Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. A show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers and grow revenue across iOS, Android and the web. You can learn more at RevenueCat.com.
Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Joseph Choi, a former e-commerce marketer who's now helping app developers go viral on TikTok. On the podcast I talk with Joseph about what's currently working for apps on TikTok, how to create viral content, and why you should try working with influencers who don't have many followers. Hey, Joseph, thanks so much for joining me
on the podcast today. Thanks for having me, David. So we're going to be talking about TikTok. I think a lot of folks are going to be excited to listen to this episode, but before we get into some of the techniques and things you're learning and working on, why TikTok and what got you into TikTok marketing? I'll give you a quick backstory. When I was in college, I wanted to make money online. I was bored with my classes, so I went on YouTube. I went and listened to podcasts, and the business
that I found was drop shipping. It's a fulfillment model for e-commerce businesses where you buy the product as soon as the customer buys the product. So you have razor-thin margins. It's not a very good business, and the only differentiator you have is copyrighting and marketing and ads.
So I got really good at ads, and I noticed that a lot of the e-commerce marketers over the years have been shifting into app development, and it's really interesting to me to see a lot of the same e-commerce tactics that I sort of learned marketing in, now being used in the consumer tech
app space. So in the past few months, I've just been meeting a lot more founders that are leveraging TikTok and short-form video to go viral with their apps, and I really think it's a great opportunity to get your first 1000 users, 10,000 MRR for subscription apps.
Let's dive in then, and I wanted to start with why TikTok? So there's so many ways to get attention, press, and SEO, and starting a blog, and all these different things, but what's unique about TikTok that people are starting to find success, and that it is maybe a good place to experiment with zero to one. When you scroll on TikTok and you're scrolling through the videos,
the videos that you're seeing are not from people that you follow. I would approximate maybe 95 plus percent of the videos that you scroll through are people that are from creators that you've never seen before. So because of this, there's just a ton of watch time going to brand new accounts, brand new videos. So as a creator, you can make videos on TikTok from zero followers and get
millions of views on your first video. I experienced this one time myself. I made a new account, I made a video with zero followers, and I got 50,000 views on the first video, and I was just talking about like San Francisco, I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I just started talking about SF culture, but people in the app space are doing this too, and I think that's what's unique about
TikTok. It's like, you know, before you had to build up a following on your Instagram or your Facebook, or if you wanted to do ads, you know, you pay for the content to put it in front of people, with TikTok, you just have to make good quality content. It can go viral from scratch. Yeah, your your cost of marketing is zero if you do it yourself, and then if you're paying a creator,
you can pay them a flat fee and then get exponential return. You mentioned that you started in e-commerce, and it seems like e-commerce maybe was a little earlier to the TikTok scene, then apps. What do you think has changed or what do you think made it more interesting for apps as of late? So TikTok shop launched in November of 2022. So it's November 2024 when we're recording this. It's only been two years since TikTok shop launched. TikTok shop is basically an affiliate
platform for e-commerce products on TikTok. So as a brand owner, you can upload your e-commerce product to TikTok shop. You set an affiliate commission percentage. So some people do 15 to 20 percent, and then creators will automatically can just sign up for your to affiliate for your product and start making videos and the payments and everything is handled through TikTok. So in the beginning, this was a huge gold rush for brands because you could just upload your product and
then pay commission only to these TikTok creators. So over the past two years, there's been a big rush on the creator side for all these creators that are now, they see how much money you can make on TikTok shop. You know, these 15 percent commissions add up very quickly if you go viral with the TikTok. So now there's this whole new class of creators that it's really good at making video
content that's that not only gets views, but is high converting. And actually, you know, it's not just views as a vanity metric like the it's actually driving millions and millions of dollars of GMV just through these TikTok shop creators. So I think the space as a whole of influencer and creator marketing has evolved and people have invented new tactics for storytelling and hooks and creative CTAs. So TikTok shop has definitely fueled a lot of the innovation in the marketing side.
One of the companies that I think is really interesting in this space in the e-commerce space is Tabs Chocolate. So they've they went from zero to 10 million in revenue in a year just on TikTok shop. And the founder of that Oliver, he put the Tabs Chocolate products on hold and he switched to apps. So then he launched an app called Study Buddy and it helps students with their
homework. You know, it's an AI app, but he used he was very transparent. He built it in public and he was saying, Hey, I'm just going to use all my knowledge of e-commerce and just do the same marketing, but for this app because it's higher margin, it's higher exit multiples, higher retention. So, you know, once he started doing that, then a bunch of apps started catching on and, you know,
doing the same thing. And I think it's, yeah, I think this is the new wave. I think like naturally apps have always grown through different ways, but I think TikTok is I think TikTok is the new thing. And it's interesting. I mean, it's not that apps are suddenly going viral on TikTok or that nobody's tried to make it work before because like famously, Widget Smith went viral on TikTok in 2020. So four years ago, it went viral, went, you know, shot to number one on the app store.
We've actually had David Smith, the developer of that on the podcast. And we've talked to other apps that are doing TikTok marketing, but it seems like maybe the why now kind of thing, why is it starting to blow up is that these e-commerce folks have really kind of pioneered the techniques that are now actually going to start working better for apps. I think that's right. Yeah.
