Diego Kafie has a test for how a brand should buy creator content. Ask the first 10 people on the street whether they know the brand, and if most say no, it should stop hand-picking creators and start chasing volume.

Volume is what Noise sells. The St. Louis company, which Diego co-founded in January 2025 after a career that included senior product roles at Answers, runs a UGC app where anyone can sign up as a creator, take on a brand’s brief, post about it on social media, and get paid on the views. Its customers are brands that, in Diego’s words, “want an army of people” making content about them. “Unless you are an extremely well-known brand, you should not care about being picky, and you should care about scale,” he says.

The model came out of Playbite, the mobile games startup Diego and his co-founders ran and later sold, where players the team sent to TikTok to make videos about the game drove new people to download it. “You don’t need to be Kim Kardashian to reach an audience. You can just make a post and reach people if the post is good,” Diego says.

That premise shapes who Noise recruits. Diego estimates that seven out of 10 people stopped on the street would say yes to becoming a social media creator, and while most start “at the very bottom of the pyramid,” Noise’s top creator now earns six figures a year, according to his account. For brands, the question is how many of those people to let in.

Scale Comes Before Polish for Unknown Brands

Diego’s answer is as many as the brief allows, and the practice he objects to most is one Noise’s platform supports anyway. In his telling, brands want creators to open new accounts dedicated only to them, then pick a small group of attractive people to run them. “You are just giving your creators a lot more work to do for marginally better results, if even,” he says.

The math, as Diego lays it out, is about odds. With 10 creators, he estimates a campaign goes viral one time in 10, if that, and only when the product and the content are strong. “The other nine times, you’re just tinkering around with 10 people when you could have been tinkering around with 3,000 people,” he says.

The street test also sets the exception. Diego says he would not give the same advice to McDonald’s or Disney, where creator content works as a branding exercise. Below that level, he applies the rule to his own company. “If you were outside right now and asked 10 people you meet if they know about Noise, they would say no,” he says.

Noise acts on that by listing itself as one of the brands creators can work with, and it does not screen who applies. That choice points to a second cost of selectivity, which is who it leaves out.

Casting Creators Screens Out Top Performers

Diego argues that whoever runs a selective campaign ends up screening on looks, often without meaning to. In his example, a reviewer approves an attractive 20-something and passes on a mother whose hair is never put together because she spends the day chasing her kids. “But that mom may be your next best creator, and if you’re picky, you don’t let them in,” he says.

Noise’s own results back the point, by Diego’s account. Its top creator over the last 30 days is a man in his 40s with a gray beard. “I would have never picked him,” Diego says.

He separates relevance from taste. A women’s health brand filtering for women at the start makes sense to him, but filtering on looks or identity beyond that, he says, ties one hand behind the brand’s back. Selectivity also costs time. In Diego’s experience, a brand that insists on reviewing every applicant can find that a week has passed and only seven posts have gone live.

Those brands are the hardest to work with, he notes, because Noise can only wait on them. The control Noise asks brands to give up at the door comes back in the brief.

Noise Moves Control From Casting to the Brief

Creators have to complete training before they join the platform. Inside the app, a brief arrives step by step, usually opening with an example post made by another creator. About half of brands arrive knowing what they want, according to Diego, and the rest can lean on Noise’s internal content operations team, one of the company’s largest, which helps brands above a certain size and budget develop the ideas.

Diego has found that loosening the brief hurts results. “We found that giving too much freedom is bad from an outcome perspective,” he says. “And so we put more guardrails than you would think.” Variety comes anyway, he argues, because each creator executes the same instructions differently, and 900 other people may be working from the same brief.

That variety is also his answer to platform crackdowns on repetitive content, which he says Noise has faced less than people would expect. His larger concern is a viewer scrolling past the same video for the seventh time. A brand can also strike a post that misses the brief, and Noise refunds that cost, no questions asked.

The best accounts, in Diego’s view, are collaborative ones where a Noise team member works directly with the brand. “It’s not rocket science. There are only so many ways you can make engaging content,” he says. Once a post meets the brief, the economics run on views.

Paying by the View Lets the Winners Surface

Noise pays creators on a CPM basis, so earnings rise with views, and an algorithm sets the rate dynamically. Creators sign one general agreement with Noise rather than a contract with each brand.

The strongest posts can become ads. Diego describes a TikTok post that draws 7,433 views and that the brand wants to run as paid media. The brand presses a button to launch it as an ad, and Noise tracks the spend, bills the brand and compensates the creator. “Every step of the way, the creator is getting properly credited for the value that their content produced and being compensated for it,” Diego says. He adds that this part of the business is growing fast, without giving a figure.

Payment speed is the other lever. Any money a creator earns can be cashed out within 24 hours to a bank account or through PayPal, Cash App or Venmo, which Diego says Noise can offer because it is “well capitalized.” “Oftentimes, this average creator is someone who’s trying to make ends meet, and we don’t want to make them wait for their money,” he says.

For a brand, the structure means it pays mostly where views materialize and can turn its best-performing posts into ads without a separate negotiation. The model depends on a large pool of real people posting, which is where Diego’s view of AI comes in.

Noise Is Betting the Base of the Pyramid Stays Human

Diego calls his position on AI a “hot take.” He estimates that people spend about half their leisure time and a quarter of their working time on platforms run by Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, so those companies will decide how much AI content gets through. “Yes, AI is getting better every day. But there’s going to be a line drawn somewhere where people just want the humans,” he says.

Noise is not opposed to AI, Diego adds. If a creator wants a digital twin to make more content, the platform would support it, though he expects a real person to remain the one connecting with the brand, even if they appear on camera less often.

The bet ties back to who Noise recruits. Diego expects the top of the Creator Economy, the MrBeasts and Kim Kardashians, to stay where it is while more of the base gets revealed, until every person has the Noise app on their phone. The company is not yet available in the Philippines, and he expects to open offices on the coasts as it scales. 

“You don’t have to be a certain look, a certain age, a certain follower count, a certain anything,” Diego says.

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