# Sub Club Podcast by Revevnue Cat:  Marketing Your App on TikTok

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhSRx2p2COQ
Duration: 53 min
Language: English
Words: 10461
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/hhSRx2p2COQ

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[0:00] i like to think of them as content buckets or pillars and you pick three and stick with those for a little bit try a few ideas in each bucket see what's working what's not scrolling through the app is the best way to kind of keep on top of things and then you have to like be able to think really fast and post really fast because these trends come and go [Music] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show welcome to the

[0:40] sub club podcast our guest today is maddie kirby senior social media manager at one second every day she began her career in social media marketing at toy company oswest while working there she also started growing her personal social media presence accumulating almost 400 000 followers on tiktok in 2019 maddie joined one second every day where she has been instrumental in leveraging tiktok to organically drive millions of downloads welcome to the podcast maddie thank you i'm excited to be here i'm also here with david my guest which i forgot to introduce in our freaky friday intro swap i usually do the intros but that was great jacob that was fun

[1:19] yeah you know what i'm very very very versatile got to mix things up so i i'll i'll pass back to david because he's the one who preps all the questions nice um yeah so so maddie and i were on a podcast on a picus on a panel together earlier this month an app promotion summit which is a a great thing to watch we can link it in the show notes um but it was four of us on the panel and it went really quick but uh she shared a lot of really interesting stuff about what she's working on in uh social media marketing and working with one second every day

[1:54] on their tick-tock presence and so i want to bring her on the podcast to actually give her time to talk a little more about it in the context of promoting apps because she's been on a couple of other podcasts where you're talking more specifically about social media stuff um so yeah i'm super excited to have you maddie and um so i do want to to dive in and and you know we typically do have more developer focused guests you know people are doing the coding or you know focused on um user acquisition where you know spending 50k a month on facebook and so that's another reason i was excited to

[2:29] have you on the podcast is to just get a really different perspective i think that there's a lot of potential in social media marketing but not a lot of people talking about it in the app space and then or just knowing how to do it right like are you how to even start right especially if you're like a developer turned promoter right it's probably like the last channel you'll think of right i think right a lot of app creators like tend to the the things you were talking about david those like technical channels about buying ads on facebook or whatever when i don't know there's a lot of leverage

[3:00] in social media stuff if you can do it well yeah absolutely so so i did want to kind of start with you know you got your start in social media marketing not with an app which is another thing it's like you came to the app marketing with like such a different perspective which i think is is really good there's too many you know people who are just so narrowly focused in in the kind of existing playbook for marketing apps so uh are there any lessons from your time at a toy company and of all the places that come from a toy company is really cool so

[3:29] um are any particular lessons from from being at a toy company that you think um you know helped you grow and learn this form of marketing and specifically that apply to subscription apps yeah uh i don't know if it's necessarily a lesson or lessons that i've learned but i think coming from the toy industry which is also an industry where people don't leave it and they have a lot of people that started in the industry and then just stayed there forever uh you have a lot of people that aren't really thinking beyond just what they are normal what they're used to i guess is what i

[4:04] would say is what they're used to like ads on nickelodeon that's all like yeah it's definitely commercials like they were still talking about tv and trying to transition out of that that's really funny that you brought that up but that's kind of what we were talking about at the time and so i got really lucky and i had a great manager who really wanted me to push people outside of uh their boxes and i feel like i wouldn't have found tik tok unless i was at a toy company because we were so focused on trying to connect to gen z and young people and i heard some kids talking on our

[4:38] public transportation about tick tock which was musically then um and i was like oh and i just had like my feelers out about it because i was just so focused on kids at the time and like trying to find this like cool new way that we can connect to them and i downloaded it and i was a content creator too so i thought it was super cool so getting onto tiktok at that time and super early i feel like wouldn't have happened without being in the toy industry and also then i was able to take that into one second every day and already had experience which i feel like

[5:11] a lot of people don't really have tick-tock experience coming into a company yeah that's really cool and so then what was the leap like what what um how'd you land the gig at one second every day and decide to jump into the the app industry i was using one second every day already before even looking for a job so i had already and i had known about the company the company's amazing and they have a lot of great benefits and they care so much about the people in the company itself and it's small and uh remote so i was already hoping that they would have a job opening when

