Hey all,
Happy Sunday from NYC. September hit and every founder I know woke up from their August nap at the exact same time. Welcome back, we have work to do.
In July I wrote about customer creator programs because it became the most requested build in Knight Vision history. Forus, beehiiv, Ploy and more are all running one right now.
And these are not scrappy startups testing a trend. Forus is a billion-dollar company. Ploy was started by Bryant Chou, who co-founded Webflow (the $4B one) and just raised a $27M seed from First Round and YC to build it. beehiiv powers the newsletter you are reading right now.
When operators at this level all buy the same build, pay attention.
Here's why they do it: when you can prove your customers give a damn about you, that's a moat. And it compounds. Every product looks the same right now (I wrote a whole issue on this), so differentiation is shifting to marketing and activation.
Customer relationships are the one asset your competitor cannot copy or outspend.
Since then, the same question has hit my inbox: why would my customer ever bother making content for my brand in the first place?
In July, we covered what the program is and who to recruit. This issue covers what happens before: what you do that makes a customer WANT to say yes.
P.S. I went through a rly interesting workflow to build this issue, so we’re talking about data:
Told Claude what I wanted this issue to cover
Claude drafted structured search prompts
Ran them through Lightfield, my AI CRM, which sits on a year of transcripts from every client call we've had
First pass came back too broad, so I kept refining and kept the patterns that showed up across multiple clients
Fed the findings back into Claude (connected to beehiiv via MCP) and it drafted straight into my publication
A year of conversations for you to learn from.
Everything below is ranked by how often it shows up across our client programs. Direct quotes and exact dollar amounts included.
Quick heads-up before we get into it: "customer creator content" isn't one format. It can span short-form video, long-form video, organic posts, paid posts, LinkedIn posts, case studies, and more. Don't assume the surface that works best. A/B test which ones convert for your audience and, more importantly, dig into WHY the winners win.
1. Unscripted 1:1 Onboarding Calls
The single most repeated move across every program we run.
Every creator at Forus (healthcare platform, program with Knight Vision launched in August as a referral from our friends at Thrive Cap) gets an individual kickoff call (vs. something like a group webinar or email sequence w/ attached brief).
A custom program deck and a Loom go out ahead of time, and the intro call is a conversation focused on relationship building.
Not being overly prescriptive with customers is a common thread throughout this program.
Our internal kickoff notes literally say: do not give scripts to customers when they make content.
Customers speak from genuine experience with the product. Itzel on my team put it best on a kickoff: "We need to focus on building this connection of trust"
Cara on our team opened a customer’s kickoff with "It's great to meet you. I love your content."
We love a little rapport first and brief later.
FYI - the best creators say yes because it serves THEM, not you.
We had a customer say that their program "goes with my content very naturally." She was taking free, professionally edited content that grows her own following and works with a software she loves vs. doing a brand a favor.
Frame the ask around your customers winning.
What to do:
Send materials ahead (deck + Loom) so the call isn't a pitch
Open with their content, not your product
No word-for-word scripts for customers. If a customer sounds like an ad, you should just run UGC.
2. Senior-Level Outreach (Top Tier Only)
The pattern across accounts where advocacy is working: the first touch comes from a founder or senior operator. Personally.
At Lightfield, Matt Serna refused to hand this off: "Me and Keith and Henry are reaching out to those [top tier] folks separately." Three of the most senior people at the company, including the founders, doing outreach by hand, on purpose.
At beehiiv, where we've built a hybrid program over the past year (creators with followings + customer creators, one engine), Ryan gave a customer his personal cell on a call. I’ve done this a million times and often joke that everyone and anyone in the world has my number.
If a top-tier creator wants to get in touch with you, they can do it ASAP by text.
At Forus, every kickoff comes from Cara or from me directly.
Why this works: your customer already likes the product. That's why they're a customer! The decision they're making is whether a human at your company sees them as a person or a line item. A senior-level person showing up answers that in one call.
What to do:
Founder, exec or org leader makes first contact for your top tier
If they don’t they are cc’d
Reserve it for the best of the best people u def want to work with
3. Pitch Status Before You Pitch Cash
Every incentive conversation we documented this year went the same direction: recognition moved people before money did. Even when money was already on the table.
Matt Serna at Lightfield leaned into software usage: “I would be totally okay with offering Lightfield credits for your workspace as an incentive and thank-you for sharing more about us." I agreed 100%.
At Forus, part of the pitch to doctors is that we boost their content with paid spend bc it "gives them a lot of recognition and showcases their page too." The media budget is doing double duty as a status play.
At beehiiv, the lead incentive is growth through the recommendation network and total white-glove service. For a newsletter operator, growth and quality are status.
What to do:
Lead with visibility, credits, insider access
Save the money conversation for after they're emotionally in
4. How to Pay in Cash
Pay per video, not per hour
Whitelisting comp (running ads from their handle) included (if creator says no, then structure as a % of ad spend for that specific video, so if the video is a dud, you don’t need to pay)
12-month cap on paid usage of any single video. Ad fatigue will eat the creative eventually, so just cap it upfront
5. Build the Insider Group
I love extending the program through a private group chat of customers.
I float it like this: "If we start our own community and our own group chat on Slack or something simple, would that be something that would be interesting to you?"
You can sense immediate enthusiasm around a place to get feedback and build community. Customers will provide suggestions too on the exact channel that works best for them (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Text, Facebook).
Btw, I said this in July, and it's still true: I text top creators at our portcos. People are most responsive this way. An insider group chat is the scaled version of the text.
What to do:
Small, invite-only, and alive with messages (a dead Slack channel is worse than nothing)
Let the cohort talk to each other, not just to you!
Be receptive to feedback
Let the community breathe and grow
6. Show Creators the Roadmap Before You Ask for More Content
We always request staging environment access and product roadmaps when we work with clients building Customer Creator Programs.
The point: we can show customers what's coming before we ask them to make content about it.
We're also lining up insider announcements: select customers we have strong relationships with get tapped first to bring company news to the larger industry community.
Knight Vision Tip: Know which of your OWN users a campaign might alienate.
Every company has a subset of customers with complex relationships, usually due to people wanting the software but feeling apprehensive about what can happen down the line to their jobs
The content that activates one customer segment can simultaneously insult another, so be careful to stick to brand pillars. Someone senior internally has to be watching for that before it ships.
7. The Advisory Board Invite (The Ceiling)
Lean into a long-term relationship. The highest tier of all of this: elevated status inside the company itself. Hand these out sparingly!
The Mechanics Underneath All of It
For the operators and VCs who want the program shape:
Start smaller than you think. Companies sometimes deliberately avoid massive followings at launch, "just to test and see what lands well, then expand."
Don’t script every word. If making videos, your buyer can smell a produced ad instantly, esp from an industry worker (there’s a common lingo)
Calendar with agreed-upon turnaround. Customers are busy. Build the pipeline instead of rushing individual pieces, but do put a date on the turnaround
Track it like a sales pipeline. Shared outreach sheet, batch one and batch two, decline reasons logged, follow-ups
Distribution is a test. For example, you can run three paid approaches in parallel for video content of customers: flighting raw footage as new ad creative, organic post + boost, and creator collab posts with spend behind them
Well, How'd I Do?
Mobilize your customers and build relationships with them. A customer creator program is built one relationship at a time, and it compounds every quarter you keep at it.
Your homework: pick five customers and have a founder call them this week.
If you're building one of these and want a second set of eyes, reply to this email. Happy to share thoughts.
I hope you have an incredible week ahead.
Julia
