"UGC is a waste of money." No — your operations are.

The post is worth taking seriously, because it comes from someone who actually spent the money. Not a thread from a guy who read about UGC. Three hundred thousand dollars in real payouts, and a clear-eyed list of what went wrong. So let's take each claim on its own terms.

"It brings views but doesn't convert"

Often true — when views are the only thing anyone measured. A campaign optimized for reach gets you reach. If the reward is "post a video" and the metric is "how many people saw it," you've built a machine for organic views and quietly hoped conversion tags along.

Conversion is a different target, and you have to aim at it. That means creators who actually use the product and can speak to why it's worth buying, a brief that carries the talking points that move a purchase, and a reward tied to verified performance rather than a flat fee for posting. Favente is built around that chain — the creator is a real user, the brief is enforced, and the payout follows tracked views on content that stayed on-message. Views you can't convert are a design choice, not a law of nature.

"30% of creators abuse the system with irrelevant content"

This is the sharpest point in the post, and it's true in exactly one situation: when nothing stands between a posted video and a payout. If irrelevant content still collects the reward, you haven't been abused — you've been running without a gate.

So Favente has the gate. Every submission gets checked against your brief, and the payout is held for a human look whenever the AI reads a video as off-brief. The money doesn't move on content that has nothing to do with what you sell. The creator gets a specific coaching note — here's what missed, here's how to fix it — instead of a silent rejection or a quiet payout for junk. That 30% doesn't get to abuse a system that checks the work before it pays.

"It works for apps, never for consumer hardware"

Here he's right, and we won't pretend otherwise. An app is a tap away — someone sees the video, downloads it, and can be making their own content with it an hour later. Hardware has to ship. You mail units to creators and customers, the cycle stretches into months, and the momentum that makes short-form work is gone before the box arrives.

If you sell physical hardware with a long fulfillment cycle, short-form creator content is a hard fit, and a tool won't change the physics of shipping. Favente is built for products people can start using immediately — software, apps, digital services — where a viewer can become a user, and then a creator, without waiting on a courier. Know which one you are before you spend the $300k.

The pattern under all three

Two of his three failures aren't UGC failing. They're a program with no operating system: no conversion target, no gate, no fit between creator and product. Run creator content that way and it will absolutely waste your money — the same way any channel wastes money when it's pointed at the wrong metric with nothing checking the output.

The fix isn't more spend or more creators. It's the layer he was missing: real users as creators, a brief that's enforced, a hold on anything off-brief before it pays, and rewards that follow verified performance. Get that right and the sentence flips. UGC isn't the waste. The version without a system is.