# How to Go Viral on TikTok (and Profit From It)  — Joseph Choi, Viral App Founders

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Woz2m8b8wno
Duration: 56 min
Language: English
Words: 10670
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Woz2m8b8wno

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Joseph Choy a former e-commerce marketer who's now helping app developers go viral on Tik Tok on the podcast I talk with Joseph about what's currently working for apps on Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok I think a lot of folks are going to be excited to listen to this episode but but before we get into some of the

[0:34] techniques and things you're learning and working on why Tik Tock and like what got you into Tik Tok 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 listened to podcasts and the the business that I found was Drop Shipping it's like 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 copywriting and marketing and ads so I got really good at ads and I

[1:09] 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 learn 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 Tik Tok and short form video to go viral with their apps and I really think it's a it's a great opportunity to get your first you know thousand users 10,000 Mr for subscription apps let's dive in then and I I wanted to start with why Tik Tok

[1:49] so you know there's so many ways to get attention press and SEO and starting a blog and like all these different things but what's unique about t talk that people are starting to find success and that that it is maybe a good place to experiment with zero to one when you scroll on Tik Tok 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

[2:25] brand new videos so as a Creator you can make videos on Tik talk 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 Franc 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 Tik talk it's like you know before you had to build up a following on your Instagram or your Facebook or or

[2:59] if you wanted to do ads you know you pay for the content to put it in front of people with Tik Tok you just have to make good quality content it can go viral from scratch yeah your your cost of of marketing is 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 Tik Tok scene than apps what do you think has changed or or what do you think made it more interesting for apps as of late so Tik

[3:32] Tok shop launched in November of 2022 so it's November 2024 when we're recording this it's only been two years since Tik Tok shop launched Tik Tock shop is basically an affiliate platform for e-commerce products on Tik Tok so as a brand owner you can upload your e-commerce product to Tik Tok shop you set an affiliate commission percentage so some people do 15 to 20% and then creators will automatically just sign up for your to affiliate for your product and start making videos and the payments and everything is is handled through Tik Tok so in the beginning this was a huge goldw for Brands because you could just

[4:13] upload your product and then pay commission only to these Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok shop you know these 15% commissions add up very quickly if you go viral with a Tik Tok 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

[4:51] through these Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok shop has definitely fueled a lot of the innovation in the marketing side one of the companies I think is really interesting in this space uh in the e-commerce space is tabs chocolate so they they went from zero to 10 million in Revenue in a year just on Tik Tok shop and the founder of that Oliver he put the tabs chocolate product on hold and he switched to apps so then he launched an app called study

[5:32] 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 Tik Tok is I

[6:03] think Tik Tok is the the new thing and it's interesting I mean it's not that apps are are suddenly going viral on Tik Tok or that nobody's tried to make it work before because like famously widget Smith went viral on Tik Tok in 2020 so four years ago it went viral went you know shot to number one in the App Store we've actually had David Smith the developer of that on the podcast and we we've talked to other apps that are doing Tik Tok 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

[6:35] 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 you kind of already mentioned how the for you page drives so much of this but I wanted to dive a little deeper into that contrast SEO you know so hard to get your page ranked because almost any topics are 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 it's just such a different experience and so is there

[7:16] anything else about the algorithm that 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 like SC cppy ugc creators in the traditional sense of like what an influencer is like 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 in a as an analogy for creating a movie a movie production which is what Tik Tok videos are basically just short movies you have like you have the director you have the

[7:54] 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 Tik Tok 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

[8:32] perform well on the for you page so now you're playing the role of of the director and then now Tik Tok 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 gonna

[9:06] make the videos anyway may as well make a little bit of money out of it so if you're willing to put a little bit more money into Creator marketing you know the I think the foru page really enables you to be scrappier 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 Tik tok's algorithm are there any specific things to the algorithm that you're striving for to help it go 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

[9:45] 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 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 Tik Tok Al 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 Tik Tok if you own Tik Tok how would you want to

[10:26] design the algorithm so like Tik Tok makes its money from adver advertising and from Tik Tok shop so if you want to make the most money as Tik Tok 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

[10:57] 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 algorithms 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 Tik Tok it's like driving that those little mini dopamine rushes and so the algorithm is maybe

[11:34] 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 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 a two-minute video and so it's probably like so context dependent what Tik Tok is going to feed people that trying to guess at it is like you said it's make people feel something and that's going to be more successful does having followers on Tik

[12:10] Tok give you any kind of a leg up like if you've got a million followers on Tik Tok are you guaranteed to at least get more of a shot or do you feel like even with zero followers videos can go viral and it doesn't matter as much as you might guess yeah if you have a million followers on Tik Tok that does give you a legout for sure because you know I I think I gave an estimate maybe 95% of the videos you watch on the for you page are brand new accounts that you've never seen before but there also is a following tab so if you scroll to the

