Meet The Marketing Genius Behind 12.2M App Downloads - Julia Pintar

0:00My guest today makes consumer apps go viral for a living. Julia Pintar is the co-founder of PlayKit. One of the reasons I wanted to bring Julia on is because she is insanely good at engineering inbound herself with her content on X, LinkedIn, and other platforms. Virtually all of Playkit's customers come from Julia's inbound content. She does an insanely good job of creating content that gets people's attention and then converting that attention into customers. And then she goes and she helps her customers to get

0:29inbound themselves through UGC content. All right, Julia, what are people going to learn today if they stick around to the end of the episode? I have not spent a dollar or any time on Outbound in about my two years of running Playit and we've brought in over $5 million in revenue. So today I'm going to talk about how we've actually accomplished that with just some fun

0:52LinkedIn and Twitter posts. That's amazing. I think that would be a dream for most people. We were actually talking before the episode and I was like, "Why haven't you done ads or outbound?" I think you're just like, "We haven't needed to." Like inbound just crushes it for you. Yeah, it's been honestly pretty crazy. Sometimes it's scary cuz I'm like, "What if the well dries up?" And that's when I think, you know, then we could do these things that everybody talks about, you know, run the ads or do the outbound, whatever. But it's been so amazing to build this community online where people come to me already trusting me. It makes

1:19my job as a person who leads sales on our team really easy because then everybody's like, "Oh yeah, I want to go and work with Play Kit. I want to go work with Julia. When they get on a call with me, it's an easy close. And that's all through a lot of the content

1:31education I've shared on platforms. Is there any particular platforms that crush it for you in particular? If I ever met Elon Musk, I'd be like, "Hey, Elon, you got a lot of things going." But one of the things in which is I I truly think you're responsible for the success of my business. I met my co-founder on X. I posted there from the beginning and it brought in I would say

1:51the majority if not all of our clients. I share so much on there and it's really really done a lot. A lot of people are like X is fun. I like X the most but LinkedIn is where all the money is. So it is interesting that you're like you know what X is actually where we get most of our customers. Your thoughts on that like

2:06why X and not LinkedIn? So Plit is a tech UGC organic UGC agency and this wasn't really a thing that existed 2 and a half 3 years ago. I do think people on X are more hip to kind of the new trends where people on LinkedIn, it just takes a little bit longer for them to really know what's going on. So if you are somebody who is promoting a new product or a new service that is net new and requires a lot of education, I think X is the place to do it. Whereas LinkedIn, it's more so if you're promoting cold outbound, people already know what that is and they're

2:38just looking for better service. That's fair. I also think that there's something to be said for just creating great content on the platform that you like. It's almost like when people get caught up between do I use this software or that software. It's like if you're creating great content, it almost doesn't really matter what platform it is on. But just for people watching like

2:55yeah, you can make a ton of money on X. A lot of people are like LinkedIn's the place and you know it is a great place to make money, but you can also do a ton of successful inbound on X. So with that in mind, do you want to walk us through one of your top performing posts on X and show us how did you create the

3:11content that actually got you customers? I really started on X and LinkedIn a little bit too. Just sharing a lot of education about what is tech UGC, what is organic UGC because nobody else was doing it at the time. So I really brand myself not like hey here are all my case studies or here are all the great results we get with clients. And sometimes we do that but for the most

3:30part I'm really just sharing education. Um, it helps make our name, our brand name synonymous with this sector of tech UGC, organic UGC. So, I can share an example. One of the things I did a couple of weeks ago was essentially leaked, for lack of better words, our entire playbook within PlayKit. I run an agency. I have a ton of competitor agencies out there. At first glance, people would be like, why would you ever do this? Everybody's going to copycat this. Brands are going to now run what you do inhouse, and they're not going to need you. And I think there's definitely a fair argument for that. But on the

