I never had Instagram.
I opened TikTok for the first time 18 months ago.
I’m not Gen Z.
I don’t an obvious edge in this b2c organic content game.
(the only edge I might have, if any, is being a growth engineer and marketer for 10 years.)
What I found after posting tens of thousands of videos—failing, winning, and everything in between—is that what’s often seen as “luck” (going viral) can actually be turned into a probabilistic game.
Therefore, “scale” is what differentiates a growth scientist from a regular marketer or solo creator or influencer.
Scale is the key ingredient to stable, low-cost and predictable UGC marketing.
Scale helps you reach daily averages that make organic growth a viable long-term channel, and it helps you get the economics right.
It’s hard. Scaling hundreds of creators or 500 videos or more a day without lowering the quality of videos or creators.
You need to isolate variables—whether creator, account, or content—and therefore, scale is the only thing that’ll give you real answers.
Like Sam says, “more compute, more energy”, I like to say, “more videos, more creators” (not that I’m comparing myself to Sam).
The same logic applies here. Assume you’re converting at an A% rate to viral videos, or that your % of users driven/converted from views is X%.
You can easily reverse-engineer a business model from there to figure out the scale you’d need to hit consistent milestones—also taking in consideration that both content and accounts compound, of course.
There’s a power law to understand: one video or one account often drives a significant share of total view value.
You don’t want power law. You should find more performing accounts to spread risk.
The way we’re scaling creator networks for our apps is through lean, constant recruiting operations and hands-on strategy management.
We hot-swap creators often and duplicate accounts when someone is performing exceptionally well.
We take care of our superstars (15M+ views per account) the way they deserve.
It becomes a talent business, but also a mass recruiting one at a certain scale—especially as economics compress when scale kicks in.
A talent might leave for a competitor or start asking for much higher rates. Scale, once again, protects you from this talent war as you bring in more talent.
If you have a fully organic TikTok/Reel-powered app: all views lead to Rome.
You just have to figure out your profit rate per video or thousand videos (or creator or thousand creators) and crunch the numbers to maximize volume.
Scale is also an issue there. If things work, you just can’t get enough creators to produce enough videos. Unlike paid user acquisition, you can’t spend more as revenue keeps increasing.
But that’s a good problem to have.
That’s the kind of problem you want to have.
Sometimes it’s skill issues, but more often, it’s scale issues.
Many viral formats we’ve found by “accident” as a consequence of scale, and then we’ve doubled down on them to pay back for that scale.
Not always, of course.
It’s usually somewhere in the middle.
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