[12:39] 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 for you page so it's easier to go viral than it was before so you have a leg up and 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 should an account like have a point of view and and model some of the old style

[13:12] 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

[13:48] great to build a brand I've seen that Instagram reals 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 it 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

[14:22] going to be able to go with a weather app and like you know productivity apps maybe widget Smith being an except 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 Tik Tok is a video platform so apps that have some sort of visual element or highly visual wow factor do very well on Tik Tok 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

[14:58] it if you look at the Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok 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

[15:37] 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 it has 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 weather is that health wealth relationships I think weather 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

[16:15] that like those are successful as ads because a lot of money is put behind them because there 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 find viral and use Tik Tok 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 and stuff are those actually going viral or is it that those just make so much money the

[16:49] 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 on Tik Tok that was my point there I think the maybe I should make a distinction there's 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 you see an ad and the ad has a good creative and you're just like oh that seems useful

[17:24] let me download that and then there's a pay wall and then you pay the pay wall versus is a Tik Tok that says hey are you struggling with motivation there's a 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 and 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

[17:58] a 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 Tik Tok as a paid so thinking again specifically about like my weather app which you know we've talked about is is probably going to be a challenge for me to get going on Tik Tok if I try it's that if I'm trying to go viral I need to focus on that that feel side of things

[18:30] 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 Tik Tock native so I've seen people do this for example with health tracking where you know if you have a whoop or a 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

[19:08] for Tik Tok it's sort of like improve your health by looking 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 Tik Tok 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

[19:45] 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 Tik Tok they emphasize this one killer feature I've seen apps you know create features just to go viral on Tik Tok and then use that sort of as a funnel to their main you know the 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

[20:23] specifically trying to go viral you're probably not you know listing all the features or trying to it's like you you specifically want to look for that hook that's going to be unique that's gonna make people feel that's gonna 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 Tik Tok 15 seconds at a time 60 seconds at a time 2 minutes at a time I mean especially tough because you're ultimately selling something and we can get into the ctas but like yeah what makes a good Tik Tok

[20:56] creative as a founder or 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 Tik Tok slideshows 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 want it to views which we discussed earlier you

[21:30] know it's it's about watch time engagement something that could be sharable and a good hetic 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 interface is is much you know better than the normal weather app it's too salesy like How likely would a 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

[22:04] 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 it has to have some sort of wow factor there's probably some other emotions that you could think of but if it has one of those things High chance that people are going to share it with their friends or like the video or leave a comment but then it also has to sell the products too you have to 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

[22:36] then you also want to sell the product the more you sell the product usually the less sharable 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 and one of the really good apps in this space it's called quizzard Ai and they have a Tik Tok 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

[23:12] 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 asleep like you know like just sleeping in the in the 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 product and

[23:59] the value proposition of the product that's one of the examples that kind of hits really good engagement and also selling the product really effectively let's stick into a couple more examples I know there's an ADHD habit tracking app that's like doing really well on Tik Tok what's their content like what's so sharable 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 diagnoses on certain mental you know illnesses D is definitely one of them they kind of describe ADHD more as a personality trait than an actual diagnosis the trend is is out there and

[24:37] 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 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 relat to this thing by the way I

[25:14] use this app by the time they gets 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 it's okay like I just got all this related atable 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 Tik Tok 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

[25:46] product as a solution for the topic that you're talking about yeah that's really cool and then another example uh RZ GPT what are they doing content wise so Riz GPT 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 jenzy you know idea of Riz and being charismatic over text and their strategy is very interesting they have dozens of Tik Tok accounts all posting pretty similar content I don't know if you've ever seen the split screen content where you get like Subway

[26:26] Surfers on the bottom and you get some like Reddit story on the top or some text message story on the top so Riz GPT 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 the app like by GPT another thing they do is they do the screen recording so they're live you know typing and then there's a pause and they like oh no what

[27:06] do I say and then they swipe over to the Riz GPT app they input the the screenshot and then it generates and then they swipe back over to the dating app and then input the line that they just copied and pasted directly demonstrates the product but of course they put that segment at least 50% of the way into the video so the 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 I use dating apps I sometimes

[27:40] struggle with writing pickup lines so I'm going to actually download this app that they that they just shielded to me people people know it's an ad you know like they know it's an ad but if if it's entertaining it's doesn't matter and are those going viral are they you know producing a lot that do go viral or is that an example of ones they're having to put a lot of money behind to get the attention oh no these are these are very viral and the virality there is is probably the conversation right it's like like weird Goofy and like they probably try and pick like you want to

