Copy This Growth Strategy, It'll Blow Up Your App

0:00So once we actually figured out a good hook and demo, Chloe, who I'm working on the app with, got a video on Instagram that did like 10 million views. And once we had that, we knew we had something. Everyone dropped off here because we didn't build enough trust in our onboarding. So that's why we expanded our onboarding a little more. Added in some social proof, onboarding video, a couple questions that doubled our conversion. That's Phoenix do. And yes, he actually became the astronomer CEO's fake daughter to market his app,

0:33generating 50 million views in a week. But that's far from the most interesting thing he's done. Phoenix has built apps in the manifesting and self-help space with his latest hitting 25K MR and 100K downloads. We're about to dive deep into the exact strategies he's using to repeatedly see success with consumer apps. But what makes this conversation different from any other podcast or video you'll see on YouTube is just how tactical Phoenix gets about the entire funnel. He breaks down when to use hard pay walls versus free trials, how he doubles his conversion rate by studying the best apps in the world, and his framework for spotting billion-dollar

1:07app ideas before anyone else. Not only that, but you'll see Phoenix reveal things nobody else is willing to show, like the strategy he used to get a 10% view to download rate. the exact reasoning behind why he targets 50k to 250k follower creators instead of mega influencers and his full process for working with 40 creators simultaneously. Without further ado, let's get right into it. For those who don't know, I'm Joseph Choy and this interview is brought to you by Superwall, the all-in-one platform for payw wall management and revenue analytics for your mobile apps. Let's get into it. How

1:38did you get 100K downloads on your app? the classic funnels that everyone deploying right now. Most of it though was from organic Tik Tok marketing. There's this huge opportunity where everyone's looking at e-commerce methods and models. Show a product that provides some magic moment in front of your consumers and then build enough interest in the comment sections to help you know boost engagement. Don't give away too much of that sauce when you're doing that hook and demo so it doesn't feel like a paid advertisement. And that helped us drive all that traffic organically to the app. How we got

2:12started on like the manifesting niche. There's this trend that came around last October. I think everyone was asking Chad GPT to like give them a day in their dream life. And when I saw how viral that was and I saw girls crying, I was like, "Yeah, like that could probably be an app within itself." You saw girls like on TikTok doing a certain prompt. You describe some things in your life and then you ask it to describe a day in your dream life and it kind of has this effect of visualization where it's like a very emotional these are all your dreams almost like coming true like

2:43put into words. So people were doing that on chat GPT and then posting it on Tik Tok and you like saw that trend. The manifesting niche it's essentially just like the self-help motivation but for you know women Steve Jobs said the same thing about Apple have a vision take steps towards it. girls were just doing that, but with chat and posting online and crying because they would say things like, you know, I'm going through like a breakup right now. Give me a story of a scenario where it's all okay. It's almost like a form of open therapy. I've saw 10, 20 million view videos of girls

3:16just posting their like reactions to the prompt and everyone in the comments were like, "Oh, what's the prompt? Like, how did you do this?" And everyone would also respond and say like, "Oh, wow. Like, this was such a great feature. You're like, I got super emotional reading mine. Really smart cuz you're like, you found a format that works and then your thought process was like, okay, I'm just going to use a very similar format, put this chat GBT prompt into basically like a rapper product with an app. Is that basically how you got started? And then how did you turn that into your own version? That was the initial idea like

3:52late last year for building in the consumer space. I used to just go back to the Gym Shark model. The guy who started Gym Shark used to give out products because he didn't have the budget to compete with Nike and he would go to influencers and creators and they would basically do a hook and demo and say like this is like this awesome shirt I just got from Gym Shark. Appreciate it guys. And it would build rapport their community. So really like I said applying that natural organic advertising to that was something that day and dream life prompt really hooked on to. So, we figured out that the day

4:24in the dream life prompt was like a great magic moment to have in the app. Once we started AB testing like the content, it didn't convert super well even though it was viral because people don't read a lot and people already use chatpt. So, funneling that into app store wasn't super successful. The magic moment throughout the funnel was like you come and download the app, you like say some stuff about your goals and your dream life. You got that day in your dream life. So you have like an emotional hook that really convinced people to like do the trial, convert to the app, and then once you got in, you

