When to start UGC
One threshold, the reason behind it, and what to do with the money until you get there.
At five thousand a month of revenue, not before. UGC and influencer marketing both work by handing your message to other people, so you have to know exactly what the message is first, and you do not know that until a few thousand a month of steady payers has told you. Below five thousand the same money finds more customers by hand, and a first campaign of ten videos costs about a thousand dollars, which is a fifth of a month’s revenue at the threshold and a bad bet below it.
Why five thousand and not earlier?
Because the brief is the whole job. A creator campaign is you writing down what makes someone say yes and paying other people to say it convincingly. If that sentence is still a guess, you are paying to distribute a guess at scale.
The failure looks like success for about three weeks. You get ten videos, some views, a handful of installs, and no way to tell whether the format failed, the hook failed or the product is wrong. Ten conversations would have told you which. That is why the money is better spent by hand below the threshold: not because creators do not work, but because you cannot read the result yet.
What should I do instead until then?
Make the content yourself, using the formats that already work. Every format on the ad formats page can be filmed on a phone for nothing, and doing it yourself is how you find out which hook lands before you pay anyone to repeat it.
Alongside that: fifty specific outreaches a week, one useful public reply a day, alerts on your category so you are first into the thread, and getting into the roundups your buyers already read. That last one is the only free move that can show up in AI answers within days.
Not yet
- Paying creators. Five thousand a month, and the number does not move because you found a cheap creator.
- Whitelisting. Running ads from a creator’s account costs 50 to 100 percent on top of the base fee and is for creative that has already proven itself.
- A managed creator programme. That is for when volume is the bottleneck, which is a much later problem.
How do I know I am ready?
You can write the first line of the ad yourself, from memory, because you have heard customers say it. If you would have to invent it, you are not ready regardless of revenue.
The revenue number is a proxy for that. Five thousand a month of steady payers usually means a few hundred conversations have happened and the same complaint has come up enough times that you know the words. If you hit five thousand through one big customer or a fluke launch, the proxy is wrong and the test is still the first line.
Good to know
When should I start UGC or influencer marketing?
At five thousand a month of revenue, once you already have a message that converts. Both hand your message to other people, so knowing the message is the prerequisite.
What if I have budget but not revenue?
Spend it on the twenty dollar ad tests and on your own time talking to customers. Budget does not substitute for knowing the message, and creator campaigns are the most expensive way to find out you did not have one.
How much does a first campaign cost?
A few hundred to a thousand dollars. Messaging ten small creators directly costs fifteen to twenty five a video up front plus two dollars per thousand views against a cap. A marketplace is about a hundred a video with no per-view element. Add a small paid budget behind the best two either way.
This expands the Above the clouds camp on the climb, which lays out the stages either side of it. Tools by job are on the route index, the free ones are here, and the other answers are in insights. Updated 30 July 2026.