🎯 The “cheap creator” trap

When it comes to scaling your app’s user acquisition, the instinct is often to recruit as many low-cost micro-creators as possible to save on budget.

When you go bargain-basement on UGC, you pay in time. Drafting scripts, filming, editing, loads of revisions and back-and-forth, and social fatigue from chasing trends

In practice, one high-caliber creator who “gets it” from day one can deliver better results more efficiently.

Top creators require less hand-holding. They understand what makes content pop, they iterate swiftly on feedback, and they often bring their own audience-ready ideas.

🪄 By paying a premium on the front end, you reclaim precious time to focus on everything else without having to manage lower-quality creators. Sometimes the smartest growth hack isn’t a bargain. It’s pulling the lever on talent.

Yes, their CPMs may be 30–50% higher than an untested novice. But because you spend far fewer hours in briefing calls, review cycles, and contract negotiations, your true cost per hour of effort plummets.

Moreover, high-end creators frequently tap into premium audiences and unlock virality more predictably.

The reduction in time a high-value creator may bring to finding high-quality formats may be well worth the premium.

💬 When to keep vs cut a creator

The unfortunate reality is that sometimes, for seemingly no fault of their own, creators just don’t have it.

You get them to recreate the working formats, matching all the lighting, vibes, visuals, music and all, and they just can’t crack more than 1,000 views.

So it raises the question - do I have enough data about this creator to confidently say ‘this is no longer a coaching or scripting problem, and continuing this relationship would be burning money and time unnecessarily…’?

There isn’t a right answer here, but there is advice:

• Early wins matter: If a creator can hit your baseline (say, 20K views on a new account or a consistent 3–5% click-through), keep testing them. Those early “yeses” show they understand your audience and can scale.

• Bandwidth vs upside: How much handholding do they need vs what I believe they can achieve for me and my product? If you’re doing lots of re-writes, script writing, and burning time trying to get them over the line but only seeing a handful of downloads, it may be time to give a friendly goodbye.

• An honest check-in: Life happens. People hit bumps, misunderstand priorities, and all sorts of possible problems can arise. Making a clear, data-backed care plan (“Let’s refocus on these three hooks, drop the others”) can reignite the spark.

• Benching, not blacklisting: When all else fails and you can’t justify paying this person anymore, consider benching this person and keeping them in your community instead of a total rejection. If they start showing promise of better content, you can quickly pick up from where you were.

Some say you need to give creators 20-30 videos before you can accurately judge. In my view, you can be far more aggressive.

If they’re already working in this niche, and can’t turn working formats into more than a few k views or having some success with experimentals early, then they likely just don’t ‘have it’.

TikTok for example doesn’t care how new your account is. They care about whether you keep eyeballs looking at your content, and a new account can do this with the right creator.

Because you’re essentially trying to predictably hack the brains attention centre - and good luck with that lol - it’s a bit black magic.

Your creator might just not have the chops needed to capture attention.