Capture & Scale Word Of Mouth

UGC (user-generated content) is the holy grail for businesses when it comes to marketing. 

Someone who loves your product enough to create content about it means you’ve either hit the mark (or completely missed it). 

The issue is that most companies don’t incentivise people to create UGC or track its effectiveness. 

Here’s how we’ve captured nearly 1 M views in UGC with our client Adaptdefy for < $5K. 

We use a platform called Whop, which, in its simplest form, is a storefront app (think Shopify) where people submit content that they post on their social channels, and you pay them for it.

You can then use this for your own social channels & paid ads.

The remainder of this email is the TL;DR for setting up a Whop (I’ve included a 9-page Google Doc at the bottom of the email for more detail if you want it).

1. Head over to Whop & sign up for an account using your brand email ([email protected]) & open your own store
   

2. Create a new product:

   • Type: Community / Membership

   • Name it Creators Club or (Your Brand) UGC Program
     

3. Create a community and add these apps to your store (this is where you will talk to your creators):

   Required Channels

   • 📢 announcements – install the forum app

   • ❓ questions – install the chat app
     

4. Create a reward for people to submit their UGC for you - here are the minimum things to include when creators submit content:
   

   • Content types (testimonial, POV, unboxing)

   • Length & format (e.g. 15–45s, 9:16)

   • Filming rules (lighting, audio, no filters)

   • Talking points (not scripts)

   • Submission instructions

     

     Example of what’s in our Whop

5. Get your store URL

Once you’ve got the basics set up, you can now start recruiting creators to make UGC for you by inviting them to your store.

This is by far the most challenging part, and where you need to spend the time.

Here’s the best way to do it:

• Send a personalised email or DM (A Loom is even better) to your current customers who have previously created content or purchased from you
  

• Here’s the message:
  
  “Hey (first name),
  
  Kale here. I wanted to reach out and personally thank you for creating content for us (or for buying from us).
  
  We’ve built a platform where we pay people to create content for us.
  
  If this sounds like you, just hit reply, and I’ll walk you through it.”
  

• Join a call to show them how to use it and set up their account
  

• Keep going until you get 10 creators

As with all marketing, determine the cost of time, money, and effort to set this up versus the expected return.

Adaptdefy tripled last year’s revenue from BFCM & a big contributor was the amount of creative we got to use from this community.

Here’s the whole document on setting up Whop if you want to dive deeper.

Focus

A few months back a food-truck operator blew up at me.

"you're taking up a park and never buy anything, go park somewhere else"

Later that day after he calmed down I went back and apologised and promised to park elsewhere. It's not that he owned the carparks (they were public car-parks) but I felt bad for him.

I recognised that person.

It was me 7 years ago battling to keep my gym alive, picking fights with anyone and everyone.

My best guess as to why I was doing that is because the situation felt out of my control and somehow picking a fight with Vodafone to save me a few dollars on my phone bill was getting me back some of that control.

Looking back that was childish and embarrassing behaviour. And silly because Vodafone could have offered me a free phone for the next 100 years and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the $100k hole I’d dug myself.

I needed more members - that's the only thing that was going to save my business.

That's why when I went back later to apologise I offered some advice.

He had a glaringly obvious problem.

From the road or even the street it was impossible to know what food he was selling (beautiful Argentina sandwiches). His only signage was on his truck - it was all text, no images - and it was only readable from arms-length.

I passed that on, which I think made him like me even less and he did nothing about it.

Today he shut down.

I'm not saying that new signage would have saved him. And maybe he couldn't afford it. But it definitely would have helped and I think if he'd stopped being so angry at the world for two minutes to think about why he's got no customers, he might have figured this out.

And the real kicker is; I was probably one of his best customers. I'd been buying one of his sandwiches almost weekly, since he opened, via deliver-easy. I even recommended him to friends.

I didn't mention that to him that day. But I also never ordered from him again.

In hindsight I should have just shared my gym story with him. It would have been far more valuable than some unsolicited advice which he was in no frame of mind to listen to.