UGC Handbook / Lesson 05 of 14 / Chapter II: Make

Founders film first: flop on your own phone before you pay a creator to

Jay is a solo founder with 60 creators posting for his app, 44 million views a month, $65,000 in monthly revenue.

He is still the top performer in his own network. Highest views for the past 3 months.

That is not an accident of talent. On Superwall's channel he explained the rule that built the network: "I only have my creators remake the ones that hit. All the flopping's done on my end."

This lesson is that rule, turned into a week you can run starting tomorrow.

Why the founder goes first

The obvious reason is money. The less obvious reason is that you cannot manage what you have never done.

The money reason. Casper, a creator who has made sponsored videos for many apps, put it from his side of the table: "It can be demoralizing for a lot of people to pay a creator a couple thousand dollars and the video flops." On a 2025 Superwall episode with Joseph Choi of Consumer Club, the example given was a creator paid $2,000 to $3,000 plus a retainer whose video could land at 800 views. A founder's flop costs an afternoon.

The management reason. Yiannis, a machine learning scientist whose accounts did roughly 300 million views last year, was blunt: "I would advise any founder to try to post themselves first, even just to go through the motions and understand what your team is going to go through." His follow-up: "there is no way you're just going to delegate to someone that is not part of your core team and make it a success consistently."

Drew Levan helped build the UGC (user-generated content) marketplace Sideshift, which lets him see what content is pulling hundreds of millions of views and downloads. His version: "you need to be this hands-on in the beginning, whoever it is." If you have the time, "you should do it yourself."

Before Sideshift's own content went viral, his co-founder Nick was the one posting. Drew added a detail worth sitting with: six months before the interview, "all the best UGC programs were being run by founders who were under the age of 25," and he said that was already changing.

The recruiting reason. Matt, who runs Jenny AI's UGC program (75 million views, 150 creators, under $2 per thousand views), described the chicken-and-egg: you cannot recruit good creators without social proof, and you cannot get social proof without content. Asked whether founders should just pick up the phone and make a TikTok: "100%." When he grew his own startup, he worked with no creators at all and made all the content himself, partly from clips of friends and family.

Dan Kwan, whose Conch AI hit $500,000 in revenue from a single viral video, goes further than most: "if you're a founder and you're scared to do any sort of founder-led marketing, then you shouldn't be building your app." His reasoning is not about charisma. At a cold start, "the founder's the biggest influencer," and the content does not need production value.

Matt's own instruction for the first video: "pick up a phone, get in front of it, no matter how terrible it feels." And a second one: "don't watch it back a year later."

Flop cheap, hand over winners

Jay's process is a filter, not a performance. He comes up with all the ideas, tests them on his own account, and gives creators only the formats that already worked. On what makes that safe: a good text hook, in his experience, "works across the board" for his creators, including the ones he considers weaker actors.

The corollary is that the test is cheap because the unit is small. The hook A/B in Lesson 04 is the scale of it: one changed first line separated a viral video from a flop.

That is one line of text. You do not need a creator to find that out. You need a phone and a week.

Jay's numbers for what "worked" means: 75 to 80% of viewers still watching after 3 seconds, and 4,000 to 5,000 views per post consistently. Lesson 04 covers how to read that. Jay adds one honest caveat: he has posted for a month at 81% retention with nothing going viral, so "worked" means the format is right, not that the next post will hit.

So commit before you film:

If you skip the blank, you will hand creators your favourite idea instead of your best-performing one. Those are rarely the same.

The first 3 days with creators

Founder-first does not end when creators arrive. It changes shape.

Drew Levan's observation from the best-run campaigns on Sideshift: "the first three days of a campaign, the best managers or the best founders, what they'll do is they'll do video reviews before the creators post their videos and give a lot of feedback in the beginning." After that, a weekly call to walk through videos together. His point about the founder: by giving that feedback, "they're learning a lot," and they end up knowing what they are looking for.

Jay keeps posting after his creators are running. "I do think that it helps a lot that I'm also posting alongside them. I think it motivates them a bit more when they see me as the founder getting in the trenches as well."

Annoying, but true: the founder never fully leaves the content loop. The job just shifts from filming everything to filming the tests.

The founder's face is also a trust asset

There is a second reason to film yourself, and it shows up further down the funnel than views.

Nancy Anderson founded Natal, an app for pre and postpartum fitness. On the Sub Club podcast she described her entire strategy as founder-led growth: she posts relatable, sometimes unflattering clips of her own life, answers every DM and comment within 24 hours, and has tried repeatedly to hire out content production. "It just doesn't really work."

Her numbers, in her own words and with her own hedges: download-to-trial "I think is 17% against a 6% health and fitness average." Trial conversion "is like 68%" against an industry average she puts at 38%. Of people who reach her web checkout, 93% go on to download the app.

She runs some paid ads too, so this is not a pure organic story.

Nancy is careful not to claim causation. She calls those stats "just a signal that trust has been built before the paywall," and admits she "can't clearly measure" the effect of that trust. Host David Barnard framed her as the opposite of the scaled-UGC path: she chose not to scale with many creators at all.

You do not have to choose her path to take the point. Jay, who did scale with creators, said his early content was "very founder-led," his face in everything, sharing milestones publicly. Of his first 6,000 users, "a lot of those were people that really liked me," who stuck around when the app was not perfect.

Both founders started the same way. They just decided later how far to hand it off.

Do this: the founder-filming week

1. Pick one format. Lesson 01 chose it. Do not switch mid-week.
2. Write 10 hook lines using the Lesson 04 scoring sheet, score them, and keep the 3-of-3 lines.
3. Film 2 per day for 5 days, on your phone. Text hook on screen, product by second 3, no editing beyond captions.
4. Post daily on one account. Do not spread across platforms yet.
5. Log every post at 48 hours in the table below: 3-second retention, views, "what's the app?" comments, link clicks.
6. Decide on day 7, one of four ways: - ≥75% retention and comments asking for the app → Scale (hand to a creator). - 60 to 75% → Iterate the line. - Views but no "what app" comments → Watch one more round. - Under 60% → Kill.
7. When a creator remakes a winner, review their first 3 videos before they post. After that, once a week.