I wanted to dive into your understanding of the algorithm and you kind of already mentioned how the 4U page drives so much of this, but I wanted to dive a little deeper into that contrast SEO is so hard to get your page ranked because almost any topics already so inundated. As you mentioned, Instagram and Twitter and other typical social media platforms, Facebook, having to build up an audience before you can like actually see scale is just such a
different experience. And so is there anything else about the algorithm that you think makes it so effective for going viral and as a marketing channel? There's a distinction between influencers
and what I like to call, I guess, scrappy UGC creators. In the traditional sense of what an influencer is, I think influencers became a thing around the Instagram era maybe a little bit before, but basically they have like an influencer is really if you think about it as an analogy for creating a movie, a movie production, which is what TikTok videos are basically just short movies. You have like, you have the director, you have the actor, and then you have the audience,
you know, the distribution. And an influencer plays all three of those roles. They're the talent that shows up in the video, they're the creative director, they actually think of the video ideas and then edit it and everything. And then they also have an audience, the pre-existing audience that they've built trust with over the years through their content. But what TikTok allows you to do as a brand owner or an app developer is you can hire a creator to play just the role of the actor.
So if you know how to do marketing, you can give them a script that you know will perform well on the for you page. So now you're playing the role of the director. And then now TikTok itself is playing the role of the audience and the distribution. You don't need a pre-existing audience. And the creators are willing to take this deal because a lot of them are under monetized. They're
just making videos. A lot of them get reached out to by e-commerce products, these big CPG companies that say, hey, I'll give you a product for free and then please make a video for us. And they're like, that doesn't seem like a great deal, but fine, I'll do it because what else am I going to do? I'm going to make the videos anyway as well. Make a little bit of
money out of it. So if you're willing to put a little bit more money into a creator marketing, you know, I think the for you page really enables you to be scrapier with it. That's a great analogy that instead of having to build an audience, it's the content itself that generates the audience through TikTok's algorithm. Are there any specific things to the algorithm
that you're striving for to help picko viral? Is it just about being engaging or is it like getting more likes or other inputs that you've seen to the algorithm that set aside the content itself? Because like we'll dive into what makes great content. But is there anything specific to the algorithm that helps it go viral other than the content itself? A short answer is no. It is just the content itself. What I will say is I'm very skeptical of anyone who claims to know
what exactly the TikTok algorithm is. It's always changing. You know, it's shifting. Like sometimes people will say shares matter more. Sometimes people will say likes matter more, watch time retention, comments. But if you just think about it from a higher level, like think about if you're TikTok, if you own TikTok, how would you want to design the algorithm? So like TikTok makes its money from advertising and from TikTok shop. So if you want to make the most money as TikTok, you want people to
watch more videos for longer, just like any other social media platform. So if you want to get people to watch more videos for longer, then you want to incentivize people to make content that people watch the video to its completion and then go on to the next video and then watch that to completion. You know, you want people to like, to enjoy watching the video and have some sort of emotional reaction to watching the video. So when people say, oh, it's just about making good
content. What that really means is the hook has to be good. The retention has to be good. And like at the bottom line is, you know, someone has to feel something when they watch the video. And I imagine the algorithm is probably fairly sophisticated as well in that sometimes it's going to feed you a 15 second video and sometimes it's going to feed you a two minute video. And so sometimes your two minute video will hit if it's engaging. If we think about it through like the base human
experience of TikTok, it's like driving that those little mini dopamine rushes. And so the algorithm is maybe taking so many different things into account. Like you said, that no one thing is always going to work because it's going to depend on the on the context. Like it is the person, is it 2 a.m. And they're just like dopamine hit and they need 15 second videos. Or is it or, you know,
are they more in a state where they they can engage with the two minute video. And so it's probably like so context dependent what TikTok is going to feed people that trying to guess at it is like you said, it's to make people feel something and that's going to be more successful. Does having followers on TikTok give you any kind of a leg up? Like if you've got a million followers on TikTok, are you guaranteed to at least get more of a shot? Or do you feel like even with zero followers,
videos can get viral? And it doesn't matter as much as you might guess. Yeah, if you have a million followers on TikTok, that does give you a leg up for sure because, you know, I think I gave an estimate, maybe 95% of the videos you watch on the 4u page are brand new accounts you've never seen before. But there also is a following tab. So if you scroll to the left, you can watch videos that from people that you follow. So you do reach an audience when you post
a video from an account that has followers. You do get a boost for sure. It's just that the vast majority of the watch time comes from the 4u page. So it's easier to go viral than it was before. So you have a leg up. Are there specific strategies that you've seen for apps be successful in
