Guarantee small creators a minimum plus commission and they will make hundreds of ads a month
The trick is a platform called Tribe, plus 150 to 250 handpicked Instagram messages to find the first five creators.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career · How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector SerranoHector Serrano runs creator ads for Whisper, and his system now produces 500 to 600 new ads every month.
Serrano borrowed the idea from an earlier organic program that paid creators for views. He applied that roster and performance pay idea to paid ads, with videos that pitch the product directly, and he runs it through Tribe, spelled T-R-Y-B-E.
Tribe was started by Lucas Pachter, a founder who first built a clothing brand called Squid Hoss and grew it quickly through TikTok Shop. When there was no equivalent way to pay creators based on results on Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, he built an internal tool to do it and later opened it to other companies. Serrano called it "the TikTok shop method, but for Meta ads," and a way for software companies that cannot use TikTok Shop to pay for performance.
The pay structure is what keeps new creators dedicated. Whisper sets up a group on Tribe that pays a cut of ad spending for software, or a cut of sales for physical products. On top of that, it offers what Serrano calls a smart retainer, a floor tied to output.
The example he gives is $1,500 for 25 videos. If a creator hits the 25 videos but earns only $500 in commission, Whisper tops it up with another $1,000. If the same creator earns $3,000 in commission, the creator keeps the commission and gets no top up. Creators who join live on the floor in month one, month two, and month three. After three or four months, Serrano says, they start to break out to commission alone, which is the best outcome for the brand because it pays only on ads that get spending.
Serrano's advice: don't wait for creators to find you on Tribe. A new group shows zero dollars paid out, and creators skip it. Serrano went to Instagram instead, searched keywords for his niche, from tech workers to lawyers to sleep and supplements, and then went down rabbit holes through the following and follower lists of creators he liked, on the theory, as Serrano put it, that "good creators know other good creators."
He says sending 150 to 250 highly targeted direct messages in about a week, with no mass automation, will probably produce five or six strong starters. Then he built culture around them with weekly meetings, creator coaches, giveaways, and a retreat in San Francisco for top creators. Done carefully once, he says, that manual outreach meant he never had to do outreach again.
Questions people ask
How does commission on ad spend actually work?
Under this model, the creator makes a short video about the product, the brand runs it as a paid ad on Meta or TikTok, and the creator gets a percentage of the money the brand spends to show that ad. Serrano's reasoning is that for software, where a sale can take weeks, a cut of ad spend is simpler than trying to trace each signup.
Is the guaranteed floor extra pay?
It is a minimum tied to output, not a salary on top of commission. Hit the quota, such as 25 videos, and you are guaranteed, say, $1,500 total. If commissions are lower, the brand tops you up, and if commissions are higher, you keep the higher amount.
Where do you find the first creators?
Serrano searches Instagram by niche keywords and digs through the following lists of creators he likes, because good creators tend to follow other good creators. He says to keep each message targeted and manual, not sent through mass automation software.