4:01flip side of it, a lot of times two things happen. One, people go and try it in-house internally and realize it's really difficult and they want to work with me instead. Two, as people are doing research for, okay, what agency should I work with? Who can I actually trust in the space? They see me sharing exactly and very transparently what I do and how we do it and why we do it. And it builds up a lot of trust. So, I'm very pro building in public, sharing literally everything there is. Being very transparent about what you're working on, what failed, what you need to do better at. It really just helps

4:30build community especially when you're working with other founders in the [music] space because a lot of times it's like we're all just people here and we want the best for one another. So for this yeah I did a ex article. Articles are pretty fun. They're relatively new and I think they're gaining a lot of traction where we see a lot of saves, a lot of reposts and things like that where they're almost little mini bibles that people come back to over and over

4:51again. It's a fun thing to play with. Really quick before we get into what works well, I do see a lot of people posting articles a lot and sometimes they don't get the most amount of impressions and I'm always wondering like is this still what is working on X is posting long form articles despite sometimes getting lower engagement? Do you see higher conversions? Like how often do you post these articles and how do you create them? Are you using like

5:13AI or what's your process? I mean don't like spam post articles every single day. I would say these are way fewer and farther between, at least for me, where if I have an idea or have something that can be relatively long form that wouldn't fit within my normal character limit, that's when I would spin up an article. So maybe once or twice a month, but it should be something that you spend a lot of time on. You spend a lot of time crafting, especially for X. I use AI all day long and it's just a big turnoff. LinkedIn, you could probably get away with it. So

5:40yeah, my process is really just like opening up a dock and brain dumping into it and then from there kind of trimming it and using all those key tips of like make the hook really catchy. Similar with organic content, you want to rope people in right away. You realize people's attention span is very very short. So then you want to make sure you have really specific headers and whatnot. So as people are skimming, they get the gist of it and if they want to they'll read the whole thing. But the most part people are probably just reading your hook, your headers and maybe a couple sentences in there. Okay,

6:09we're going to go like piece by piece through this and so I'm going to ask all the questions that I think that the audience probably has. Since you're writing it by hand, obviously it takes a little bit longer. How long does it take on average to write a piece of content like this? I love writing. So, it probably will take me like honestly an hour to two hours. Um, but I write all the time. I write every day. It's just like part of my practice. I think if I wasn't in that habit, it would probably take me much longer to really get through that

6:35editing. But I know my voice very well. What do you write every day? like how long do you write and what specifically are you writing? Because I know a lot of people are like write every day, but like is it sales and marketing copy? Is it just journaling or what is it specifically? I mean, I'm definitely tweeting every day or exing or whatever you want to call it these days, which is fun and that's very just stream of consciousness where I'm like boop, whatever I'm thinking right now. But in my more like systematic approach, every day I have a little 5-year journal. So, I write out

7:01here's what I say, here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'm feeling. And it's just a great practice not only to reflect and remember what the heck's been going on in my life, but then just to be like, "Oh, yeah. I can write without Claude." Awesome. And then how long do you budget for that each day? Usually, um, X, I feel like I probably do it, you know, an hour throughout the day, just sprinkled throughout the whole day. Journaling, honestly, like 20, 30

7:23minutes. Okay, got it. So, ideally, people just they build a practice around writing for 20 or 30 minutes every day. This takes you, let's say, like 2 hours. Maybe the average person should budget like I'm just going to like triple what you would take. So maybe like five to six hours to write a piece of content like this. Is

7:39that fair enough? Yeah. And I definitely wouldn't do it in one sitting or even one day. A lot of things that I do when I'm writing longer content is I will like kind of jot down in a bullet point list or however is most helpful for you just kind of all my ideas and then I'll step away and do whatever and I'll come back and I'll structure it a little bit more, step away again and keep kind of doing that

7:57process until it feels very polished. Otherwise, you kind of risk going too fast and not actually really sitting with and synthesizing all of your ideas. Yeah, I used to be a journalist and we had a rule where when you write something, you have to basically like put it away and not look at it for 24 to 48 hours and then come back and edit it with fresh eyes. But I definitely recommend that. Okay, sweet. Let's start by looking at the image. Then we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the headline because honestly the headline and the image probably I don't know what you think but like 80% of the