[28:12] 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 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

[28:44] success of these three that we've talked about but it seems like so much of getting good at Tik Tok and having multiple videos go viral over time is just watching what other people are doing I'm learning are there any tips for how to keep an eye on what's going viral you know 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 Tik Tok I scroll on Tik Tok in reals 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

[29:24] ad but it seems like it was paid for I put it into one of my four swipe files in the Tik Tok folders or the Instagram reals 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 slideshows folder if it's a talking head content I'll put it into the talking head folder if it's like a a skit like the quizzard AI lecture hall one I'll put it into the skit folder so yeah I think just being a an active consumer and like consuming from a producer mindset is sort of how I've always thought about marketing if you

[30:01] 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 Tik Tok 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 um you know when I'm on Tik Tok or Instagram reals I'm a middle-aged man Instagram knows that I really like family humor so like you know husband and wife humor but my point in saying that is that if all you do is scroll as a consumer you're going to understand what goes viral with other

[30:35] 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 on Instagram I don't spend much time on Tik Tok so I'm using Instagram as example but it's like the algorithms do kind of pigeon hole you and so while like being a consumer helps you probably want to find ways to kind of break out Beyond where the the algorithm has pigeon hold you so it seems like those kind of websites and

[31:12] other resources I've learned a lot following you on Twitter to see what's going viral in those age groups that like I I don't see that kind of content when I'm scrolling that's very true I think the algorithm does pigeon hole you if you're thinking about researching content in a specific space there are first party research tools that Tik Tok does give you if you look up like Tik Tok keyword research I think there's tools that give you insights into underutilized keywords for Tik Tok search and then if you go on the Tik Tok Creator Marketplace you can also find creators that are putting themselves on the marketplace to be hired for

[31:46] sponsored content and you can filter by Niche and if you look at their videos and you can see like the the types of branded content that they're making so that's another good uh research tool you 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 Tik Tok ad Library so just like the Facebook ads Library Tik Tok has similar products where you can just see all the top performing ads you can even see the click-through rates and the you know the watch time on the on the ads so you can analyze the those

[32:20] videos they they show you a lot of good data yeah and I guess on on those though it's 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 I 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

[32:53] 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 to 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 Tik Tok video yeah this is super important like consumers in general not just on Tik Tok but consumers are hyper aware of you

[33:32] know things that feel like ads as a general rule one interesting thing about Tik Tok is a lot of these videos promoting apps they don't mention Link in BIO so that was a really popular thing from Instagram era you know click on the my Lin in 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 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

[34:07] the top five apps I use for XYZ paino 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 like Google SEO strategy where it's like these are these articles are 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

[34:41] follow the call to action and go to the 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 the vibe of you know actual disposable cameras but they're going really viral on Tik Tok with slideshow stories so they say you know the first slide is so it's all wedding based weirdly enough so they they say here's five controversial rules that we had at our wedding recently and

[35:23] then there's this image of you know a 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 the pictures at the wedding so

[35:57] than 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 mention 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 at our wedding one two three four and I used the app to enforce rule number four or whatever so yeah that's man that's that's super slick one is this one's really good for talking head content so if you have Creator if you get a 100

[36:32] 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 just it's just a good hook and eventually it'll get saturated like everyone's going to say the same

[37:08] hook and then people will start to catch on that 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 paino and then give helpful tips so that you say oh if 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 it doesn't have to be at the end you could use the the app as tip number

[37:41] three out of five or you know but the basis of the video is that here's a bunch of here's these hacks that I a life hack or ADHD hack actually if you go on Tik Tok and you search hash ADHD hack you'll get lots of examples of these videos of people sharing their ADHD hacks 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 that 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

[38:23] 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 Tik Tok like are you really like building something valuable for folks that they're actually going to use I mean that's what so many apps I talk 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 wow factor that's going to inspire

[39:03] people to use it if this whole strategy and finding things that are likely to go viral on Tik Tok 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 weit 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

[39:39] people to sign up for a wait list and that's instant product validation if you get bunch of views on a Tik Tok that talks about your app you get a bunch of signups for for your weit list then you can build the app after you Market it there's this app called Breezy the the founders in the community it's basically a social note sharing app but it really resonates with this certain demographic of young genz people yeah she just makes founder Le content talking about the app itself showing figma screenshots some beta screenshots and then it's a weit list and she made a video that was 15

[40:12] seconds long just talking about the app and got I think 5,000 weightless signups so yeah that was that was Breezy the breey app I wonder if that's actually even a good strategy too because as far as hooks go that's another kind of hook look like being an Insider being in the no 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 is 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 for when