[5:44] i was looking and i so i didn't necessarily have my site set on an app really it was just i was interested in one second every day because i use it and i also like it because it's content creation and i have the background in that so i feel like i was able to kind of have this weird experience coming into it you know i i i do want to pause real quick and maybe talk a little bit about the app um and i should have researched i should have read up on this before the podcast but it'd be fun to just ask um one second

[6:16] every day has been around like 10 years right like this is the like i think i bought this as a paid app in in 2009 or 10 or something so tell us a little bit about the history of the app itself um and what the app does yeah so our founder has been recording his life for 10 years now which is a really long time and they started on kickstarter actually and he did a ted talk and that's how a lot of people initially found us was through his tick tock where he had left the ad industry um for a year he left his job to go record

[6:51] his life his 30th birthday um and just it's it was amazing and people really connected to it and it's like a very simple idea and then he did his ted talk about it and then that's how he he launched the app and now it's just kind of built slowly up uh through that um really just being able to have him connect with people uh caesar is an amazing person and a really great storyteller and people were able to connect to him first and then that's kind of how he built a team around him to slowly grow i love the i mean i think you know when you talk

[7:25] about user acquisition or or you know ultimately that's you know what marketing or whatever is right you want to get people into your business your app or whatever um it always feels so much easier when you start with the story right when you start with like the narrative the story then you add in the business or the product later right because now you have a foundation i was i was on the one second every day reading the timeline right it's all very a clean narrative right like this person has a story whatever and then everybody can join in on everything humans are very narrative driven right

[7:56] so we like to be part of something that like that like makes sense right that like has an arc to it so i think it's uh i i and i think that downstream that's gonna help will help makes apps like one second be successful is they have this like something that makes sense and they don't have to just go out and like oh you need 50 000 users to spend 50 000 right um you actually have a little bit of like organic story there it's great yeah yeah and speaking of telling stories so while you were still at the toy company you started building your own social

[8:27] media presence so you had uh your own personal tick tock account but then also built up several others yeah what was it like i mean so this again this as you said earlier this was musically at the time before it even became tick-tock before you even blew up so you're really early to this really cool platform how did how did you build these um accounts uh i started off at uh on vine and then of course vine died r.i.p yeah i know i i had started it and then i had a harambe vine blow up and then a week later they announced that the app was shutting

[9:05] down and i was devastated because i was like here's my shot i got it and then so i was looking for my next place to go because i was a youtube kid growing up so i've always wanted to make videos and i and i love it just naturally and i had some friends invite me over to this app called flipagram which is actually kind of funny because that was a competitor to one second every day at the time and i didn't even know about one second every day yet um and so i was a paid content creator over there to be using their app um and then got onto tick tock

[9:37] and started just posting random funny videos and at the time things were the algorithm wasn't really developed then it was more you post and then whoever likes your stuff is really important so if you have somebody really cool and like big that likes your video your video is going to blow up and i just had these two popular twin girls had liked my video and i had all these people coming over and said that these girls had liked my video and they saw it on their uh platform or their account and then that's how it started it just started like going up and getting followers and

[10:13] now uh i have a an account where i play guitar i decided to take up learning electric guitar and so i built an audience of 11k on there in two and a half months so i'm really like addicted i guess so yeah so so and do you do you um you know i don't know this is more about like personal just like brand and like building these these properties because i mean i do think it's it's it's the skill like you know we're talking about developers building their own social media properties it's like okay you got to have a stick right i don't know what you're

[10:44] calling right guitar so do do you carry them over from your other properties you try to like bootstrap them or you're just like nope totally green field i'm just gonna like be a guitar person now and like make it a thing is that is that more how it goes or i mean on my other account my comedy account i guess it's always been a really hard thing to kind of stick with one thing that you're into and some people are really good at that i'm definitely not the best when it comes to my own stuff that i like i i just want to do whatever and kind of

[11:14] see if that works but that's kind of morphed over time and then with guitar i was just like i'm just gonna record myself playing guitar and see what happens and it did well oh so you don't you don't you don't like plan out like oh i'm gonna do a funny harambe guitar thing it's just no i just do it it's a lot of it's like improv and going for it and just seeing and i think that being on the platform for so long i kind of know what's gonna do well yes yeah and sometimes you'll put you know five seconds of effort into something and it does really well and

