Should SaaS Companies Pay Creators a Cut of Ad Spend?

Hector Serrano says a SaaS company should pay creators a cut of the ad spend their video drives, not a flat fee, and should put a floor under that pay so a new creator is not working for nothing.

Commission alone is a bad start. A person who makes 30 videos and earns about a hundred dollars gets demoralized, and the best creators are the ones who stay long enough to learn what works. Wispr Flow uses what he calls a smart retainer. The deal might be 25 videos for $1,500 if the quota is hit. Earn $500 in commissions and the company adds $1,000. Earn $3,000 and the creator keeps the commission, with no retainer on top. The first months often sit under that line. Three or four months later the same people are living on commission, and the brand is paying them only for videos that perform.

For a freemium SaaS product the cut is a share of ad spend, because a purchase is hard to pin on one ad and can take a week or two. A physical product, where the sale is easy to trace, can pay a share of sales instead. The upside is uncapped. Wispr Flow is not paying $50 or $100 for a video, or $1,000 for the month. Creators in the program make about $13,000 a month, some with only 1,000 or 2,000 Instagram followers. He also stopped sending a long brief of required hooks and banned lines. A ten-page rule sheet takes away the creative reason they were hired.