8:28success of an article is going to come from good headline, good image. I think a lot of people get caught up on the image and like how do I create a good image? What does it even look like? What was your process for creating this image? Yeah, I wish I had a really professional answer for you but this took me way longer than it should have because I'm

8:42not good at using AI image generators. So, I think I used tragedy tea for this. Or maybe I used I have this little AI agent called Kiki. Love it. So, you're always going to want to match what works well for you across your other content, too, just so there's like that common theme. If there's ever a picture of myself that does well, that typically tends to work well across X and LinkedIn, really any platform, because it feels personable and it's different than just wall of text or, you know, a picture of a tree or whatever it might

9:07be. I always like to lead with numbers. So, you know, 12 million app downloads is huge. A lot of people are striving for a huge number like that. And then the word steal is very, you know, top of mind. It's like, oh, this is something that I can take. This is tangible. I want to use this thing. So, you're telling people exactly what they're going to get in just a very quick amount of time. That's the goal. For the image itself, I was going to use a picture of myself and I was like, let me just AI myself. I grabbed some of our Tik Tok videos, asked my little AI agent to put

9:37it all together. This is my first time creating an image like this and turned out okay. I don't know if I'm like the most proud of it, but it's it's fun. It works. So, like, long story short, you could probably just use like Astra in Chad GBT, the new model, and just create an image in there. One thing I want to draw attention to, the 12.2 million app downloads. For whatever reason, when it comes to hooks and

9:58titles, having odd numbers just works. It seems more realistic and trustworthy. Like, even rather than 10 million app downloads, 12 million just sounds better. 12.2 million sounds even better than that. So I find that that always works. And then yeah, I agree like words like steel, playbook, cheat code, blueprint, those all seem to be words that work in headlines. And so we have in here, you know, how you drove 12 million app downloads. So specific

10:24number. You also have the social proof. So the proof of achieving something that the audience wants, which is the 12 million app downloads with UGC. So you have like a specific method and people are curious as to like, well, what is this method? I don't really know like I've never thought about using UGC to get app downloads and then steal this playbook which I also think like putting it in brackets just like a common copyrightiting practice break up the

10:46text organizes it a little bit better. That's my like analysis of your hook here. Anything else that you'd add? I totally agree. I think image and hook or title are the biggest things that will make a difference for you. One thing I see people do a lot on X as well is they post their article and then they actually repost or requ, oh my gosh, I can't believe they did this or I can't believe this is free. Again, being really clickbaity, even if it's your own piece of content, people often don't even recognize that. And they're just like, "Oh, this new information. I need to go check it out. This guy, I can't

11:14believe it's free." Whatever. That's really helpful practice as well. This is insane. Like, wow. Okay. Yeah. I always see people like, "This is insane." And it's their own article. is like, man, I'm glad you think it's insane. Okay, awesome. Let's move down the article a little bit. So, today I'm leaking our entire playbook at Play Cut. By the way, that's like another hook, like the first line. You're grabbing

11:34attention. What else is happening? Because like people are probably not going to read the whole article, but they probably will read at least the first few lines or paragraphs. What else is happening in here to get people's attention and to get the right type of attention that is going to translate into you getting customers? So, an important thing, this first line, this is what's going to show up on the feed as well. So, before they click into it, it'll be the image, the header, and then we'll you'll get that like little subheader, which comes from that little line there. So, you want it to feel that

12:02same excitement energy of, oh, I need to click into this right now. After that, after you establish that, then you're going to want to establish some credibility. So, here's the system that we use to blah blah blah and all these big numbers. Then I talk about, okay, who am I to be telling you about this? Um, and I find that's really helpful

12:18because then you establish credibility. People trust you. Then it's like, okay, this is a person I want to hear from. This information is gonna be really solid. You're almost priming them to believe and trust everything you say. Of course, you want your content to actually be reliable, but you need to also prove that it is to the people who are reading it. So, yeah, I talk a lot about here of like, you know, I started where none of this really existed. We improvised this all on our own. Now, you get access to the whole thing. So, it feels very exclusive. It feels like