[11:46] then other times you put you know an hour of work into something and it doesn't do well this is me and my twitter game yeah you need to give me some advice because like i can i still can't 11 years in i sir 13 years in on twitter i still can't predict what's going to do well yeah exactly so you you've kind of been talking about your your personal accounts um but these things that you're saying i would assume also apply to company accounts and i would assume you know growing a company account you just need to have a similar amount of exploration so how have you taken those lessons from

[12:21] your own personal accounts and then systematize them to to grow a company account and then even pushing back on on not overly systematizing because you have to keep experimenting yeah that's a really good question i think how i tackle it now since i've been on so many accounts uh because i grew one um back at the toy company too for the stop-motion animation toy and that's kind of my first dipping into that and we grew really fast like it's like at a half a million now for followers but uh i think that's kind of when i was realizing that there's buckets to these things and like i like to think

[13:04] of them as like content buckets or like pillars and you like pick three like i'm gonna do behind the scenes videos i'm gonna do uh some kind of like app walk through maybe for one second everyday purposes and then fun trends and stick with those for a little bit try a few ideas in each bucket see what's working what's not and then kind of maybe if the behind the scenes stuff is not working as well then we won't make as many of that stuff and then just scrolling through the app is the best way to kind of keep on top of things and make sure that you're experimenting with

[13:41] new stuff because people are always thinking of really creative ways to make new videos and have these like wild ideas that you don't think could ever relate to one second every day but they can and then you have to like be able to think really fast and post really fast because these trends come and go so that's kind of like my system i guess how do you avoid the like uh what's it that steve buscemi meme that's like hello fellow kids like how do you like how how do you because that's always my fear too it's like if i'm trying to be like hip on twitter or whatever

[14:15] like it feels like there's this uncanny valley that brands can really easily get into and you see it with like bad social media right is there is there is a solution just hire people who are actually good at social media or like or is there like a framework for not becoming the steve buscemi meme i think the biggest thing is don't try to make anything that you don't understand already like don't try to guess i i think i learned that david i cancelled this the the sea shannon's revenue cat collab because yeah i still don't understand it yeah it's uh i think i learned that on my personal

[14:49] account uh specifically just as i age and everything and you get like these young kids on there that are like wait you're you're a millennial that's really old and then they just kind of like it pierces your heart a little bit and you're like oh god that hurt really bad but okay thanks for for reminding me and it's okay if they do that it's actually kind of funny and you can lean into it uh but don't try to be gen z i think is the big thing when you're trying to relate just as i wouldn't try to be boomers either like you wouldn't try to be somebody else so it's being yourself

[15:23] knowing what you know and like not trying to guess at it and you can talk to that generation but they might just tell you like stop get off the platform or something i don't know but there's always people that you can find within the platform that will relate to you too that's a big thing how much of this do you think is kind of product social media platform fit i guess so my question is like can you shoehorn a product that wouldn't necessarily work on social media into social media marketing so revenue cap being a good example you know we are you know sharing some videos on twitter

[16:07] and stuff like that but it doesn't feel like tick tock would be a good platform for us to invest in marketing wise as opposed to because because we're an infrastructure tool right as opposed to you know it sounds like even at the toy company the stop-motion animation product was what really hit on social media did you try other um products within the toy company that didn't hit or and do you have any kind of thoughts on that kind of product platform fit that's a good question we specifically got onto tick-tock because of the stop-motion toy and i think it definitely makes it easier when you have

[16:48] a content creation tool because we had an app that went with that toy too and and really it's all about entertaining people at the end of the day on tick tock and if you can't make entertaining content with your product then it gets harder i don't think we tried with other products we did do uh cross promotion where we would have like the stop motion toy playing with our other toys that we had kind of thing and that was a fun way to do it but we we had different strategies for other toys like influencer marketing or unboxing videos as well um but i think that anybody

[17:25] can be on tick tock but i also like to ask people why do you think that you can't be on tik tok and often people will say well it's because kids are on there it's a kid's platform and it's really not at all it used to be it used to be people just lip syncing and that's what i had started out doing and i was terrible at it and like this sucks i am not this is not a good platform for me and it's really just transformed into a place where anybody can kind of find their their audience and and maybe with revenue cat it might be a thing of just trying to