[40:45] 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 that's how you validate whether or not these features are going to hit or not I've built so many I I've launched 20 two three apps over the last 16 years and some were like hits and some were 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 so for you know side project apps today for big

[41:24] apps that are looking for new features that's a really cool idea for doing some product validation ahead see if it goes viral on Tik Tok and 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 a infinitely repeatable tactic that just it happens year year over year it's just Spotify wrapped if you just remake Spotify wrapped but for XYZ Niche that concept goes viral every single year reliably like the 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 the

[42:01] style of the music that you listen to and then they Ed 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 Tik Tok is going to settle out you middle-aged man you know talking about abs like there'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

[42:36] can pull that off that's going to be a ton of fun but for a lot of folks like 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 sometimes they even have an

[43:10] agent a 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 scrappier way I like going after a very low follower count creators so finding people that have less than 50,000 followers who've maybe hit one or two viral videos in their time on Tik Tok 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

[43:45] feeling of what it takes to go viral like they probably thought about oh why did that video go so viral oh like it's the way that I said these words in these ways the way that I did the hook so they sort of Know What It Takes and then lastly is 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

[44:19] much money from Brand deals so you can pay them cash and they'll gladly they'll probably gladly take it'll take a little bit more training you know teaching them about the app and telling them how to structure the the video script and things like that but yeah I think finding low follower count but charismatic creators is is the way to go and then how would you suggest structuring payment expectations in those kind of low fer account 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 and how do you structure the deal to make it work yeah so a lot

[45:02] 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 prod a free product in exchange for 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 video my app is you know it does this I think your audience would be a great fit

[45:32] 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 in 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 they're such a low follower account Creator and you know you want them to go viral on the foru page you can have them make a brand new

[46:07] account so you can have them make a new Tik Tok 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 Tik Tock 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 their level of experience and how much Roi you expect

[46:41] to get out of it I have a friend member of the community who's paid a one Creator 3,000 a month and they got their first 20K Mr 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 cre 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 CPM which is very very cheap and you can play around with the rates depending

[47:17] on what the what the Creator wants the thing about paying a CPM though is it 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 or 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 five million views now you're on the hook for five grand but then the CTA wasn't very strong and like you don't make much money on it

[47:55] yeah totally I mean that that's why like the the Creator brief is like very very important you know you should agree beforehand 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 then 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 eCommerce part of what really blew up was the affiliate model with Tik Tok shops do you think there's potential for

[48:33] that on Tik Tok with apps doing Affiliates like I've actually talked to and probably have on the podcast at some point the founder of go market me 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 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 you know first conversion or whatever and they can make 50k I mean

[49:09] 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 Tik Tok I think it's 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 up front and just have people do free marketing for you and only pay if they generate revenue for you the problem is yeah like Tik Tok is consumers are very Savvy they don't really like clicking links in BIO they want to feel like you know this video is just telling them

[49:46] 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 Lincoln bio clicks I think that has always been and will will always be a good way to partner with with creators if 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 creater talent I think creators actually have like the

[50:22] 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 is reversed I think there's a lot more creators that are underpaid that Brands can start paying so Tik Tock shop for apps can definitely exist um within like a certain context of influencer marketing I've actually been playing with um offer codes recently it's something again I'll probably do a whole podcast on or or uh

[51:04] 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 like I'm probably going to do a Black Friday promotion so it was top of mine but use code whatever to get 20% off or do think like on Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok I think if you got creative with it

[51:39] 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 the 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

[52:13] for 50% off maybe that could I don't know how legal that is but I mean there's 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 I've learned a ton I think this is going to be really interesting to folks especially just this kind of new trend that it you know we've talked about Tik Tok 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 I knew you actually have a community of Founders who were all

[52:46] working on this and trying to correct 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 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 womo AI Bloom Investing For Teens autopilot copy trading the founder of yikyak lots

[53:22] 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 you're bootstrapped and you're just learning to you want to you know find the the current edge of Tik Tok organic and other user acquisition we're a pretty pretty small community just trying to keep it tight knit just sharing the the latest tactics the community is been great you Discord so it's it tends to be extra chatty and I don't have you know a ton of time to be following along with the chat but I love how you do the weekly summaries so every

[53:54] week you kind of take the best insight cuz it's your community and you do have the time to be following and chatting with folks and stuff so the weekly summaries are 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 and things you've 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

[54:24] we're going to be doing a webinar where we actually dig into 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 really looking forward to

[54:55] 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 if you've enjoyed this episode want to learn more about Tik Tok 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 this been fun thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in

[55:24] your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]

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