Kuse’s 150M Impression UGC Playbook

I met with Kathy Liu a few weeks ago who shared she was leveraging UGC for growth at Junior.so. She explained that they were the child company under Kuse.ai and were bootstrapped and had to be scrappy.

When she started going into how they hit 150M impressions in a few short months, my ears perked up. I made her tell me everything and today I’m sharing that with you.

The Problem

Last November, I took over growth for Kuse.ai, a collaborative workspace for docs, sheets, websites & slides. Bootstrapped startup, limited budget, product nobody in North America had heard of.

The default playbook: influencer marketing. But KOLs wanted $6,000 per video with no view guarantees. Industry CPM runs $8-12. We couldn't afford it and even if we could, there was no guarantee it would work.

So I tried UGC.

The result: 150M views in 4 months. If you're growing a 2C product and traditional methods aren't working, here's exactly what we did.

What is UGC?

User-Generated Content: you find micro-creators who love making videos, have them post about your product daily on TikTok/Instagram, and your goal is to produce viral videos, duplicate what works, and drive top-of-funnel awareness until people sign up and convert.

Where Most People Go Wrong

Most UGC attempts fail for two reasons:

1. Using platforms like Sideshift - sounds efficient, delivers inconsistent quality

2. DMing established creators directly - expensive, already loyal to other brands

Better path: go through UGC coaches. These are people on Instagram and TikTok who teach others how to become UGC creators. Their students are hungry for paid work and already understand the format.

You pay coaches a referral commission per creator they place; they get to tell students “I helped you land a paid gig.” 

Clean value exchange.

The Playbook

Step 1: Find coaches, not creators.

Search “UGC coach” on Instagram or TikTok. Skip the biggest accounts — find engaged communities. Pitch: “I’m looking for UGC creators. Can you refer students? I’ll pay [X]% commission per creator.” We reached out to five coaches. Most responded within days.

Step 2: Recruit for the right traits.

Ignore background entirely. What matters: comfortable on camera, understands UGC, can produce consistently. One hard requirement: one video per workday. Virality is quality × volume × luck — you need all three. We started with 5 creators in November. By April, 40 active across North America and Asia.

Step 3: Write the scripts yourself.

Unlike influencer marketing, you control the narrative. Structure:

• Hook (attention-grabbing, not product-focused): “The first rule of using Excel is to never let anybody know you’re using it”

• Solution (product demo with B-roll): “Go to [product] and ask it to make any sheet you want”

• Results (demonstrate capability): “You can select data, generate new columns, make charts — all automatically”

• CTA (engagement-optimized): “Comment ‘Excel’ and I’ll send you the playbook”

The CTA matters. “Comment [word]” drives comments, which signals engagement to the algorithm. It performs better than “link in bio” every time.

Our highest-performing script:

“Welcome to part one of side hustles for idiots. Yes, I’m talking about you, so go ahead and save this video because I know you’re gonna forget. For this one, you only need one tool, a computer. Open your computer, type in ChatGPT, ask it for good app ideas, ask it to pick the best one, and make it MVP. I know you don’t know what an MVP is, don’t worry about it. It’s gonna pop out a code. Copy it. Open Kuse.ai. Paste your code right here. Select start building. Give it like 5 minutes and we’ll build your app for you. Here’s a fitness app that I’m testing right now. After you’re done testing it, you can make edits here and publish to the app store. All you have to do is add a paywall through the app store and you’re done.”

Step 4: Pay for performance, not upfront.

• Threshold: 2,000 views minimum

• Payment: $30–40 per qualifying video, uncapped upside (top creators made hundreds per video at 1M+ views)

• No payment if it doesn’t hit threshold

This keeps CPM well below the $8-12 industry standard. Good creators earn well; bad ones churn naturally.

Step 5: Solve operations before they solve you.

At 40 creators, I was spending 30+ hours/week on: onboarding (contracts, NDAs, payment forms), daily posting reminders (40 people × 5 days = 200 nudges/week), video review, analytics tracking, and payment calculations.

I automated most of it using Junior.so , an AI employee that handles contracts, daily creator pushes via Discord, analytics, and payment calculations.

Time dropped from 30+ hours/week to 3–4 hours/week. Automate this before you scale past 10 creators, or you become the bottleneck.

The Results

• 150 million views over 4 months

• CPM well below the $8-12 industry standard

• 5 creators → 40, zero additional headcount

• UGC became our primary acquisition channel

Time to first viral video: 1–2 weeks in Asia, 6 weeks in North America.

The persistence principle applies everywhere: some videos get 3,000 views, some get 1 million. You can’t predict which.

Post daily until the algorithm picks one up.

- Kathy Liu, Growth at Kuse

Want to learn from more Revenue Creators like Kathy? Join the RevGenius community and be part of the movement rewriting the GTM playbook.

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