4:57saw those affirmations along with that GPT story that you got, and people were like, "Oh, wow. This is like a really nice like positive message throughout my day." And then how did you turn that concept into top offunnel content? So once we actually figured out like a good hook and demo, Chloe, who I'm working on the app with, she got a video on I think Instagram like herself that did like 10 million views. And once we had that, like we knew we had something. So from there, it was just a matter of tracking performance, trying to get like a few more hook and demos in content variety,

5:34and then it was just aggressively scaling up our like UGC program. What was that 10 million view video? It was like if you're seeing this before like May 7th, repeat these affirmations for the next 7 days from Copia and watch your dream life unfold. Something along those lines. So, we had like hard deadline and the hook and then we promised some transformation which everyone wants and then when Chloe would actually say the affirmations, it was

6:02just affirmations from the app. How did you actually show the app in that video? Did you do a phone screen demo? Yeah, it was like a phone screen demo overlays. Are you able to show that format or is it still something you're kind of using? It was one that had 6.6 million. Okay. That actually didn't have the hook and demo and I remember very specifically I told Chloe or that video popped off and I was like, Chloe, you forgot to hook do the hook and demo. We've gotten like 20

6:2930% less downloads than we could have. So that video didn't show or mention the app at all? No, that didn't. But it still got downloads to the app. Yeah, it did. Cuz she probably did subtly cuz she said, "These are the affirmations from Copia." And everyone in the comments was like, "Oh, what's Copia?" Oh, so she said the name of the app as if like everyone should know what it is, but then it's like, "Oh, here's the affirmations from Copia." And then just went right into it without explaining what that meant. And then everyone that comments askked what it is. And then obviously it's coming from

6:58the Copia Instagram account. Some people are curious. They go to the bio and they click the link. Yeah, that's how we were driving that funnel there. So, that one had the hook and bow out. You actually show the the affirmation on the screen of the app and you're showing the app as it's going. So, that one I imagine is more high converting. So, this one format is really interesting. It's very engaging, but then it's also showing the

7:22app and mentioning the name of the app. And it's also kind of repeatable because you're saying, "Hey, if you're watching this before February 7th, insert whatever date it is like right now." So, it feels timely. It feels relevant. So, is that basically the strategy? You kind of repeat the same format, but then you just change the date and it it's sort of like a evergreen format that you can just keep repeating. This was like our initial format. Since then, we've expanded to like multiple formats and like multiple features. And to your point, it is like super repeatable. The creator that we were inspired by is a

7:55girl named Sarah Pearl. She sells courses. She sells books. She's in like the manifesting niche. And she doesn't do this type of content anymore, but she did this for like 2 and 1/2 years. Got a million followers on Instagram, 2 and a half million followers on Tik Tok. So, it's like the same cadence of like having something repeatable that is a motivational gets people out of their seat. and bucket this in like the hope course side of social media. She did this because she saw like another self-help book. It got a million purchases on Tik Tok shop and then she made a book for herself and she would

8:32repeat that content and she sold like a 100,000 copies of her book literally just saying like repeat these affirmations for the next 7 days. So we were like we could probably do that as an app. It's exactly like you said it's an info product, right? It's a book. You can turn that into an app. like a person buys a book one time or can buy an app that's like a recurring subscription that basically provides the same type of value. How did you find this person? Cuz this is a gold mine. Like I think if you apply the framework and you're trying to find another niche where you can turn

9:04person who sells courses into an app, but then people might not be aware of all the niches of where people sell courses and the types of content that they're doing really well. Do you remember how you found this Sarah person? Once we got that 10 million view video, me and Chloe were scrolling to try and find all right, who are the larger creators in the space in the self-help, wellness, mindset, motivation, and just by naturally scrolling and warming up new accounts. We ran into Sarah. I would probably aim for that like 500,000 plus follower, probably like a million to look and see like what products are

9:39they selling, do they have a link in bio, how are they trying to monetize? If you're the app founder, you're the brand and you want to sponsor creators to achieve similar distribution, but then you own the app, they don't own the app. Where in that curve do you go? Are you going to that kind of middle ground medium-siz influencer who will take the brand deals or are you actually going big and just partnering with those people or do you go small to the micro influencers? You have to start smaller because you have like an unproven product and once you do target like people with like a million followers,

