Case study · UGC Marketing Lead

After months of searching, Teleparty hired the first candidate Sprout introduced — within 24 hours.

Shaurya had been hunting for a UGC Marketing Lead for months. He'd been quoted comp numbers he couldn't justify and was burning time on channels that weren't converting. Sprout sent over five pre-vetted candidates the same day — the first one became the hire.

The company

Teleparty is the browser extension that lets people watch Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and YouTube together — in sync, with a chat sidebar, from anywhere in the world. It launched as Netflix Party in 2015, exploded during the pandemic to 20M+ installs, and rebranded to Teleparty to reflect a multi-platform footprint.

The product is run by founder and CEO Shaurya Jain — a Penn CS alum, ex-Google engineer who built the original extension solo. Today, Teleparty is one of the most-installed Chrome extensions in the entertainment category and has long outlived the "lockdown-era" thesis it was supposed to belong to.

The hire that needed to happen

With the pandemic tailwind long gone, growth at Teleparty now lives and dies in the creator ecosystem. The product is intrinsically social — people show it off in TikToks, fancams, "watch with me" streams, and reaction videos. UGC is not a marketing channel for Teleparty so much as the marketing channel.

UGC Marketing Lead was a brand-new function. Shaurya wasn't backfilling someone — he was hiring the first person to ever own this motion at Teleparty. That's a high-stakes seat: the wrong hire eats six months of runway and resets the function from zero. The right hire compounds. He needed someone who had actually run UGC programs at scale — sourcing creators, briefing, paid whitelisting, measurement — not a generic growth marketer with TikTok on their resume.

Comp band for the role was $60K to $120K — wide on purpose, because UGC marketing as a discipline still has wildly different shapes depending on the operator. A creator-turned-marketer at the lower end can absolutely outperform a senior IC at the top of the band, and Shaurya wanted the band to stretch wide enough to capture that.

Months of searching with nothing to show

Before Sprout, Shaurya had been at this for months. He'd worked LinkedIn — both posts and direct outreach. He'd sent cold messages to creators and operators he admired. He'd run the role through his own network. He'd taken intro calls.

The pattern was always the same. Strong-on-paper candidates were quoting comp numbers that were genuinely hard to justify — well above the top of his band, sometimes by 50% or more. Candidates inside the band didn't have the depth he needed. Inbound was loud but unfiltered: hundreds of "UGC marketers" whose actual experience was a single internship at an agency. Cold outreach was slow, stochastic, and hard to scale around running the company.

What he didn't want next was another sourcing list — a long spreadsheet of profiles he'd still have to vet, screen, and chase. He wanted candidates who had already been on a real call, with written notes on what they'd actually done.

What Sprout did

We took the brief — the role, the band, the trade-offs Shaurya was willing to make, and the few non-negotiables — and ran the search across our active candidate pool plus targeted external sourcing. Inside 24 hours, five pre-vetted UGC marketers were sitting in his inbox with screening notes attached.

Pre-vetted, in our world, means someone on our team had already done a 30-minute screen with the candidate, written up what they'd actually shipped (not the resume version), and flagged the trade-offs the resume couldn't show — depth on briefing creators vs. running paid whitelisting, comfort with measurement, where they'd be a stretch. Shaurya didn't have to chase calls or read between resume lines. The first version of the shortlist was already structured the way he'd want it.

And the fee. The standard contingency-agency fee in this category is 25% of first-year base. We come in materially below that, and we bring deep startup experience — Sprout was built by operators who've hired and been hired into early-stage GTM and engineering seats. For a founder trying to keep burn clean, that delta on a $90K hire is real money.

The first candidate became the hire

The very first candidate we introduced — within that initial 24-hour window — is the one Teleparty ended up hiring. Not because we got lucky, but because the brief was tight and the screening was honest. The fit was visible from the first call.

The hire is a top-performing creator in their own right, with hands-on experience inside multiple UGC programs from the creator side of the table. That's the exact background Shaurya had been looking for: someone who knows what makes a brief actually convert because they've shipped on the receiving end of those briefs themselves. Months of searching had been pointing at this profile without ever finding it.

From brief to signed offer took longer than 24 hours — internal process on Teleparty's side, as it always is — but the candidate who ultimately signed was the first person Sprout ever sent over.

The moment that mattered

Three of the five made it to a final round. By that point every finalist looked great on paper — that's the point of a good shortlist. The hard part is choosing.

What Shaurya called out specifically — and what we hear often from founders making first marketing hires — is that we walked him through the trade-offs candidly. Not a sales pitch for the highest-comp candidate. Not "they're all great, you decide!" An honest comparison of where each finalist would land their first quarter, where they'd struggle, and which one was the best fit for Teleparty specifically.

The outcome

Teleparty stood up its UGC function with a hire who came in with real program experience — not a learning-on-the-job situation. The search took a fraction of the time Shaurya had budgeted, the comp landed inside his band, and the placement fee came in below the standard 25% agency rate.

More importantly, Shaurya told us he'd use Sprout for any future GTM or engineering hire — not just because the first one worked, but because the way it worked was repeatable. A clean brief in. Pre-vetted candidates out. Honest guidance at the offer stage.

"Working with Sprout has been a great experience. They moved a lot faster than expected, presenting 5 pre-vetted candidates almost immediately. We advanced 3 to the final round and ended up hiring one as our UGC Marketing Lead. They also provided candid, unbiased guidance on the candidates when helping me make the final decision. I'd recommend Sprout for any GTM or engineering hires, and will be using them for related hires in the future."