How do you find UGC creators for your brand?

Why not just hire creators off a platform?

You can, and plenty of brands do. Two things tend to go wrong.

The first is fit. If your customer is a particular age or type of person, finding creators who genuinely look like them is harder than it sounds, and the ones who do fit can charge premium rates per video. You end up paying top dollar for someone who has never used your product.

The second is risk. If your product is expensive, seeding it to random creators is a gamble. You ship out a high-ticket item, a weak video comes back, and you’re just sitting there going, oh my god, what a waste.

Your customers fix both problems. They’ve already bought, often more than once. They know what the product does because they’ve lived with it. And they look like your next customer because they were your last one.

Who should you email first?

Your repeat buyers. I would send an email out to anyone who has placed an order more than three times. They’ve already told you with their wallets that they like what you make.

Make it a plain-text note from the founder. No designed template, no hero banner. Say you’re looking for a few customers to make short videos about the product, that you’ll send them product and pay a modest fee for every video you can use, and link a short form for anyone who’s keen. Send one reminder a few days later, and that’s it.

When we’ve done this before, we’ve had up to 50 people put their hand up. For the sake of a couple of emails, just give it a crack.

How many creators do you need?

Five to start. More once it’s working.

On that first email, I like the nuclear approach. We want too many people, and then we filter out. Cast the net wide, then pick the five who look the most reliable. Five creators you can count on is a proper start.

Once those five are delivering, build out the pipeline. Get to about ten creators who genuinely use the product, on a monthly retainer, and you’re laughing. That’s steady content every month without chasing anyone for a video.

What if some customers already have a following?

Then make it a proper ambassador programme. This suits high-ticket products especially, where you’d much rather back someone who already owns one than post stock out to strangers.

Make it application-based. Promote it in your post-purchase flows and in your website footer, aimed at customers who already have an audience. Give them good reasons to apply: early access to new products, special pricing, and paid content opportunities. Later on, you can layer in tools that auto-publish their videos to your ad account with a revenue share.

How much should you script them?

Barely. The UGC that wins is usually a creator just being a creator, talking about the brand in their own words. That’s the ad that’s going to perform better, because it doesn’t look like an ad.

Hand creators a prescriptive script and the content gets fragmented and feels forced. Give them a light brief and let them talk. Customers are good at this, because they already know what they like about the product.

How do you stop it becoming another job for the founder?

Put it on a simple Kanban board in something like Asana. Columns for everyone who’s replied, worth talking to, briefed, filming and delivered. Ideas from your media buyer or copywriter drop into the board, go out to creators, and finished videos come back for editing.

Anything that relies 100% on you has a risk of becoming a bottleneck. Do the heavy lifting early, while you’re finding your first five, then hand the board to someone else to run.