12:46you're letting in on this little secret. You're lucky to have stumbled upon this. And you want to kind of craft that environment with that reader. Ultimately, when you're writing anything, you're creating a relationship between yourself and the person that's reading it. You don't know who's reading it, but they know you. So, how can you craft an environment where you're able to make them feel however you want that to be? Whether it is excited or interested or curious or scared or angry or happy, you can create that environment with the words and the framing that you choose. Yeah, I really like making people feel like they stumbled across a hidden secret. Like,

13:20wow, if I read this, this is going to unlock something for me in my business. Also, you're a fantastic writer. Like, it's no surprise that you write every day. And for people who are just getting started in writing, one thing I want to draw attention to, look at your, if you even just scroll up a little bit, your sentences are just so short and punchy, but then there's also cadence. So, like as an example, a few years ago, I grew an app to 500,000 downloads by posting

13:44short form videos from one account. There was no name for what I was doing. And like having that mix between the long sentence and then immediately have like a shorter sentence and there's like a rhythm to it. Super underrated in writing. But I just love like everything is very clear. It's very short and punchy. The sentences are for the most part just like short, clear. Each sentence leads into the next. You have like the social proof throughout. So it's like you first have the system we use to turn 100 creators into and then all these big exciting numbers you go into a story then you go like back into

14:13across our workplay kit has driven 12.2 million app downloads for companies so like more social proof for the first time and sharing the full system used to go viral time and time again and you're like rehooking them. This is just such a masterass. Those are some of the things that I noticed when I read this. Yeah. I mean and then you get into the the real meat of it and I think again

14:29kind of what I was mentioning before. What really matters the most here are your subheaders and probably the first and last paragraph in each of these sections. Very rarely do I actually think people are going to read all of this no matter how much time you spend on it. So you want to set this up in a way that's like, okay, why do I care about TechUDC? And then if they're skimming, you know, the first couple sentences of each paragraph, that's what you need to be focusing the most on. And similarly for each of the following sections, what I think is most helpful, especially on X and LinkedIn, you want

15:01things to feel very tangible, especially if you're a business owner, it's very easy to slip into the thought of, I'm going to make this about myself. I'm going to make this about what I did and what my company does. Nobody cares. You need to make it about your reader and what they can use from it, what they can learn from it, and what they can then execute from that knowledge. That's how you'll get people to keep coming back time and time again because you're producing and providing value for them rather than just sharing information that is something that people just skim across and forget later. But if you give

15:30them something and they actually enact that later on in their business and their life that will stick with them and they'll come back for more. You have your headings. The headings are important. The very first sentence beneath each heading is important. Making it skimable. What about the like bullet points? Is there anything that you're doing there intentionally? I mean, I think it goes kind of with everything else where it's like, how tangible can we be? Another good writing practice is when you're editing, cut way more than you think you'll need to make it as concise as possible where again, you're optimizing for skimming, but you're also just optimizing for

16:00understanding. A lot of times people have too much fluff, which is also another reason why I love X. I think posting on X is a really good exercise because you're constrained to a certain amount of characters, so it's just a good practice to get into. Do you know Jay Yang on X? Oh, yes. I think I follow him, but I I

16:15don't know what he does. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a friend. And he has a good rule, which is you pretend like every word that you include cost you $10. Do I absolutely need to include this to get my point across because it's going to cost me 10 bucks. And so, is it like, am I getting an ROI on this word

16:30or or not? I love that. It's the same thing when you're speaking, too. I think people come across much more confident when they can be concise and don't need a lot of fluff around what they're trying to say. Something I'm always trying to work on. Majority is is pretty similar here. I try and add a lot of media as well to break it up so when they are skimming it's not just like low this is a lot of text this is a lot of reading people don't like to read anymore so anytime you can include media or videos that's a really helpful example again tangibility is important where if you can provide

