3 TikTok growth secrets for virality | Sub Club tl;dr

0:00As a creator, you can make videos on TikTok from zero followers and get millions of views on your first video. Short form video is everywhere, but nothing says virality like TikTok. In this video, you'll get three key insights from my almost hour long chat with Joseph Choi, former product manager at Google Turn, TikTok marketing expert.

0:21And if you wanna watch the full episode, click here or open the description below. Does having followers on TikTok give you any kind of a leg up? Like if you've got a million followers on TikTok, are you guaranteed to at least get more of a shot or do you feel like even with zero followers, videos can go viral? If you have a million followers on TikTok, that does give you a leg up for sure, because I think I. Gave an estimate, maybe 95% of the videos you

0:47watch 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 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.

1:04It's just that the vast majority of the watch time comes from the For You page. 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. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I just started

1:18talking about SF culture. But people in the app space are doing this too, and I think that's what's unique about TikTok. It's like before you had to build up a following on your Instagram or your Facebook, or if you wanted to do ads, you know, you pay for the content to put it in front of people.

1:34With TikTok, you just have to make good quality content. It can go viral from scratch. This whole strategy and finding things that are likely to go viral on TikTok is actually a great way to do feature discovery, product discovery, and think of new apps to build, think of new features to build through these framework. You've essentially shared over this whole podcast about like what

1:57people are gonna connect with. A hundred percent. I've even seen people build apps in the completely. Opposite direction where they do the marketing first just for a wait list and they talk about the app and the concept of it and show Figma screenshots and the app doesn't even exist yet and they just get people to sign up for a wait list.

2:14And that's instant product validation. If you get a bunch of views on a TikTok that talks about your app, you get a bunch of signups for for your wait 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.

2:30But it really resonates with this certain demographic of young Gen Z people. Yeah. She just makes founder-led content talking about the app itself, showing Figma screenshots, some beta screenshots, and then it's a wait list, and she made a video that was 15 seconds long just talking about the app and got. I think 5,000 Wait list signups.

2:51Let's dig into a couple more examples. I know there's an A DHD habit tracking app that's like doing really well on TikTok. What's their content like? What's so shareable about what they're doing? This might be a Gen Z trend, but I think, you know, gen Z cares a lot about mental health. They kind of describe A DHD.

3:07More as a personality trait than an actual diagnosis. I am going to need therapy before I become a parent, before I get 42% of Gen Z have a diagnosed mental health condition. These are the top three mental health concerns of Gen Z. The trend is, is out there and people are talking about it.

3:24So there's all this existing A DHD. 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? You could do that as a talking head video. These creators are speaking to the camera or they're doing a skits where they

3:41show themselves walking to the room, then forgetting what, why they're there. Procrastination on things like their homework or their tasks. So the content is out there. You can just make a slight change in the call to action of those videos where you say. Hey, anyone else relate to this thing? By the way, I use this app. By the time they get halfway through the video, they've already given the algorithm

4:03the 50%, 60, 70% watch time, and then you plug the app, you know at the end. Then people are like, well, it's so okay. Like I just got all this relatable content and maybe got a few tips for managing my A DHD plus. They just gave me this app that's really useful. It's almost like an infomercial, but just. Organically on TikTok, you know, you gotta give value and demonstrate the value of the product by talking about the pain points and then talking about the solutions and including your product as a solution for the

4:30topic that you're talking about.