10:14they do have like a brand that they have to maintain. So if product isn't there yet and it usually isn't in your first like 2 3 months you have to figure out really like what your core product mechanics are what's like the hooked model what gets people in what's the action they take you know what are they rewarded with and ideally if you can build like a product that lasts you have some sort of investment I would start out going to the people in the like 50k like 250k range in terms of Tik Tok following I mean that's what we did we were paying a bunch of those like

10:46smaller size creators because they're not getting brand deals. You're still actually working like a part-time job or like a full-time job for the most part. There's this opportunity for you as an app founder to sell your brand and to have like a mutually beneficial partnership. Ideally, you should be aiming for like a $1 like CPM. You can up that as you go along. I think that's really where the art of advertising comes in. And when you're starting out, going with those smaller creators will just get you people in the funnel to understand those metrics so you can

11:16optimize and scale. So you you scaled to 40 creators. I want to talk about that in a bit. But you said in order to scale to that amount and really be able to start investing, you got to fix your funnel first, like make sure your LTV is high enough to support that growth. How did you actually get a good like high converting retentive product in order to support that growth? So, I remember when we first started out, our install to payw wall rate was like 50 55%. We had about like a 15 to 20% conversion from like payw wall to trial, which is like a decent standard, but like I said, only

11:5550% of people were getting there because we didn't build up enough consumer trust in our onboarding for them to just immediately log in and like type their goals. So you're getting 50% view rate on the pay wall itself. So half of the people were dropping off just scrolling through the four screens. I have our Figma files up here. Initially our

12:14onboarding was like this login screen. What's your name? And then type in your goals. And then after you typed in your goals, you got like that day in your dream life. But like I said, everyone dropped off here because we didn't build enough trust in our onboarding for people to actually share their dreams and goals despite the fact that they had

12:35that user intent from our UGC content. So that's why we expanded our onboarding a little more, added in some social proof, onboarding video, a couple questions along the way, and then that got us from 50 to 60% to 85 to 90%. Just a couple questions to better understand your customer and make that experience

12:59feel personal doubled our conversion. That is a huge difference. What were the biggest things in your onboarding that you feel like make the biggest difference in that conversion? I would really say, and this is where like the ecom pros have really gotten it right, the social proof I think is really important. Being able to say like, you know, proven methods, meaningful results, those small things, they're not like outrageous claims, but just saying that like this is our inspiration. These are people who have done these things before have really helped. And like I said, just really asking like progressive questions. People don't want to go in an app and like immediately

13:33type in a paragraph. having buttons that you can click despite like chat GPT and like chat being like a great interface and people will still expect some type of dopamine physical trigger in an app. That's why Dolingo is so successful. These screens are super simple. It feels like a PowerPoint almost like there's just very minimal words on each screen and you tap through and it makes it a lot more consumable. It's almost like Tik Tok captions. You don't put more than like five words on each screen. You like switch to the next frame. It's definitely like the model here. As much as you want to like provide like

14:06information for a user, like everyone has Tik Tok brain nowadays, they're not going to read like a paragraph anymore. I think you have a hot takes around payw walls. Yeah, I do. If you do a hard payw wall, it's honestly because your app is but if you look at like apps that are actually like useful and helpful, Strava gives you a free trial and you get entrenched

14:27and then you're like, hm, you know what? I probably should pay for like Strava Premium. Like eventually you have this emotional trigger where it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm trying to learn a lesson. I get the dopamine hit and if I like want to continue getting more of these dopamine hits, I should pay for it." But because a lot of these leaks aren't closed on like the current state of like mobile apps, it's really just like how can we create the most like viral feature and then like that's it. You lose the ability to actually build like an app that people stay on. And without that, you can't do like a premium model

15:01cuz you will have conversions. So it's like if you have a hard payw wall and a good product that has the investment and the variable reward and all this stuff, is that also good? Does that like fit into your view? An app like Cal AI, it's like all right, like I want to lose weight. I want to get stronger. There's like a good emotional hook here. It's like you have an external trigger like what gets the user to the product like the external dopamine and it's like okay great. Like I'm trying to lose weight. What's like the simplest action I can take? I can take a picture of my food and then the

15:30variable reward is calories. Calorie tracking is something that you can do like every day if you're trying to lose weight, get stronger, build more muscle, a little healthier because over time you can see these patterns of like, oh, here's like my food, here are my calories track. It's like a slot machine essentially. Like you don't really know what you're going to get, but there's no investment there. There's no actual product there. And you could have like a really good top of the funnel and keep shoving people in there as long as your rorowaz and your payback period makes sense, but like you'll never get that model that like actually made flow into