16:57like this is what I think you should do here's exactly how you do it this is what that looks like that's a really good process to get into as well how many bookmarks did this get 596 which is a lot especially for compared to the number of views one thing that I really like about this article that somebody told me, I think it was Finn Mallerie. He was like, "You want to create your content where people are going to want to bookmark it because you have little things in there like lists as an example or things they can include in their swipe file that they're like, I

17:28need to come back to this later." So having like lists or bullet points or examples or like swipe file type stuff, I think that also is uh super helpful. Yeah. So, I I really think like as much actionable as you can be and then what I found I see a lot of agency owners or business owners do really hard CTAs to book a call with them or about their company or whatever. I rarely ever do a call to action. I think here I had like one sentence that's like and by the way if you're like thinking about doing UGC and want to talk to me, sure, DM me. But

17:59it was like so chill and so casual. Whereas I see kind of two sides of the coin where people do it really hard or people do it really soft. This has worked for me traditionally. I think it builds a lot more trust. It doesn't make me feel desperate, which makes people want to work with us even more. And we kind of have built that line out the door just by sharing education and being like, "We don't really need you, but if you want to come here, great." And that's kind of the energy that I try and

18:22showcase throughout all my content. Yeah. I go back and forth in this so much because I see exactly like you said, both sides of the coin where some people are like, "I put a CTA on everything. I always like autoplug my stuff." And then other people where they're like not it's like more the art of the subtle cell and it's it's hard to know which one is right. I mean maybe

18:40there's just multiple ways to win. Yeah. I know there's multiple ways to win. I mean I think this is definitely the long game approach where now I have calls with people who are like I've been following you for the past 2 years and now I've been using your tips to make money through my products and now I've actually finally made enough money where I can work with you. And that's a really cool thing to watch but it's taken them two years to get there. So, it is that

19:03long game. So, yeah, I'm sure both work. I mean, I will say in my experience, this approach works better. Like, from what I've experienced and also what I've heard from other friends who create content like this is having it be really subtle. I think shoot me a DM in particular, it's almost like you're creating friction intentionally where you said you're kind of pushing so that

19:25they pull. Totally. Exactly. And for us too, we are higher ticket. So our campaigns start at a much higher price than you know like a $20 SAS subscription. So I kind of want to intentionally create that friction. Otherwise, it's just too much inbound for us to even wrap our head around. So we do a lot with that. And and again, because it is higher ticket, we want to build those personal connections and

19:46really create those relationships. What do you think for somebody, they're just starting out, they want to get customers coming inbound. How long does it take to ramp? Because you said a lot of people, they've been following me for 2 years and now they're just starting to book calls. Most people are going to hear that and be like, "Okay, well, I

20:01don't have 2 years." In the beginning, I used to try and block out an hour or two in the beginning of the week to really think through a list of ideas for content. That worked. Essentially, what I would do is I'd go through my calendar, my emails, or my Slacks, whatever it is, and be like, "Okay, what can I pick information out of?" But now that I'm in such the practice of it, honestly, as I'm just going throughout my day and I learn or realize anything myself, I'm

20:22like, "Oh, that would be a good tweet." even if I don't have time to really flush it out. Sometimes what I'll do is just kind of write my brain dump and save it as a draft and come back later and post it. So, I really think the best content is things that you kind of just do as you're going along. If you're creating a video and you're like, "Well, I need my ring light and my whole thing." Write down your note in your phone somewhere and that's really helpful. Just like seek inspiration from your dayto-day and that way your content will feel more cohesive with your brand

20:49and you and what you're already doing. Jula, do you just use Apple Notes, too, or like what do you use to write down your thoughts? I use a lot of Apple Notes. My latest thing, loving this so much, Google. I'm a big Google calendar girl. Google Calendar tasks. This has changed my life. It is a little bit scary where I have all these like gray tasks and I just add it on here. So, it's like, oh, film a video about this or send someone this. And I just click it off and it's great cuz then I'm like, oh, I actually couldn't do that today. So, that's my