growing an audience? Or do you think that the focus is more just content and shouldn't account like have a point of view and model some of the old style influencer that this account is all about, you know, like if I created one for my weather app, like should I strive to create something people would actually want to follow by sharing interesting content in addition to any like pitch kind of stuff. Or do you think it's more important to just really focus on on each video being as
potentially viral as possible? Yeah, this seems sort of like a business strategy question. Like, I feel like the long-term goal is always to build a great brand because that contributes to better SEO and ASO and just general word of mouth and brand love. So I think it's always great to build a brand. I've seen that Instagram Reels is better for that because there's actually a home feed where it's just people that you follow. So it's a lot easier to reach your own followers from an Instagram
account. So yeah, I think, you know, having a legitimate brand beyond just like going viral every day, it's always good. Yeah, I think that's always a good thing to have. Yeah. What kind of apps do you think this works for? You and I actually talked about this directly in relation to my weather app. I forget the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of, yeah, I just don't know like how viral you're going to be able to go with a weather app and like, you know, productivity apps maybe
widget Smith being an exception. Is it harder for productivity in those sorts of apps? And then what apps do you think are the absolute best fit for this kind of marketing? Yeah, so TikTok is a video platform. So apps that have some sort of visual element or highly visual wow factor do very well on TikTok. So things like consumer social dating personal finance, health and wellness. If you have any of those apps that have some sort of strong visual component, it's easier to make viral content
about those apps, but you can get creative with it. If you look at the TikTok ad library and you go to the top performing ads of all time, they're all utility apps. They're just, you know, things like phone storage, cleaners and AI spam calling blockers and things like that. One niche is that I've seen do really well is just productivity apps. So there's this app because if you think about the types of content that exists on TikTok, there's a lot of people that talk about things from their
personal experience like ADHD or productivity, motivation. There's a lot of content that exists in that niche already. So partnering with creators in that niche or just copying the content that already works in that niche, it can apply very well to things like productivity apps and utility apps like you're saying. If you think about in general, like what type of marketing works as a whole,
it's like health, wealth, relationships. Right. If I have to do with either of those things. So for example, productivity is somewhat about wealth, somewhat about health and you can attach that type of storytelling in your marketing to the app. Whether is that health, wealth, relationships.
I think whether is a difficult one. You were saying, you know, looking at the top ads, these like phone cleaner and stuff like that, but are those going viral or is that like those are successful as ads because a lot of money is put behind them because there's those two kind of things like a lot of what you've been talking about on Twitter and you know, you have this community
you're building up of apps working to go viral and use TikTok as a marketing channel. But there's the like free marketing go viral and then there's like put money behind a piece of content and that performing well. So do you see those kind of like productivity tools and you know, clean your storage itself? Are those actually going viral or is it that those just make so much money, the creators of those apps are able to put so much money behind them on spend?
They're primarily getting their users through paid acquisition because they can't go viral and TikTok. That was my point there. I think the maybe I should make a distinction to productivity apps that solve a deep pain point about your day to day motivation and building habits. It's a very emotional emotionally tied product versus a productivity app that cleans your phone storage. It's a somewhat emotional problem, but it's not it's not as deep. It's more of a UEC and ad
and the ad has a good creative and you're just like, Oh, that seems useful. Let me download that and then there's a paywall and then you pay the paywall versus a TikTok that says, Hey, are you struggling with motivation? There's the dream outcome that you can sell through that type of content. You could be 10 times more productive. You start doing habit tracking and then that sort of like user experience and buying journey is very different, I think, than
strictly utility app. Yeah, so maybe that that's where to draw the line of you kind of said it earlier, right? It's like, if you have a productivity app that you can make content that people really feel has a higher likelihood of going viral. If you have a productivity app, like we've been talking about that, like, clean your storage, like that people need that, but maybe those kind of ads are less likely to go viral and get a lot of free boost, even if they can be very effective on TikTok
as a paid. So thinking again, specifically about like my weather app, which, you know, we've talked about his, it's probably going to be a challenge for me to get going on TikTok if I try. It's that if I'm trying to go viral, I need to focus on that, that feel side of things and that's hard to do. It's hard to create that kind of feel content for that kind of a utility versus like you were saying, a more kind of emotionally driven utility or productivity app. So maybe that's a great
way to draw those distinctions. I think it's possible also to slightly change the products to become more TikTok native. So I've seen people do this, for example, with health tracking, where, you know, if you have a whoop or an Apple watch or Fitbit or something and that you're not satisfied with the analytics, there's these apps that are doing better biometrics and better analysis, which is not a fantastic pitch for TikTok. It's sort of like, improve your health by looking at your analytics.