16:06like a billion dollar company cuz there's no investment there. How do you think about asking for more investment from the user? If you want to actually figure out how to get people to stay and like go like a great app, try to figure out what that bottom of the funnel is. So it's like what does that user experience look like? You know if you get to day 30, day 7, day 1, like what is the expectation and work backwards from that. The easiest path to 100K trigger action variable reward. And then if you want to go bigger than that and build a retentive app that people

16:38keep coming back to, probably something that has some enterprise value or exit value. That's where you need to figure out the investment part. And for the investment part, you want to figure out what's a user action that people are already doing. In your case, what is recently ubiquitous, newly possible? What's recently ubiquitous for like the consumer is being able to have all this access to your own data in the palm of your fingertips. And what's newly possible is that we have these like LLMs before a lot of these like insights would have to be hardcoded, but you really see this in Strava right now. I think really building the Strava for

17:12stress and mental health is like a good proxy for what we want to do. So like these little insights that I would have never been able to actually like gather from purely looking at my data around like my runs is now recently possible. So that's how we're thinking about how to do this. The goal is to build something helpful, useful, and stands the test of time. I think that's sort of like the fundamental problem with self-help. It's that it requires yourself to put in a bunch of effort to improve yourself. But if you find an action that people naturally do every day like have a heart rate or take a

17:50walk or do things that are stressful, it doesn't require any user input and then give them insights into how they can improve their life which is newly possible with LLM cuz you're getting all this data and now you put it into the LLM and then you feed back like helpful stuff and solutions to the user. How did you scale from this one winning format that's getting millions of views and then scale that to 40 creators? you just see still I think one of the best ways we saw through like our metrics that most people coming in our funnel were like girls like 18 to like 25. So we

18:22used platforms like Sideshift a great UGC marketplace to be able to like hire creators like really quickly that got us about 10 20 people that were actually really good. Like I said is just a matter of like how do you use all the tools out there? You know there are agencies available as well. We did have that winning format, but one thing that I also saw was like really viral during that time were like people crashing out cuz Chloe was like making content and then like one day she just like made a video like ranting. Our friend was like you should tell Chloe to like stop

18:53crashing out and it got the wheels turning and I was like crashing out is actually like really viral thing in itself. People being mad, it's like a very strong emotion. People resonate with it. They think it's funny and always goes viral. But I think at that same time like Justin Bieber was like promoting his album and like everyone was talking about his crashs. There was that video of him in front of Nou Malibu where he was like, "Dude, is it not like clocking to you, bro? Like I'm like a dad, too. Like I have a family." And then he used that as like a billboard in

19:23like West Hollywood. Literally, it was like his album logo and it was like, "Is it not clocking to you?" And like a picture of like Justin Bieber. It was like such like a viral concept already. We also invented this crash out button or like a really big red button and you click like crash out now and then it gave you like a breathing exercise to do. We had one video that got like 12 million views because of that. It was

19:46like a slideshow. That's a great video. You literally showed the app in it. It's just a funny text about crashing out. If it was like a 15 million view video and it was like a hook and demo like it probably would have gotten I would say like 30 40,000 downloads. How many views did this video get? 13 million views, 10 to 15k downloads from one just two slides on Tik Tok when you're talking to all these 40 creators, are you doing the same creative strategy for all of them at the same time? Are you kind of giving them free reign to just be creative? So, when it comes to like actual UGC

20:20creators and like college ambassadors, we try to be more strict with the guidelines. They're not like professional creators. They don't know like the angles, the hooks and demos. But for a lot of people, it's like I said, those small things will matter a lot more. But when you're at 40 creators, and when we were at 40 creators, like there's also room to AB test, it was still inherently like the same guidelines of like do a slideshow, do this hook and demo, and show like the same product. The first 10 seconds where we were trying to AB test to find like the most viral, varying degrees of

20:50success with like different hooks. The demo and the product just stays the same. But I've also been looking at all these like ecom guys. This guy named Dc Midas like tweets like insane like alpha. These are the things that go viral if you're trying to target somebody over like 45. Go to your mom's Facebook page and she'll see like this and then people like try to like run ads that are like UGC. But you have to understand like you have to meet your market where they are whether that's the channel, the content they see. And that's what really separates like a longerlasting marketer. Literally people like run advertising agencies outside of

