After months of testing, experimenting, and rebuilding our UGC system multiple times, this is the creator program team system we ultimately landed on.
Recruiter(s)
New Creator
Lead Creator
Strategist
Lead Strategist
Head of Strategy
This structure works best when running a network of networks with a large number of creators.
With FMC; we went through about 1,000 creators. While not all of them are active today, a strong portion still is.
In this TGL #2, I want to focus only on the creator side and set the rest of the infrastructure aside for another edition.
Creators
New creators must be onboarded continuously.
The reason is simple: You need a large pool to find the truly strong ones.
One great creator can drive outsized results. Some of ours generated more than 100M views across multiple apps. At scale, this follows a clear power law. When you study other creator networks, the same pattern shows up again and again.
The goal is to reduce the risk created by that power law. Relying too heavily on a few creators makes the system fragile. The best solution is to increase the number of high quality creators.
To do that, you need to expand the top of the funnel as much as possible.
There is no single trait that defines a great creator. It is not about looks. It comes down to expression, adaptability, and versatility. TikTok is driven by relatability.
There also seems to be something about certain phones or users where all of their accounts get pushed. My suspicion is that the algorithm rewards creators who consistently perform well, even across multiple accounts.
This is not proven and is mostly personal observation. It does not change the strategy either way.
Within one week, you can tell if a creator is easy to work with and communicates well. Within two or three weeks, you know whether they can produce true outliers.
An outlier is a video that performs 10 to 50x above the median views for an account. This matters because without outliers, it is impossible to tell whether the content, the account, or the creator is actually good or bad.
Strong performance on one account does not guarantee strong performance on another account or in a different niche.
If you run a single app, you should encourage your best creators to open additional accounts. This goes against common belief, but the upside is significant. You save time, improve results, and simplify operations.
Managing five creators with five accounts each is much easier than managing twenty five different creators.
Most creator program operators prefer the latter, but the former is often a highly scalable option. In the long run, if you work with many creators, you will naturally have a mix of established creators running multiple accounts and newer, trending creators with a single account.
The key is to slowly isolate your top creators and keep them motivated.
Once they are running multiple accounts, you should move them into exclusive UGC contracts. This matters because top creators are constantly approached by other apps looking for shortcuts for hiring talents.
Creators are not motivated by money alone.
They care about strong management and meaningful work. It may sound surprising, but it is real. We have creators who stayed with us even when others offered up to three times more pay. That matters because you never want your creators to be bid away by competitors or well funded players in your vertical.
Why Creator Programs Fail
While researching for Social Growth Engineers and experimenting myself, I have seen and made many mistakes.
Most mistakes are content mistakes.
Often, content mistakes are creator mistakes, when a creator simply cannot execute on the content.
The best approach I found is to trial creators on the four core formats:
1/ wall of text
2/ hook to demo
3/ green screen
4/ talking head
There are other formats, but these are enough to cover most use cases you will face.
The recruiting and training pipeline matters more than anything else, particularly in competitive niches and advanced content categories.
You need clean, sharp edits and creators who can speak confidently and persuasively. The Turbo AI creators are a strong example of this done well.
Cycle through
Cycling through many creators is one of the most effective ways to break through the noise and identify the exceptional ones. These power law outliers tend to generate the majority of the value.
Time and time again, even a creator who seems average can become the standout if her account gains traction. One account can end up driving more than 90 percent of the results across the network.
This approach starts to resemble a venture capital model.
The ongoing challenge is always increasing the number of accounts that perform so risk is spread as widely as possible.
At scale, everything becomes numbers driven. You focus on metrics, outliers, and total weekly views across the network. Stay consistent, keep output high, and the system works in your favor.
Start with one or a few, then scale to many
At the start, I recommend running accounts yourself.
If that is not an option, begin with five to ten creator accounts. Use this phase to learn how to manage a small team and decide which creators to keep and which to remove.
You will face nearly every operational issue during this stage.
Once you move past that phase, scaling to 50 or more creators becomes an operational challenge.
The key is scaling without sacrificing content quality, as that is where the strongest economics are built. There are many ways to approach this, but that discussion is for another day.
Less than 50 team
I went deep into TikTok, and after researching over hundreds of apps, the space is largely mapped out in my head.
I believe there are fewer than 50 teams successfully running creator networks with more than 100 creators for app growth. Some people, including the Cluely founder, have said publicly that the number is under 10. From what I have seen, it is higher, and I would place it closer to 50. This only counts human creator networks for apps, not faceless or clipper networks, which would increase the total.
This is still early. Knowledge is being built, and the channel will mature as more marketers take these systems from company to company.
I am confident this number will grow to 250 or more within a year. Anyone who has experienced this firsthand knows the economics at scale are too compelling to ignore. If your product market fit and content market fit align, this becomes an obvious full scale channel.
May your top of funnel be blessed.
G,
from The Social Growth Engineers Team.
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