want to find this happy medium between keeping the culture and scaling, keeping the culture and scaling.
>
> And that brings me to the sixth step, which is a phase that a lot of brand owners find themselves at, because eventually your creators will feel burnt out and will not know what to create. So what will they do? They're going to look at the top performers on Trybe and they're just going to continue to replicate those and replicate those and replicate those. And this is a topic I've covered in the past. So you guys can find that video, but basically what ends up happening is if you have a bunch of people replicating the same videos, Meta recognizes those as the same concepts and clusters them and actually suppresses the reach. So you always want to continue to push your creators to actually make these new concepts, because these new concepts are like new keys that can actually open these new doors. And if you reach that point where you just stagnate and you get to a point where you have so many creatives and everyone's just making the same creatives over and over and over again, because they see that their top performers, they're not going to succeed.
>
> And the way I actually tell my creators and push them when they're in these ruts is I'm like, okay, you see creator X, Y, and Z that are at the top of the leaderboard. The reason they're at the top of the leaderboard isn't necessarily because of the format they made. It's because they continued experimenting. They kept testing new formats, new ideas. And if you just settle down for making a lesser version of their video, you're never actually going to succeed in this group because all your videos are going to get grouped under the top performer and your videos aren't going to break out.
>
> That's how we run everything at Wispr Flow through Trybe, from hiring to scaling to building culture and coming up with new formats. And everyone's super happy. Our creators are making a bunch of money. We're getting really good concepts and formats and yeah, that's how you're going to succeed with paid ads. Let me know if you guys have any questions and what you would like me to make a video on next. Peace guys.
FAQ
How does a performance-based creator program pay creators
On output, not on hours or deliverables. Ecommerce brands pay a percentage of the GMV a creator's ad drives. Software brands pay a percentage of the ad spend behind it, because the conversion cycle is too long for revenue share to be fair. Wispr Flow pays 7% of ad spend.
What is a smart retainer
A guaranteed minimum payout for creators who hit an agreed video quota, paid as a top up only when commissions fall short of it. It exists so a brand with no payout history can still recruit strong creators, and it costs nothing once their commissions clear the floor.
How many creators does a program like this need
Far fewer than most brands assume. Wispr Flow went from five creators to 50 over four months and treats 40 to 60 as the ceiling worth having. Large groups produce near identical creatives, which Meta clusters and suppresses once videos pass about 60% similarity.
Where do brands find creators for a new program
Not on the platform itself, because a new group has no reviews or payout history to recruit against. Warm introductions through existing creator groups work best, and failing that, keyword search on Instagram, then mining the followers, comments and likes of creators who already match the bar. A batch of 100 to 200 DMs is enough to start.
Does this replace paying for UGC up front
For ad creative tied to a measurable outcome, largely yes, which is why usage rights and whitelisting stop being separate negotiations. Flat rate work still matters for content a brand needs regardless of performance, like product pages and organic posts.