21:27consumer apps and products and they they're able to see things like this and they're like, you know what, yeah, I can't target like a 25-year-old with this, but like this is great rorowaz. That's some alpha. It's good to go into like hyper competitive spaces to figure out where the tactics are, like where the real edge is. Cuz in ecom, especially affiliate ecom where you're selling something that's like very much a commodity and your only edge is your rorowaz, your marketing. you can take a lot of those principles and take them to consumer apps. I don't see a ton of people doing that because a lot of

21:57people in apps I feel like have more Silicon Valley backgrounds or you know coding backgrounds. They're not really in the trenches of e-commerce and affiliate but that's a good like mindset shift if you're a consumer app founder thinking about trying to absorb more information from spaces that are hyper competitive in the marketing space. You have to run ads eventually. It's like really hard not to. And the reality is like if you're all bidding for the same CPM with like the same format, it's just going to skyrocket. So like your ability to innovate and target new channels and audiences and demographics is what makes like a really good

22:30marketer. For example, at Sony and like Dolingo, they have different accounts for different countries and different activities. And that's how you really expand your funnel horizontally. But I wouldn't immediately do this unless you actually know what you're doing. And even then, like you should really try and focus on dominating like one funnel, one niche. Try to get that two, 3x rorowaz first. This like applies to apps just as much as it does like an ecom product and you need to like dominate one channel otherwise like your focus and your attention is just going to be off the charts and you'll never actually wet any channel. Is there anything else

23:03that you wanted to share? I feel like there's a lot of good stuff in this. If you're building consumer app, this is really like the model that you should think about. You start off with capital, code, time, money. This is like top of the funnel. So it's like all right you have creators posts that they make views impressions. More creators means more post which means more views which means more impressions. Try to get a really good CPM so you can justify like a good cost basis there. And then you also have like ASOS app store conversion. You can get 100 million views but if your name

23:35is like something super popular like you're not going to be found in the app store. If your name is like AI journal, like you're going to be screwed. So that's why it's good to have like some type of brand name, something that's like culturally relevant. From there, you get your downloads, then you can use a service like super wall to like really help you AB test your payw wall. If you literally just master like top of funnel plus like good onboarding and payw wall, like you can probably make like $100,000 like a month and get pretty good downloads. The real trick here is like, all right, what does your app look like

24:07when there's nothing? What does your app look like click when there's something and what does your app look like click when there's a lot of things. You want to really build that like feedback loop. You know, you want to follow this model where get somebody to use your product. Great marketing. Give them some type of like GPT action, something they they can learn about themselves, something they can do. Have that slot machine variable reward and over time you can build that investment. So yeah, K factor get that stuff out of there. try to build like a viral loop because you know really that action is the K factor or these apps

24:40scanning swiping that's stuff that people can reuse and make content it's just that it's more forced nowadays like apps used to go viral because it was like oh yeah like I like did this on an app and a lot of people shared it you gain natural virality now it's just reverse engineering and forcing that virality with a viral feature another marketing experiment that I tried that clip of the cold play constantly went viral viral when the astronomer CEO was caught like cheating with his like head of HR. I had this like genius idea and it was like what if we used that to market like our app. So there's this

25:15account that got 200,000 followers I think like 50 million views in like a matter of like a week. And then like the second video like we had done like a product placement for Aopia. That video got like 5 million views and everyone was like yeah like get the bag. Your dad's getting divorced. rack it up. That video had five million views, but only probably drove like a couple thousand downloads. Wasn't super high converting because there wasn't like a clear demo. Do you have links to either of those? I do have this like one LinkedIn post that like I thought was really funny. Yeah. Yeah. Here it is. I

25:47got like four or five texts that day from people being like, "Dude, was that you?" And I was like, "Yeah, that was." So, I don't know, mate. If you want like that clickbay headline and you be like astronomer CEO daughter speaks out about building consumer app something along those lines. You'll get some engagement baiting there. This is great. Thanks so much for doing this pod. This I learned

26:07a lot. Yeah, dude. All right, that was a good one. By the way, I'm the host, Joseph Choy, founder of Consumer Club, which is a private group for ad founders to talk to each other about the latest tactics. Median revenue of member is about a million ARR. Check it out. Check out Superwall too. They're the best. and check out the other interviews on the Superall

26:25channel.