500 Million Views Brought Too Few Customers, So Whisper Ended the Program

Tobin joined Whisper as an intern with almost no marketing experience. He had studied finance and once thought about becoming a lawyer, and Whisper, which sells business software for work, gave him a small budget and loose instructions.

His boss, Tanay, the founder, told him to throw stuff at the wall and see what stuck. After a few projects went nowhere, Tobin built a group of creators who posted short videos about Whisper on their own accounts. In about two and a half months, the group produced around 500 million views at a very low cost, but the views did not lead to many paying customers, so Whisper shut the program down.

The setup was simple. A creator who joined would start an alternate account on TikTok or Instagram, separate from a personal page, and post only Whisper videos there. Whisper paid for attention on a CPM basis, meaning cost per thousand views, for example roughly $2 per thousand views, with the rate falling as views climbed higher.

The numbers were large and cheap. Hector Serrano, who leads the paid creator program on the content side at Whisper, said it “worked decently well” as attention. But many viewers were students, and students were reluctant to pay for a work tool.

That gap mattered. This was a period when many companies focused on large view totals, and Serrano said Whisper decided those totals were vanity metrics because they produced few paying customers. Views were high but sales were low, and the result was not the success the company wanted.

Then Tobin left to join Polymarket, another company, and Whisper faced the task of replacing him on a program that had not delivered. The company killed it, in part because paid advertising was working better.

Serrano later reused Tobin’s core idea, building a roster of creators and paying for performance, and applied it to paid ads that pitched the product more directly.