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I’m back after another one of those breaks I never announce in advance. This time, it was moving apartments plus diving into a new role, which I’m actually excited to talk about.
I’m leading Wati’s North American expansion, a Hong Kong-based DM automation company, through marketing and GTM. The ICP is a little different from what I’m used to, but I’m excited; maybe it’s time for a bit of change from traditional B2B.
The marketing looks quite different because of that. I’ve spent the last few weeks buried in two very different categories of tool: market research platforms and ugc platforms. I thought I would never touch UGC platforms, but here we are!
There’s so much surface area to Wati’s audience that narrowing down the niche has been fun. This includes the very unsexy question of who your ICP and ECP are (ideal vs. early), which I’m still figuring out.
The tools that are helping me?
I’ve been testing messaging with our ICP and ECP, and Wynter has been a good tool for testing the North American market. I like the UI as well; it keeps the comments in one place. The team is sweet, helpful, and honest too. Their panel is heavily North American, and they were honest about this. So if Wati needs a platform for global repositioning, Wynter might not be the right fit.
Strong presence in the US and Europe, and growing in Asia, which matters since much of Wati’s market is there. Profiles get verified through LinkedIn, which cuts down on noise, and there’s an AI layer that gives you a quick overview of results as they come in. Sharekh, the founder, has personally been a huge help! I was struggling to upload some PNG, and he came to the rescue quickly.
It’s a Malaysian platform conducting market research primarily in Southeast Asia and India. I grew up in Malaysia myself, so I’ve always had a soft spot for backing startups from that region. #MalaysiaBoleh
One thing to flag though, Vase is mobile-only, and Wati is primarily a desktop product, so that’s a real gap to keep in mind when you’re testing pages or positioning across regions. Although this did give us the kick to amp up our mobile game. We needed to, anyway! So we’ve been testing mobile versions of our desktop platform.
And across all three platforms, the same feedback keeps coming up: market research in China is genuinely hard, no matter which tool you use.
Creating UGC and running creator campaigns have become a bigger part of my job than I expected, and I’m learning so much about the space. I’ve even been creating more on Instagram these past few weeks…
I’ve also been looking at Shout, Billo, Flowbox, Collabstr, AhaCreator (new to me this week), and a couple of other UGC platforms that connect brands to creators, which I’m still exploring. I’d previously mentioned Bento, but that platform seems geared towards travel and hospitality, which is a good reminder to check what a platform actually specializes in before you commit time to it.
I also tried makeugc.ai platform and wasn’t a fan. The trial doesn’t let you test the actual product, which I suspect trips up a lot of people before they even get a fair look at it. We previously had a subscription, and it was brutal to cancel. Add those two friction points up, and neither was easy to justify keeping around.
So far, I’ve been using Passionfroot. I get to build out full campaigns, creators upload their own stats, pricing and placement are clear upfront, and there’s support on Slack. Shoutout to Cleiton!
When I couldn’t reach a creator I wanted to work with, Passionfroot reached out on my behalf. Turned out she just wasn’t checking her inbox, and I ended up collaborating with her because we finally connected. Creators on the platform have also been genuinely willing to work with Wati as a design partner, which makes the whole thing feel like a two-way street instead of a straight transaction.
I had a reality check with social media. UGC has gotten so much bigger than I realized, and I think most B2Bish companies are sleeping on it. Gamma is doing it, though their product can be B2C, so it’s a bit of a different game. Granola looks like it’s about to jump on the same train (similar to Gamma, also has a B2C touch), and ManyChat is already leaning into it hard. It’s less “should we do this” at this point and more “how.”
The AI side has been fun to poke at, mostly because it’s wild how far these models have come. I work with someone to execute all this in my day job now, but I made my own UGC-style clip with captions just to test the workflow today.
Somewhere in my feed, I also caught an Instagram reel about teaching your parents to tell AI-generated content from real content to prevent scams, which felt so real that I might actually do it this Christmas when my parents come over.
On the ad side: human-generated content is still outperforming AI in everything we’ve tested so far. How “AI” a clip looks depends heavily on which model you use, and the less “AI” it is, the more expensive your content is. People are also using ElevenLabs for the voice layer.
If you’re deep in UGC or influencer marketing too, I’d love to compare notes!
am i... a marketer? is a newsletter about the weird experience of working in marketing right now. It’s where I share what I’m learning, unlearning, and experimenting in marketing and beyond, for marketers carrying unreasonable expectations. If this resonated, share it with someone who’s in the thick of it.
nicole
About the author:
Hey, I’m Nini. I’m a head of marketing who’s spent about a decade in content, growth, demand gen, and product marketing, plus a lot of “figure it out.” I’ve worked at global companies, bootstrapped ones, some agency work after being in-house my whole career, and back to series A-B startups.
I’ve lived in 10 cities, so third-culture kid, I know. When I’m not writing, I’m outside hiking, skiing, making pasta from scratch, or creating a new playlist!
Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:
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