Noise CEO: Unknown Brands Should Ditch Creator Casting and Buy Scale

Diego Kafie has a blunt test for how a brand should buy creator content: ask the first 10 people on the street if they know the brand, and if most say no, stop hand-picking creators and start chasing volume. That's the pitch behind Noise, the St. Louis UGC platform he co-founded in January 2025 after senior product roles at Answers.

Noise lets anyone sign up as a creator, take a brand's brief, post on social media and get paid on views. Its customers are brands that, in Kafie'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 grew out of Playbite, the mobile games startup Kafie and his co-founders ran and later sold, where players sent to TikTok to make videos drove new downloads. "You don't need to be Kim Kardashian to reach an audience," he says. "You can just make a post and reach people if the post is good."

Why scale beats polish for unknown brands

Kafie's math is about odds. With 10 creators, a campaign goes viral one time in 10, he estimates — and only when the product and 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.

He objects most to a practice Noise supports anyway: brands opening dedicated accounts and casting 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 street test sets the exception. Kafie wouldn't give McDonald's or Disney the same advice, because creator content there works as branding. Below that tier, 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."

Noise lists itself as a brand creators can work with, and it doesn't screen who applies.

What selective casting actually screens out

Whoever runs a selective campaign ends up filtering on looks, often without meaning to, Kafie argues. A reviewer might approve an attractive 20-something and pass 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 his 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," Kafie says.

He separates relevance from taste — a women's health brand filtering for women makes sense, but filtering on looks beyond that ties one hand behind the brand's back. Selectivity also costs time: a brand that reviews every applicant can find a week has passed with only seven posts live. Those brands are the hardest to work with, he says, because Noise can only wait.

How control moves from casting to the brief

Creators complete training before joining, and a brief arrives step by step in the app, usually opening with an example post from another creator. About half of brands arrive knowing what they want; the rest lean on Noise's internal content operations team, one of the company's largest, which helps brands above a certain size and budget.

Loosening the brief hurts results, Kafie has found. "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 survives anyway, he argues, because each creator executes the same instructions differently — and 900 people may work 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 bigger worry is a viewer seeing the same video for the seventh time. A brand can strike a post that misses the brief, and Noise refunds that cost, no questions asked.

Paying by the view lets winners surface

Noise pays on a CPM basis, with an algorithm setting rates dynamically, and creators sign one general agreement with Noise rather than per-brand contracts. Strong posts can become ads: Kafie describes a TikTok post that drew 7,433 views, which the brand launched as paid media with a button press — Noise tracks the spend, bills the brand and pays the creator. "Every step of the way, the creator is getting properly credited for the value that their content produced," he says. That part of the business is growing fast, though he gives no figure.

Payment speed is the other lever: earnings can be cashed out within 24 hours to a bank account or via PayPal, Cash App or Venmo, which Kafie 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.

Can the base of the pyramid stay human?

Kafie calls his position on AI a "hot take." People spend about half their leisure time and a quarter of their working time on platforms run by Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, he estimates, 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 isn't anti-AI — it would support a creator's digital twin making more content — but he expects a real person to keep connecting with the brand. He expects the top of the creator economy, the MrBeasts and Kardashians, to stay put while the base expands, until every person has the Noise app on their phone. The company isn't yet available in the Philippines, and he expects to open coastal offices as it scales.

"You don't have to be a certain look, a certain age, a certain follower count, a certain anything," Kafie says.