After my last TGL explanation on “How I Manage 1,000 TikTok Creators”, I need to clarify something. I do not actually manage any creators anymore. The truth is I’ve stopped speaking directly to creators a while ago. I could not last long doing it directly. It is just not my thing. I am more the guy behind the computer, talking to datasets.
We put together a full team of strategists and operations to run our b2c activities. I still do not believe there is a perfectly defined final structure. What I do know is that our current setup allowed us to hit around 220M views in a week last week across our apps and partner apps. It will keep evolving if we want to reach my goal of a billion views per week.
What’s maybe more interesting than the current state of things is the journey to get to this point. In the beginning, we were very hands off with creators. When we started the “creator rental” model, we only made videos with Lindsay and Summer, two U.S. creators. One struggled at first and later went on to hit multiple videos over 6M views. The other was slightly better from the start. Back then, I felt it was important to give them space to figure out the content themselves. That approach broke down as apps became more complex to promote and verticals became harder.
In a few weeks, we realized that being hands on with strategy, formats, and concepts was not so optional. It was required to scale performance. That meant hiring strategists for ideation and iteration, and operations people to communicate with creators, make sure they post, implement feedback, and handle their day to day issues and feelings. At first, I thought strategy and operations could be split. Salva, who now leads operations, handled recruiting and ops, while I handled most of the strategy.
This turned into something close to a nightmare for me. Strategy was completely disconnected from operations, and neither side was scaling at the pace demand required. Still, we kept them as it was. Maybe it was my ego and my reluctance to let go of content strategy. Maybe it was how hard it was to find good strategists in such a new space. Probably both. The real issue was not just the disconnect, but the explosion in the number of apps and strategies we had to build and iterate for. That’s when we decided to unify strategy and creator management, and leave recruitment as a standalone function. Starting from scratch was painful. Training new hires to build strategies, implement them, and iterate daily took a lot of effort. But the results were what we needed to scale.
Two weeks ago, we ran yet another training session. The team has kept growing, and we now run weekly internal workshops on creator management, content strategy, and research. During these sessions, I fully realized how much emotional and human work goes into managing creators. I literally could never have done that myself. Some strategists, or managers of specific networks or locations, started experimenting with things like creator micro clusters, where one creator helps lead and support others in the group. The impact was great. I would never have thought to break things down into smaller clusters like that. Others run weekly calls with their creators to brainstorm strategies together.
Every app, every creator, every network of creator and every location is different, so I let go completely. By letting go, I allowed the day-to-day team to experiment and discover better and more efficient structures or at least left sufficient room for them to do things their way at the network level. In the end, everything comes down to views and our ability to sustain them over time. It’d be foolish to assume that there already is an optimal system in such a new and fast moving space.
After countless iterations and small experiments, I still do not know if there is a final structure at all. What I do know is that these strategists impress me every single day. There is no right or wrong way to do this. We are all learning and building lean, scalable systems. The structure at 20 creators, at 500, and at 5,000 will look completely different. Every lesson along the way seem to be a building block of learnings required to scale.
Right now, there is a real shortage of people who can do this job. We are trying everything to recruit, train, test, and promote talent. We have seen all outcomes. A nurse with no marketing background generated over 150M views. Someone with years of experience managing traditional influencers failed badly. Younger people often adapt faster, but some older ones perform exceptionally well too. So what actually matters?
From what I see, three things define a great manager. How fast they understand the structure of this style of videos, how well they communicate ideas to creators, and how creative they are.
First, understanding the structure of organic virality. This is harder for newcomers than I expected. To me, it feels simple. You analyze a few videos from other apps and the structure becomes obvious. In practice, it takes repetition. There is nothing better than shipping 1,000 videos. Research, copy, apply, learn, iterate.
Second, communicating ideas. Many creators struggle to understand instructions and sometimes cannot even recreate a video frame by frame. Long text explanations rarely work. A quick call often does. We do not validate videos before posting. We give feedback after, for the next batch. Micro validating everything is a massive waste of time. So when working with new creators, the manager must be a strong educator and teacher.
Third, finding creative ideas. This requires daily global research, tracking creators across every relevant app, and documenting viral formats constantly. It also means forcing everyone to scroll daily, create separate accounts for each vertical, and train their algorithms to surface ideas. Research is the most important lever if you want to unlock a 100M view format. You need that spark. As I said on some call, we are not artists. We do not want recognition after we are gone. We want to innovate 20 percent of the time, then repeat and squeeze the remaining 80 percent.
The truth is that this is a dream job for a lot of people. Managing creators and working on Instagram and TikTok feels exciting to a generation that grew up with stories, influencers, and social entertainment. Many tell me all the time how much they love what they do. It is human, social, and creative. You push an idea out and get instant feedback from the algorithm. When a video goes viral, the dopamine hits.
When you find strong strategists, you should take great care of them and keep growing things around them. They may end up being the main engine that drives your top of funnel.
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