“People mistake UGC for thinking it's just college kids making content. But UGC is user-generated content, and if you're a dev tool, your user is probably an older technical person. For those audiences, the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they perform. Some of our best ads, you'd look at them and say, holy cow, these are such bad ads. But they perform the best for audiences that are a bit older and a bit more technical.”
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · In-Depth Interviews · November 2026
Context
Answering a question about dev tools and other non-consumer products, he says UGC works for any product if you recruit real users who match the buyer, and that plain screen recordings often beat polished creative with technical buyers.
Transcript
…get five different creators that can all make net new concepts. And like it just exponentially grows the more different creators you bring on board. So it's like, not just the point about bringing a few creators, it's also being very specific about those few creators you're actually bringing in.
And so when you say that, it's think about what customer kind of market, what ICP you're targeting, and what's a creator that will speak to that audience.
Exactly. So at Whisper, we have everything from like moms to lawyers. We have like the awesome thing about Whisper is like when you have a product that people love, like you get so many cool people wanting to work with your brand. We have like an eight-figure e-comm founder that loves Whisper so much that he just makes ads for us. And it's like, I find that pretty incredible. Like some dude who has a successful e-comm business, he loves Whisper so much and he just wants to be part of the community. And he's like 45, has kids. And yeah, like we have basically anything you can imagine: engineers, lawyers, moms, sales reps, agency owners, any type of ICP you can imagine. And I get this question a lot as well from a lot of founders and different businesses reaching out and they'll be like, oh, well, I have a dev tool or I'm in the sleep space. I can't make content for my brand or I have. Had success with UGC. And a lot of times what happens is people mistake UGC for thinking it's just college kids making content. But UGC is user-generated content. And if you're a dev tool, your user is probably going to be an older technical person. And you can't get by bringing on an 18-year-old who isn't technical to talk about your…
And this unexpected element of what works is part of the reason I imagine you run so many ads. You mentioned you guys like 700, 500, 1,000 ads a month. Part of the reason is to discover the ones that are working.
Exactly. Yeah, because ads, I would say, is almost weird in organic content. Like I can kind of put my finger on what works on organic, but sometimes I'll see an ad that comes in. I'm like, what the heck is this? And it ends up becoming the best performer. So that's why I think it's just good to…
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