#127: 1.4B Views and Building Whispr's Paid UGC, Financial Options 101, The End of Adobe

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

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This week, we will take a look at how Wispr Flow cracked paid UGC, strategies for 1.4B high-intention views, a tool for learning financial options, and more.

Let's dive in:

"Might Be Sharing Too Much"

In response to a full guide to UGC by Matt Gittleson, one user said that he "might be sharing too much".

Gittleson went from filming TikToks on his bedroom floor to 1.4 billion views in 90 days and over $1M in MRR, and his core point is that a view is only worth what it is attached to, meaning the outcome it drives. He has watched videos get millions of views and drive zero signups because the product was never named, and he outlines a strategy with great examples to counter the most common problems new growth engineers run into.

His method is to find a viral format first and build the product's marketing around it, and the best formats come from content that is not selling anything at all. He found a relationship-style format that was working organically, rebuilt it around a client's product, and the first video passed 60 million views.

​Hector Serrano Martin, who built the paid UGC program at WisprFlow, names the mistake on the other side. Most brands think they have a volume problem, so they hire a pile of creators who make the same talking-head videos, and when creatives are more than about 60% similar the algorithm suppresses their reach and you keep hitting the same person at the same stage of the funnel. His fix is to build an intent-based creator machine first, handpicking a small group who each solve a specific gap, and only then scale, because twenty creators who are bought in will always beat a thousand who are copying the same key.

Put them together and the insight is that distribution isn't about lack of volume, it's about diversity-of-signal. The brands that win treat content like a portfolio of distinct keys, each opening a different door to a different person.

Gallery of Motion Graphics (GOATed)

​p4n built a growing gallery of motion graphics made with Claude Opus 5.5, and every video is shown next to the prompt or skill that made it. There are 226 so far, all pulled from posts on Twitter/X and credited to their creators, at prompt-motion.com. This website shows you the clip and hands you the recipe, so you can start from a prompt that already works instead of guessing.

Motion design used to require years of After Effects reps, and now the bottleneck is knowing how to describe what you want. This library of proven prompts is the fastest way to build that vocabulary and create animations that can be used across websites, apps, and marketing efforts.

Financial Options 101

​Agustin Lebron, who traded options at Jane Street and now works at a frontier AI trading lab, just launched Options 101, a free course on how financial options actually work. It is the same material he is teaching at Charles University in Prague, with lecture notes, videos, and assignments.

There are no ads, no affiliate links, nothing to sell you, and he is explicit that he will not teach "profitable strategies for retail" because that way lies madness. Options are a topic where almost all the free content online is a funnel into a broker, so a clean, rigorous, free resource from a real practitioner is rare.

Options are a useful tool for thinking about risk. Most people meet them through someone sharing a screenshot of a huge gain, but they never learn how they are priced. This course teaches the mechanics first, which is the only way to use them without becoming the person on the other side of the trade.

GitHub for Hardware Projects

​Justin Kim and the HeyPCB team built Explore, a map of over 11,000 open-source hardware boards, because discovering them on GitHub still feels like searching repositories and you usually have to already know what you are looking for.

Instead of it being another directory, Explore turns hardware into a map you can zoom through. Zoom out and you see whole categories like keyboards, robotics, and audio. Zoom in and those turn into the actual boards people built, and every board is real, so you can click one and see the PCB, its dimensions, parts, and source, then open the whole design in the editor.

The End of Adobe

Three updates this week show how fast the video-editing toolchain is moving away from Adobe. MATH FOURNITY flagged that someone recreated the entire Adobe suite as open-source apps, a project called ArtCraft with seven native apps covering image editing, vector, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics, and layout, all written from scratch in Rust and free to use.

​Linus Ekenstam showed that Claude can now open, edit, and render Premiere and After Effects project directly through Tesseract, so you can hand your agent an old project, let it recut the edit, and pull it back into Premiere, or run ten projects in parallel instead of one timeline at a time. And Colin Landforce noted that his Cut30 course is launching with AI video editing integrated, calling the "biggest gate to success eliminated".

The last defense of legacy software was that leaving was expensive, and AI just made leaving free. When one developer can rebuild your entire suite and agents can open your file formats, the only thing left to sell is the work done inside the tool.

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