Like do end consumers really want to put in the work to improve their health with general, like good health analytics, not really, but what some of these apps are doing is they choose one hook, one viral, you know, killer feature within their app that will go viral on TikTok. So for example, I've seen this new health graph that tells you your anxiety levels throughout the day. And I don't know how it does that. It's maybe it's blood, a combination of blood pressure and
heartbeat or, you know, some other data, but it's a very novel thing. Like I've never seen an app do that before and it hits a pain point that's very resonant with a lot of people. And the app might do a whole bunch of things with your health, but on TikTok, they emphasize this one killer feature. I've seen apps, you know, create features just to go viral on TikTok and then use that sort of as a funnel to their main, you know, the whole ecosystem of features that they have in their app.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like and then that probably somewhat informs your kind of go viral strategy versus the kind of create a great ad strategy is if you're specifically trying to go viral, you're probably not, you know, listing all the features you're trying to, it's like you specifically want to look for that hook that's going to be unique, that's going to make people feel, that's going to do all those things. That kind of leads me to the next question, which is, and we've already
been talking about it, but how do you create great content on TikTok? 15 seconds at a time, 60 seconds at a time, two minutes at a time. I mean, especially tough because you're ultimately selling something, we can get into the CTAs, but like, yeah, what makes a good TikTok creative? As a founder or a developer, like, you can make content yourself, so you can get out your phone, record your face and just start talking about your app. There's another trending format right now
where it's just TikTok slide shows. So there's no, it's like a carousel image where it scrolls through five, five to 10 images with captions on the screen and those are going really viral. So there's a lot of ways to make this content yourself, but in general, how do you make good content? I think generally it has to have you want it to go viral, you know, on its to get views, which we discussed
earlier. You know, it's about wash time engagement, something that could be shareable. And a good heuristic for thinking about that is if someone was watching this video, would they share it with a friend? So then if you think about like, if you said, hey guys, I just made this app, it helps you look at the weather and the interfaces as much, you know, better than the normal weather app. It's too salesy, like how likely would an average viewer watch that video and then decide to
send it to a friend? What emotional impact is that video having on them that makes them think, wow, I need to send this to my friends. So how do you create that emotion? It's got to, basically, it has to, it has to be funny. It has to be controversial or has to have some sort of wow factor. There's probably some other emotions that you can think of, but if it has one of those things, high chance that people are going to share with their friends or like the video or leave
a comment. But then it also has to sell the products too. You have to either show the product or mention it. You don't just want views. There's a tension there that you want it to get good engagement, but then you also want to sell the product. The more you sell the product, usually the less shareable the video becomes. It is tricky, but I can give one example. So there is this app that helps you to record your lectures for college students. You audio record the lecture and then it
gives you an AI summary of all the lecture notes based on the the recording. And one of the really good apps in this space is called Quizzard AI and they have a TikTok and Instagram accounts. And one of the video formats that they do is they get a college student to put a laptop in their lap while they're sitting in the lecture hall while the teacher is presenting their lecture. And then they have a laptop screen open with the app open on the screen. And it's recording the lecture and
the student is like a sleep. Like, you know, like just sleeping in the in lecture. And but the the camera angle is it's a student behind them filming over the shoulder and looking at the student that's sleeping and recording the lecture. And the caption is WTF, the college isn't even real anymore. So it's relatable, it's funny, it's controversial because kids are lazy these days or whatever, like college is a scam. And it directly shows products and the value proposition of the
product. That's one of the examples that kind of hits really good engagement and also selling the products really effectively. Let's dig into a couple more examples. I noticed an ADHD habit tracking app that's like doing really well. Tick tock. What's their content? Like what's so shareable about what they're doing? This might be a Gen Z trend, but I think, you know, Gen Z cares a lot about mental health. Sometimes Gen Z over self diagnosis on certain mental, you know, illnesses,
ADHD is definitely one of them. They kind of describe ADHD more as a personality trait than an actual diagnosis. The trend is out there and people are talking about it. So there's all this existing ADHD content where people are saying, does anyone else get that feeling when you walk into a room and then you completely forget why you were there? Oh, like ADHD things. And you could do that as a talking head video. These creators are speaking to the camera or they're doing a skits where they
show themselves walking to the room and then forgetting why they're there. Procrastination on things like their homework or their tasks. So the content is out there. You just make a slight change in the call to action of those videos where you say, hey, anyone else relates to this thing. By the way, I use this app. By the time they get halfway through the video, they've already given the algorithm the 50% 60, 70% watch time. And then you plug the app, you know, at the end,
then people are like, well, it's okay. Like I just got all this relatable content and maybe got a few tips for managing my ADHD plus they just gave me this app that's really useful. It's almost like an infomercial, but just organically on TikTok. You know, you got to give value and demonstrate the value of the product by talking about the pain points and then talking about the solutions and including your product as a solution for the topic that you're talking about. Yeah,
that's really cool. And then another example of RizGPT. What are they doing content-wise? So RizGPT is a keyboard app that looks at your dating app matches that you get on Tinder or Hinge or whatever. And then it suggests what to say to the person. So, you know, it's like it's sort of riding this Gen Z, you know, idea of Riz and being charismatic over a text. And their strategy is very interesting.
They have dozens of TikTok accounts all posting pretty similar content. I don't know if you've ever seen the split screen content where you get like subway surfers on the bottom and then you get some like Reddit story on the top or some text messages story on the top. So RizGPT uses this format a lot in a lot of their videos where they have Minecraft, like parkour video in the background or some sort of gameplay video in the background just to get people to keep watching.
