How Vadim Strizheus got to $10K MRR at 19 by copying viral formats

Vadim Strizheus is 19. A few months before this episode he quit a startup job to build Vugola, an AI video editor that clips, edits, captions and schedules your videos. It has crossed 80,000 users, and he got it from $0 to $10K MRR by posting short videos himself.

His whole method fits in one line, and he repeats it on purpose: copy what already works.

If you're watching this, there's one thing you need to learn about UGC marketing, go copy what works.

The fastest way to $10K MRR: copy formats that already went viral

Step one, for Vadim, is to open Instagram and look up the creators of a fast growing company running UGC at scale. His example is Viewmax, an AI video company with one of the biggest UGC campaigns he has seen. Scroll their creators' videos and you're looking at a library of formats that have already gone viral.

Then swap your product in. One Viewmax video's hook is "Claude plus GTA 6 equals YouTube millionaires in 2027", followed by a demo of adding Viewmax as a connector in Claude. Vadim copies it almost word for word, except the connector he adds is Vugola's. Then he posts three to six of these every day on Instagram.

He knows some people think copying content is wrong. In UGC, he says, it's the norm: competitors copy each other, ride a format until it's saturated, and move to the next one together.

You can copy, you can steal in UGC. That's like normal by the way.

3 roadblocks that waste founders' time

• Listening to everyone selling to founders. Vadim calls it F2F, founder to founder: people on X selling you AEO, SEO and Reddit services. Ignore them and learn to post short form content on Instagram.
• Overthinking the account. Personal or brand, new or old, it matters less than posting every day. If you're stuck, start a brand new UGC account and keep it separate from your personal brand, because the two attract different audiences.
• Waiting for an original idea. You don't need to be the most creative person out there. Copy a format that works and change it to fit your product. If you can't see how, ask ChatGPT.

Warm up a new account in 2 days, not 7

Maya asked about the common advice to spend seven days warming up a new account. Vadim disagrees, loudly.

Guys, if you take seven days to warm up your account, I'm sorry. You're gonna fail.

His creators take two to three days. The point is only to show Meta you're a real person: like posts, follow creators you enjoy, engage, and scroll this account instead of your own, maybe 15 minutes to an hour on day one and another 15 minutes on day two. They post their first video on day two.

If a new account still gets no views, he says, you have a content problem, and a longer warm up won't fix it. Two weeks of warming before five flops is two weeks you don't get back.

Hooks that make people stop scrolling

For UGC, the answer is the same: copy what works. For personal brand content, everything depends on the hook, and the hook has to make the viewer feel something.

He compares two hooks. "Rich people protect their investments" is flat. "This $20 piece could save you $20,000 on your Hermès bag" makes you want to know what the piece is. Open loops work too, like a top five list that saves the top one for the very end.

Generic beats nobody. "I'm 19 and I quit my job to build a startup" is something viewers have heard a thousand times. "I'm 19 and I just spent $30,000 on marketing in the last 30 days, here's what it got me" is specific enough that people stay to find out.

Hook, demo, CTA: a viral UGC video broken down

Every UGC video he makes has three parts, in this order. He shared his screen and broke down the Viewmax video to show them:

• Hook: a text overlay plus the creator saying it out loud. GTA 6 is something everyone knows, and making money online is something a lot of people want.
• Demo: the creator shows exactly how, step by step in Claude. This can be the longest part of the video.
• CTA: at the very end, "comment Claude for the step by step guide".

The hook and the demo have to match. If the hook promises one thing and the demo shows another, viewers feel they learned nothing and leave.

How to make a viral format your own

Vadim's advice here is to think for a moment before reaching for AI. Find the viral format, then find the part where they talk about their tool and put yours there. Viewmax's playbook is making money with AI faceless YouTube channels. Vugola edits and clips video, so his version keeps the script but says you can make money by clipping content and earning from YouTube monetization.

It can take a while to see the swap, and he says not to get discouraged. He blocks out one focused hour every day to look through Instagram for new formats for himself and his creators.

Picking which formats to copy

He keeps a doc of about ten current formats and updates it almost daily, with no single "best" script handed to everyone. To pick them he looks for the videos that clearly popped off, say 3.3 million views and 30,000 comments.

The stronger signal is repetition. When five adjacent competitors are all posting the same format and their creators keep going viral with it, he rides that wave until it saturates.

The 3-day format test

When a new format goes in, every creator posts only that format for three days, twice a day, across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, changing only small things like the sound. With 30 creators that's around 60 posts a day and about 180 over the test.

A video that crosses 10,000 views counts as a winner, because it shows there's something there. One creator went three weeks without a single viral video, then found a format in a test and crossed 10K. Vadim messaged him privately to ignore the next formats and double down. His next videos did 100,000, 300,000 and 400,000 views, then 1.5 million on Facebook.

So winners keep posting their winning format on their own accounts, while everyone else tests the next one.

$0 to $10K MRR, and when to hire creators

Vadim got to his first $10K a month posting content himself on three Instagram accounts. One reached about 12,000 followers, and he averaged around 3 million views a month. All three accounts ended up banned.

His advice for a new founder is to run this same playbook yourself, three to six posts a day. That can take one to three hours a day, and he says that's the job.

Do you want to make it or do you not want to make it?

Hire UGC creators only when you have about $5,000 you're okay losing in the first month. Until you find content market fit, the format that works for your brand, you'll be unprofitable. Five creators at $800 to $1,000 a month who don't go viral is five grand gone. If you have cofounders, every one of you should be posting. The UGC playbook puts Vadim's steps next to those from other founders on the show, and you can compare channels in how 10 founders got their first customers.

The cheat code for 6 posts a day

He didn't film six new videos a day. His UGC videos were faceless: a reaction or text hook, then the demo, then the CTA. For each new post he changed only the hook, the text on screen and the audio. The demo and CTA stayed word for word the same across all six, and he says Meta didn't hold the reach back.

He posts these as trial reels. If Instagram warns that one looks too similar to an earlier video, he records a properly different hook and posts again. He says one of those reposts got around 100,000 views.

As for metrics, he didn't watch retention, likes or saves when he started. He watched volume. Post, find what pops, and do more of that.