21:16new favorite little thing that I do. But, I use Twitter drafts a lot. I'll sometimes just film a quick video of my face and write like my idea that to my draft so I come back to it later. So I actually just use the platforms a lot too. Do you think you got to just Rick Rubin it and like be open to ideas and be like thinking and learning and collect ideas throughout the day. There's kind of no

21:34way around it in my experience. And I also think just post everything. A lot of people are afraid that you know this isn't a good enough idea whatever. The good thing about it is if it's not a good enough idea if you're posting organic content no one's going to see it. So it just like you might as well just get in the practice of it for that standard of I'm going to post everything

21:53that comes across my mind. Is there a certain cadence that people should strive for like three posts a day or something like that? I think in the beginning the more the marrier because you'll learn very quickly. LinkedIn I would say post once a day max like five times a week. X you can do a lot more. I'll post anywhere between 3 to 10 times a day if I'm feeling crazy. Uh, Tik Tok, Instagram, I think similar like three times a day

22:18max, I would say. Okay, gotcha. And do you have any hub and spoke strategy where you're creating long form content and chopping it down? It's kind of off the dome. Again, sometimes, for example, with articles, I'll then parse through all the different parts and make smaller posts from maybe each section and even cut that down a lot. I find personally it's easier to start long form and then cut it down from there rather than the opposite. So if you're doing long form, you know, like this podcast and that will turn into clips, then just start to

22:49take little pieces from there. Okay. Timeline. Timeline for getting started. Yeah. I mean, I think content like anything is a long game. You're not going to get rich quick overnight. Unfortunately, I remember when I started Playkit, I posted a MR screenshot essentially. Those always do really well where it's like, oh my gosh, I got my first person to actually buy this service and that blew up. And that's how we really kickstarted. And from that moment, truthfully, we have not had a problem with inbound. So, I think just like get in the habit of sharing every

23:16single day, the time will pass anyways. You might as well start now. And if you need, you know, a little helping hand, put some paid ad spend behind some of your content. I think it is helpful when people go to your page and they see that you have any followers because it feels like they are credible. It feels like they're trustworthy. And you can get a lot of those followers if you boost good content with some page spend. Also, I

23:38think you will never get rich quick. It's better to think about what are the things that if I do them, I will not fail to get rich. Like I will get rich, you know, eventually. Maybe that's like 5 years, maybe it's 10 years, but I'm definitely going to get there. And if you build an audience and you're creating inbound content every day and especially if you're improving like it would be preposterous to do that to post the quantity of content that you're posting and try to improve every post and not eventually get rich. And I think that's totally that's realistic and like that's the good news. So the last thing book or

24:13content recommendations for anyone who's like okay I'm bought in. I want to go and create my first content. I just want to learn like how to become an incredible writer like Julia. Where should they start? Not a book nor a podcast, but a exercise that I really like whenever I'm like I forget how to write. Every single day, time block for 20 30 minutes and just stream of conscious. Write. Do not stop moving your pen or your pencil and also do it with your hand. Really good way just to like get the ideas and the things in your brain on the paper. It can be about anything you want. It could

24:43be about a fake story, about your day, about somebody you hate, whatever. Just start doing that and it'll be much easier for you to write in all the other facets of your life. a book recommendation that I think is not specifically about writing but translates well to building community which then translates to you know inbound engineering. Pish the author her first name is Amanda really good book on building community and using language that sticks with people. Uh I give that book recommendation all the time. They kind of compare literal cults with tech companies and things like Soul Cycle and

25:16how they really capture people to stay. Okay, I'm ordering this right now off of Amazon. Amanda Montel. I just ordered like six books yesterday, so I'm like I shouldn't do this because I'm not going to read all these, but it's getting added to the list. So, last thing is where can people find you if they want to learn more, if they want to work with

25:32you? Find me on X or LinkedIn, Julia Pintar, P I N T A R. All right. Thanks for your time. That was awesome. Thanks for having me.