But then in the foregrounds they have screenshots of Tinder conversations and the Tinder conversations are basically funny pickup lines that are generated by the app, like by RizGPT. Another thing they do is they do the screen recording so they're live, you know, typing and then there's a pause and like, oh no, what do I say? And then they swipe over to the RizGPT app. They input the screenshot and then it generates and then they swipe back over to the dating app and then input the line
that they just copy and pasted directly demonstrates the product. But of course they put that segment at least 50% of the way into the video. So the main point of watching the content for most viewers is to just watch this entertaining conversation between two people on a dating app. But you know, certain percentage of people that watch will relate to the content and say, hey, actually, I use dating apps. I sometimes struggle with writing pickup lines. So I'm going to actually
download this app that they just shield to me. People know it's an ad. They know it's an ad. But if it's entertaining, it doesn't matter. And are those going viral? Are they producing a lot that do go viral? Or is that an example of ones that are having to put a lot of money behind to get the attention? Oh no, these are very viral. And the virality there is probably their conversation, right? It's like weird, goofy, and like they're probably trying to pick like, you want to see what the
person's going to respond on Tinder to this crazy message or whatever. Anything to do with dating. I mean, there's a reason why everyone gossips about relationships and dating. There's just a lot of good content that can come out of it. Everyone relates in some way to finding love and, you know, talking to people that you're trying to date. So there's a lot of spiciness and humor that can come out of that type of content. It seems like based on, and it is fun to kind of dive into these
specific examples. But I don't know that anyone listening is going to be able to replicate the exact format and the exact success of these three that we've talked about. But it seems like so much of getting good at TikTok and having multiple videos go viral over time is just watching what other people are doing and learning, are there any tips for how to keep an eye on what's going viral? Yeah, how people are effectively doing this? You should follow me on Twitter.
I post, I post content about this. Like the way that I do it is I just scroll on TikTok. I scroll on TikTok and Reels and I have swipe files. So I have multiple folders. Every time I watch a video that seems like it is an ad, not an ad, but it seems like it was paid for. I put it into one of my four swipe files in the TikTok folders or the Instagram Reels folders and I categorize it into what type of content it is. So if it's like a slideshow, then I'll put it into the slideshow's
folder. If it's a talking head content, I'll put it into the talking head folder. If it's like a skit like the Quizzard AI lecture hall one, I'll put it into the skit folder. So yeah, I think just being an active consumer and like consuming from a producer mindset is sort of how I've always thought about marketing. If you want quick hacks for like just getting a bunch of ideas for content,
there's tools out there. I think if you just Google like best performing TikTok, you know, content for brands, I think there's a lot of websites that kind of try to aggregate some of that content. It's kind of funny because when I'm on TikTok or Instagram Reels, I'm a middle-aged man, Instagram, though, said I really like family humor. So like husband and wife humor. But my point saying that is that if all you do is scroll as a consumer, you're going to understand what goes
viral with other people like you. And I wonder if like you kind of have an advantage as a young techie in New York City and like your habits may be more aligned with those kind of audiences where things are going to go viral, whereas like my like dad content on Instagram, I don't spend much time on TikTok. So I'm using Instagram as an example, but it's like the algorithms do kind of pigeonhole you. And so while like being a consumer helps, you probably want to find ways to kind of
break out beyond where the algorithm has pigeonhole to you. So it seems like those kind of websites and other resources. I've learned a lot following you on Twitter to see what's going viral in those age groups that like I don't see that kind of content when I'm scrolling. That's very true. I think the algorithm does pigeonhole you. If you're thinking about researching content in a specific
space, there are first part of your research tools that TikTok does give you. If you look up like TikTok keyword research, I think there's tools that give you insights into underutilized keywords for TikTok search. And then if you go on the TikTok creator marketplace, you can also find creators that are putting themselves on the marketplace to be hired for sponsored content. And you can filter by niche. And if you look at their videos and you can see like the types of branded
content that they're making, so that's another good research tool. You had mentioned it earlier, but where do you go to see what ads are performing really well? Like storage cleaner apps performing really well? That's in their ad product. The TikTok ad library. So just like the Facebook ads library, TikTok has similar products where you can just see all the top performing ads. You can even see the click through rates and the watch time on the ads. So you can analyze those videos. They show
you a lot of good data. Yeah, and I guess on those those probably, you want to look at the content that's going viral to get tips for going viral. And then you want to look at the ad library for for like what kind of content we create that we might put money behind. And like I imagine there's enough overlap between those two where you're going to get ideas for both from watching either. But imagine you need to kind of keep that context like you're not going to go viral with some of
the techniques that these storage cleaning apps are using in their ads, right? Definitely. Definitely. That's exactly right. Yeah. The last part of creating content that again we've touched on, but I want to dive deeper into is how do you create effective call to action? Pretty much anybody listening to this podcast is not wanting to go viral for viral sake. They're wanting to go viral to make money, to drive people through the app store, to download their app, or to go through a web flow,
to sign up for a subscription. How do you create effective call to action in a TikTok video? Yeah, this is super important. Like consumers in general, not just on TikTok, but consumers are hyper aware of things that feel like ads as a general rule. One interesting thing about TikTok is a lot of these videos promoting apps. They don't mention Lincoln Bio. So that was a really popular
thing from Instagram era. Click on the my Lincoln bio, use this code to check out. That works well if you're an influencer and you're pushing the products to an audience that already has trust with you. But if you're watching a random video in the for you page, it needs to feel as authentic as possible because you haven't built that audience trust over time. They're just watching a video cold. Some examples of this are here's the top five apps I use for XYZ pain point. Here's the top five
apps I use for tracking my progress in the gym. That's not a great hook. You could probably put more pain points and more dream solutions in that hook. But you know, you name five different apps and then your app is one of them. It's a genuinely useful video. It's similar to you know, the Google SEO strategy where it's like these are called the top five credit cards and then obviously they're