[17:57] explain what you do in a really fun way and unique way to make people excited about it there are other developer brands that find success on there right there's like a certain language or that that works yes it's just like yeah you know for us it's always and i think for any any you know as an app i think going back to your point david about product network fit right apps in general fit well i just think about one second every day and tick tock right you're putting a camera at your face or that's something right so like you're already like you know very like products in some ways so it's like

[18:28] very smooth transition um but for most apps it is right you're there you're on your phone you're doing stuff you're probably bored like here like let me tell you about some other application you can use it's a smooth transition um but then like i still like yeah thinking about i mean we have this problem now maybe a podcast we do it's one thing but then like um you know for blog content and other things it's really hard to come up with stuff that matters right that like like you were saying maddie like something that that that's funny like you care about right that that's like what you want to do because

[19:02] like at the end of the day if you're just trying to like chase the meme it's going to come off as hokey right it's going to come off as like un genuine um so but i think app developers yeah i mean i i i it feels like we've heard like this whole tick tock as an app distribution mechanism really has kind of something that yeah surprised me too like it blindsided me it's like we and not just the first order of like we're selling ads on tick tock this like second order user generated content stuff which i think is just fascinating yes and i i think that again it's

[19:39] you just have to figure out how you can be on the platform if you want to and there's really nothing to lose with it too because it doesn't cost money to be on there and try things like you can have a podcast format on there you can take clips of a podcast and put them on there and people have a lot of success doing that or just having their reply with video feature there's a lot of different kind of structures that people it's it's not just making skits or trying to use popular sounds popular sounds do well but maybe that's not for you i think it's brainstorming trying things

[20:13] seeing what sticks and if it doesn't stick then try something different and if that doesn't then you can focus your energy somewhere else and realize that you you know you gave it your best shot and maybe there's a different kind of opportunity that comes up later or a new feature that's introduced later that works better on the on the trend chasing um what are some examples of that with one second every day that you feel like came off well and and can how do you how do you attach yourself to a trend without that hokiness because it sounds like y'all succeeded at that but i imagine that that is a hard thing

[20:47] to do so any tips on on how to do that well we kind of get lucky sometimes and that is kind of like how tick tock works is luck and i hate saying that prepared though yeah i mean it's good that we were on tick tock it definitely helps uh to be able to to see what's going on out in the world but we just had a a wall street journal article that was about this too about tick tock in one second every day and how there's this trend going on on uh tick tock where people are making one second everyday type videos and there's a lot of trends out there that

[21:22] show it's like the 27 video challenge where you have 27 videos and you set them to a song that's very we say that's one when sc vibes when we ever like share it inside of our our slack channel i mean the thing is it's like bad posts nobody sees right like is is that true like it's kind of it's like such a timing thing and that goes back to the luck part of it and i think being able to um jump on a trend it's like you could have a great video and people think it's awesome and you show it to your friend and they think it's great and it just

[21:54] doesn't do well at the time and you could post it two months later and it'll do great maybe not for a trend it's it's randomness and kind of like just how the algorithm works with wanting to reward you sometimes but i think where we've done well with uh jumping on a trend too is we had a video that took off with um one of my co-workers made she she helped me make it um she was just standing there with her phone and was having somebody else zoom in on her that said i recorded one second every day of my life for the last year and then it just rotated through like

[22:29] really really fast imagery of the year and that was a trend of people showing it but it was like this we just kind of twisted it a little bit to make it about one second every day but don't ever make it like an ad it shouldn't be it shouldn't feel like one second every day is posting it and that's really cool we were getting a lot of positive feedback on the post because people were like okay uh what's the app that you used yeah and that's not a bad thing people think that's a bad thing to have people ask that but it's actually not it just

[23:00] means that they think that some random girl posted a video not a brand and i i was on your brand account though yeah it was on our brand account we get that all the time i mean that's a good sign of success right yeah yeah people don't really read the they don't read the captions maybe i'm not sure what it is but they don't make that connection it's really understated on tick-tock right yeah kind of like floating in the bottom yeah i feel like it's a great thing when people have no idea that it's coming from a brand even when it's posted on a brand account and that's i would

