“Us in the industry labeling this TikTok strategy as organic is very misleading. Even though you could pay $5 for a single UGC video... the time invested to get to that point is significant. We recently built this UGC machine at Blue Throne. It took us like six months to get our first viral video, and that's not one person's time, that's multiple people across multiple disciplines.”

The 'organic TikTok' lie: 6 months and a cross-functional team to ship the first viral

Peleg pushes back hard on the framing that UGC/TikTok is free distribution. Even with cheap individual creator videos, the research, scripting, and iteration cost is real. Acquirers treat it as a marketing cost basis, not organic upside — founders pitching 'we grow organically on TikTok' get re-valued downward once the time and creator spend is unpacked.