all sponsored. It's still genuinely useful to the consumer because you're giving them a variety of options and a certain percentage of those people will follow the call to action go to the first one or the second one or whichever one is your app. Another one is there's with the slideshow content. There's this app called POV and the app is a disposable camera app. So you take pictures and you can only view the photos later. Sort of a nostalgic app that brings back the vibe of you know, actual
disposable cameras. But they're going really viral on TikTok with slideshow stories. So they say, you know, the first slide is so it's all wedding based, weirdly enough. So they say, here's five controversial rules that we had at our wedding recently. And then there's this image of you know, wedding. And so that's a great hook. It's a very negative, you know, interesting hook. People are like, oh, what are the controversial rules? And then the rules are controversial. It's like, oh, no kids
at the wedding or no taking pictures. And then the no taking pictures kind of hints at the last slide, which is, oh, by the way, I had the guests use the POV app from the app store. So instead of taking pictures normally with cameras, they have to use this disposable camera app and it created a better, you know, vibe for taking a picture of the wedding. So they have multiple accounts making these slideshow videos. And the app, the CTA there is, you know, I had the guests use the POV
app. So it's a, they directly mentioned the app, but it's part of a storyline rather than saying, hey, go download this thing. Yeah, and it sounds more organic too, right? Because it's like, here's our five crazy rules that are wedding. One, two, three, four. And I used the app to enforce rule number four, whatever. So yeah, that's, man, that's, that's super slick. One more is this one's
really good for talking head content. So if you have creator, if you get 100 creators to just start storytelling on camera, a good hook that a lot of people are using in the e-commerce space and the app space now is, am I the only one that saw that viral video from that XYZ authority figure about this thing? And it's just like, the viral video might exist. It might not. But it's like, it's also ambiguous enough to where, yeah, of course, there's going to be lots of viral videos about
every topic. But just saying, like, oh, am I the only one that saw the viral video? It's just a good hook. And eventually it'll get saturated. Like, everyone's going to say the same hook. And then people will start to catch on it. Oh, this is not organic. But it is a trend that I think is still quite active right now. Yeah, another, another CTA is, I've seen this one in the ADHD niche going back to that.
But you just start with a pain point and then give helpful tips so that you say, oh, if you struggle with ADHD, here's this hack I found or here's some tips about how to deal with ADHD. And then you give actual tips and then you say, oh, also, I use this app. You just doesn't have to get the end. You could use the app as tip number three out of five or, you know, but the basis of
the video is that here's a bunch of his these hacks that I a life hack or ADHD hack. Actually, if you go on TikTok and you search hashtag ADHD hack, you'll get lots of examples of these videos of people sharing their ADHD hacks. And you can replicate some of those copyrighting structures. What's interesting to me too is as we've been talking through all of this and you said it earlier,
is it some apps specifically build features to go viral. And I wonder if that's actually a good product strategy is that, you know, if you're building features that people care about that are interesting that have some natural pain point that's going to bring people back into the app, like if you're building features that don't have any kind of a hook that's going to go viral on TikTok, like, are you really like building something valuable for folks that they're actually going
to use? I mean, that's what it so many apps I talked to really struggle with retention because, yes, you created some great solution for ADHD, but it's a huge pain to use or it doesn't have that like emotional connection that's going to bring you back to it or it doesn't have that wild
factor that's going to inspire people to use it. If this whole strategy and finding things that are likely to go viral on TikTok is actually a great way to do feature discovery, product discovery, and think of new apps to build, think of new features to build through these framework, you've essentially shared over this whole podcast about like what people are going to connect with.
100%. I've even seen people build apps in the completely opposite direction where they do the marketing first just for a wait list and they talk about the app and the concept of it and show Figma screenshots and the app doesn't even exist yet and they just get people to sign up for a wait list and that's instant product validation. If you get a bunch of views on a TikTok that talks about your app, you get a bunch of signups for your wait lists, then you can build the app after
you market it. There's this app called Breezy, the founders in the community. It's basically a social note sharing app but it really resonates with a certain demographic of young, Gen Z people. Yeah, she just makes founder-led content talking about the app itself showing Figma screenshots, some beta screenshots, and then it's a wait list and she made a video that was 15 seconds long just talking about the app and got I think 5,000 wait list signups. So yeah, that was that was
Breezy, the Breezy app. I wonder if that's actually even a good strategy too because as far as hooks go, that's another kind of hook like being an insider, being in the know, being early to something that's going to blow up. Yeah, I wonder if that's actually a fun hook for folks to play with. It's like as you're building a new feature, tease it in that way and like, hey, you want to get on our beta or you want to join the wait list for when this comes out versus building it first
and then creating the marketing. That could be a really cool strategy. And then you kind of like do that and like like you're saying, it's like that's how you validate whether or not these features are going to hit or not. I built so many. I've launched 22, 3 apps over the last 16 years and somewhere like hits and somewhere total duds. There wasn't a ton of correlation between, you know, the amount of time spent or like, I probably should have found better ways to do product validation
ahead of time. And so for side project apps today, for big apps that are looking for new features, that's a really cool idea for doing some product validation ahead. See if it goes viral and tick-tock it if it doesn't. Maybe it's not the feature to build next. I just want to give one more thing relating to this. This is an infinitely repeatable tactic that just it happens a year, year over year. It's just Spotify wrapped. If you just remake Spotify wraps, but for XYZ niche,
that concept goes viral every single year reliably. Like the most recent one is the verse app. It's a consumer social app and they just did a design. They generated an AI image, a bedroom based on the style of the music that you listen to. And then they use that as a hook for the for the consumer social app. And it went super, super viral. I think they hit number one in the app store for a few days. Wow. So the last thing I wanted to talk about was working with influencers.
So I'm a good example that I don't think me getting on tick-tock is going to sell apps. Yeah. Middle-aged man, you know, talking about apps. They'll be a lot of folks like you who will in your framing be the actor, the director, and kind of do everything. And I think for people who can pull that off, that's going to be a ton of fun. But for a lot of folks, they're not going to be able to do this themselves. And so finding creators to work with is going to be a huge part
of making this successful. So yeah, what are your top tips for finding and working with creators to help implement what we've been talking about? I think influencer marketing, traditional influencer marketing is very expensive. If you reach out to some of these creators on who have, you know, more than 100,000 followers, a lot of them will hit you back with their media kit. And it's all something even to have an agent, an talent agent that inflates the prices even more.
Charge you thousands of dollars for a single video. You want to avoid those people. They can be good to work with if it's a really, really strong audience fit. But if you want to get a lot more ROI in a scrapier way, I like going after very low follower count creators. So finding people that have less than 50,000 followers who have maybe hit one or two viral videos in their time on TikTok, but maybe don't go consistently viral. Because if they're going consistently viral,
they're going to be more expensive. But if they hit one or two viral videos, they know the feeling of what it takes to go viral. Like they probably thought about, oh, why did that video go so viral? It's the way that I said these words in these ways. It's the way that I did the hook. So they sort of know what it takes. And then lastly, it's just like human touch, just like look at how they present themselves. Are they charismatic on camera? If they're charismatic on camera, they have low
follower count. They know how to make viral videos, but are not super monetized with sponsor videos yet. That's the perfect person that you want to reach out to. They're probably not making that much money from brand deals. So you can pay them cash and they'll gladly, they'll probably gladly take it. It'll take a little bit more training, you know, teaching them about the app and telling them how to structure the video scripts and things like that. But yeah, I think finding low follower count
but charismatic creators is the way to go. And then how would you suggest structuring payment expectations in those kind of low-fowl or count? They're probably aspiring creators, not, you know, they don't have an agent. Do you write a contract? Like what do you offer the creators and how do you structure the deal to make it work? Yeah, so a lot of these creators are used to getting reached out by these big CPG, you know, e-commerce companies. They just do
gift-gifted campaigns. So they just get a product, a free product, an exchange for a video. So in your outreach message, whether it's an email or a DM, if you just say I want to pay you, like explicitly say I want to pay you for a video in cash, you don't have to say how much, you know, you can figure out negotiating the rates later. But say explicitly I want to pay you for a video. My app is, you know, it does this. I think your audience would be great fit. I really
like your content. And then typically how you structure that deal is, you know, as I was saying before the CTA in these videos is not always link and bio. So there's not going to be attribution for a lot of these videos. So what you actually do is you give them bonuses for views. So if they get a bunch of views, then you can pay them per view. And then in addition, you can give them a base rate for making videos. Another thing is since there is such a low follow account creator and, you know,
you want them to go viral on the for you page, you can have them make a brand new account. So you can have them make a new tick talk account and name it something else that's, you know, a little bit more branded towards your app. Have them post on it every day. So a lot of these deal structures are, you can have them post one tick talk per day for a month. So 30 videos a month. And the cost on that
is anywhere from I've seen $500 all the way up to $3,000. So at $3,000, that would be $100 per video, which is still like fairly cheap. How much to pay just basically just depends on the level of experience and how much ROI you expect to get out of it. I have a friend member of the community who's paid a one creator 3000 a month and they got their first 20 K MRR from just one creator just posting every day. So the retainer you get what you pay for, you know, if you pay for a really
good creator, it'll pay dividends. But then the incentivization is also good too. So a typical rate that I've seen for that is $1,000 per million views or you can cut it where it's $500 per 500,000 views, which works out to be $1,000,000, which is very, very cheap. And you can play around with the rates depending on what the what the creator wants. The thing about paying a CPM though is that
it has to actually deliver. And so if they create something that like goes insanely viral, but doesn't actually send people to the app where it sends people to the app that aren't going to be payers, I could see easily getting pretty upside down. Have you seen any examples of that or have you experienced that yourself? Like you do this on a CPM basis and that it goes crazy viral gets 5 million views. Now you're on the hook for 5 grand. But then the CTA wasn't very strong. And like,
you don't make much money on it. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's why like the creator brief is like very, very important. You know, you should agree before hands on all the things that are required from every single video. So if you know, you know, generally what your strategy is and what you think will be high converting videos, you should give those guidelines and say you have to have the CTA in this way. So definitely important to make sure that the videos are viral and high converting.
Yeah. Earlier you mentioned that in e-commerce, part of what really blew up was the affiliate model with TikTok shops. Do you think there's potential for that on TikTok with apps doing affiliates? Like I've actually talked to him. Probably I'm on the podcast at some point. The founder of GoMarketMe and what they're trying to do is build a platform for affiliates. Like in what cases do you think it would work? What do you think are the potential there of actually just
doing a rev share where essentially infinite upside? Like if somebody created that video and instead of getting paid $5,000 to get 5 million views, if that 5 million views actually generated $100,000 and you're giving a 50% of first conversion or whatever and they can make 50K. I mean, it seems like for a lot of creators, this opportunity to make infinite money would be more interesting, but it's tough. So yeah, what are your thoughts on affiliate on TikTok? I think it's great. It's
always the gold standard of marketing for as the brand owner. Like obviously it would be great to have zero risk upfront and just have people do free marketing for you and only pay if they generate revenue for you. The problem is yeah, like TikTok is consumers are very savvy. They don't really like clicking links in bio. They want to feel like this video is just telling them about an app. They go search on the app store themselves. They download it. I think it can work for influencer
marketing. If you have an influencer who has an established audience and they're getting a cut of the link in bio clicks, I think that has always been and will will always be a good way to partner with with creators. It's like traditional influencer marketing. They have an audience. They have a lot of trust, but typically with those deals, there's there's always a base rate in addition. I think there's a talent constraint or there's a supply constraint of good
creator talent. I think creators actually have like the big creators like with audiences, they have a lot more power than the brands. They're getting reached out to by tons of brands all the time competing for their attention and doing deals. So that's why I sort of advocate for the you know the scrappy creator marketing, non-traditional influencer marketing because in that equation, I think the supply demand is reverse. I think there's a lot more creators that are underpaid that
brands can start paying. So TikTok, shop for apps can definitely exist within like a certain context of influencer marketing. I've actually been playing with offer codes recently. It's something again, I'll probably do a whole podcast on or write something up about the experiments I've been doing. But what's interesting about offer codes is that you get 100% attribution on those. Do you think that could be incorporated into a call to action of like use code
Black Friday? Yeah, I'm probably going to do a Black Friday promotion. So it was top of my, but use code whatever to get 20% off. Or do you think like on TikTok that kind of thing just wouldn't work? Like use code whatever, even if it's incentivized like getting a discount. Do you think that's too overt of a call to action for it to actually work on TikTok? I think if you got creative with it, it could definitely work. It just can't be in the same way that you would sell the promo code
through an influencer. Like I think it'll always work with influencer marketing like we were saying before. But for the scrappy creator marketing, if a random creator on the for you page with zero trust with the audience says use promo code this at checkout for a discount. It feels like an ad. It's not going to go viral. But imagine if you if you had the creator say, guys, did you see that code? Like I just used it. Have you seen this hack that you can use to
like get this thing for 50% off? Maybe that could, I don't know how legal that is. But I mean, there's probably other ways, you know, there's there's always creative ways that you can incorporate codes. So I could see some potential with that. Well, Joseph, it's been fascinating. I've learned a ton. I think this can be really interesting to folks, especially just this kind of nutrient that we've talked about, take talk for years, but it does seem like people are figuring it out in a
way that's different than it has been in the years past. And you actually have a community of founders who are all working on this and trying to crack. I actually joined a few weeks ago. And that's part of how we met. Anything else you wanted to share about the community or anything else you're working on? Definitely. I appreciate having you in the community. It's been great seeing you around. Yeah, the community is a membership community for consumer app founders
about half of them are venture backed, half of them are bootstrapped. Everyone has some form of traction, whether it's users or revenue or funding. Some of the founders include the founders of calm, the meditation app, Wombo AI, Bloom investing for teens, autopilot, copy trading, a founder of Yik Yak, lots of people of different backgrounds are finding value from the community,
whether it's venture backed and you're trying to learn these scrappy marketing strategies or your bootstraps and you're just learning to you want to find the current edge of TikTok organic and other user acquisition or a pretty, pretty small community just trying to keep it tight and it just sharing the latest tactics. The community's been great. Discords, it tends to be extra chatty and I don't have a ton of time to be following along with the chat, but I love how you do the weekly
summaries. So every week you kind of take the best insights because it's your community and you do have the time to be following and chatting with folks and stuff. So the weekly summaries are like super high signal and kind of the best of conversation and tactics and what's working, what's not. And then I mean really this whole podcast was kind of that high level overview of all the things you're learning in the community from other founders. I think you've learned
yourself that you're sharing with founders in the community. So thanks for sharing so much today. And then we are for those listening in early December, I believe it's December 4th, we're going to be doing a webinar where we actually dig into some of the specific videos that are going viral, some of the tactics we're going to, I don't know, all the things we're going to cover, but we're going to have some fun Joseph and I on this webinar. And if you're listening after
the webinar, it'll be posted to YouTube. So as a companion to this episode, that webinar is going to be fantastic to like dive in more directly to show what's working and what's not working and actually see the video, see the acting, see the call to action. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking to you again so soon. And we'll have a link to sign up for the webinar. And then once the webinar has happened, we'll link to the YouTube in the show notes. We'll also link to
the community and your Twitter. So yeah, if you've enjoyed this episode, want to learn more about TikTok, go to the show notes and sign up for the webinar or view the YouTube video. Joseph, thanks so much for joining me. This is a ton of fun. Thanks so much for having me. It's been fun. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subplub.com to join our private community.