[23:35] say with trends it should feel like that it shouldn't feel like like i'm trying to think of an example like if oreo cookies made a thing it shouldn't feel like they are just trying to sell you cookies it needs to be entertaining it needs to tell a story you can't just find an easy way to do it and hope that it works so how how so you've had success with first party content have you used like user generated stuff as well have you tried to i've seen a lot of apps do this where they'll i i we know if we've had on the podcast people before who have had like

[24:08] tick-tock influencers make videos and then use those as ads have you experimented with any of that we haven't used any as ads something that's kind of weird about one second every day too i mean it also just has to do with us being a small team um with not a lot of money to spend on ads so we really lean into organic because organic has also done really well for us so why would you spend a bunch of money yeah but my my manager who used to be the social media manager when she started at one second every day started a thing uh where they added a

[24:41] feature actually to get more spikes monthly and that was to make it so that people could match their month and share their money uh on social and then they had a giveaway that went with it and we still have that giveaway and that gets hundreds of people to enter by sharing their their their month essentially uh of one second every day and that just keeps that going and just feeds into it and then the more people that post about us the more people that download and then the more people that can then post about us again so it's just keeping that stream it's a virality yeah

[25:15] do you have it does it get posted tiktok as well as like other platforms or is it like specifically focused on tick tock uh that's for instagram actually yeah you have that one sorry i'm this is i'm totally like a tick-tock idiot but like you can't actually like post videos into tick-tock right or no you can oh okay you definitely can't i know nothing about this yeah yeah no and we we share user-generated content all the time on instagram and we're trying to do that on tik tok as well but it's it's not the same because you can't really just share a one second every day video from a

[25:49] random person that doesn't mean as much as trying to kind of make it more of that tick tock format or putting a little bit of context behind it so that people understand it so and uh on the on the panel we were on you talked about um how well it's done for y'all at one second every day um can you uh rehash what you already said but on here tell us more specifically about uh a couple of the posts that went viral and then being able to see the direct results on in downloads yeah so we started our tick tock uh in december because we wanted to be

[26:28] able to launch it before the new year which is our biggest time of the year because that's usually when people download and then because it's the start of the year that's a great time to just start a thing for your life and then they'll wait a year to post it uh and so usually we see like this massive spike because everybody wants to post their year uh but this time what was different is that i think it was the day before the new year a girl i was just randomly scrolling through tick tock and a girl had made a video that was like hey i have an idea what if we just

[27:01] recorded one second every day of our life and then we would have a live movie and then i went oh that's our app and it hadn't even been i don't think it was even at one million views yet and so i was like i gotta do a duet right now and so i filmed a duet where i just was walking through the app um as she's explaining this idea and people even thought that we made the app because of her idea how did you guys do that so fast we're amazing uh so then people thought it was like this new cool app and uh it started this like

[27:33] micro trend uh through tick tock and her video i think it reached a lot of millions of views i think it was like 13 million or something crazy and then ours got like a million views and then everything after that for a couple days was like a million on our own account because then everybody started translating her video into their own country languages and so you had hundreds of people copying her video and just ending up on everybody's feed and then everybody that had already downloaded one second every day and knew about it was commenting inside of those videos saying hey download one second every day so they

[28:09] were doing our job for us really you know that's a sign of a great product right like yeah it is it's like we we talk about it because we go i mean it's again kind of a lucky circumstance of having this girl think of this idea that's really similar to our app but also we were able to capitalize on on it even more because we do edited with it and then we were able to grow an audience to like now we're at i don't even know we're at 20k or something on uh tick tock but we we grew really fast within that time and then uh

[28:43] kind of going back to being able to see download spikes is we got uh number one in the app store that day for the first time ever had never had that happen uh and it just i mean it blew the other numbers just away dramatically and then uh now we're able to see these little spikes every month when a tick tock is posted from somebody we had one in france and you'll see all the downloads that happened in france just spike up and then we had one in argentina and that spiked in uk so being able to like see that and also just learn from them like what kind

[29:19] of videos are they posting super simple them just saying i've been recording my life for this long people just think that's cool because they're like you did what you recorded your life for four years what how do i do that and then you tell them how they do it and then they just they're all like talking in the comments it's really cool and but we haven't seen this at all on the other years it's only this time that we've seen these like massive monthly spikes too didn't y'all hit number one again in may or something we did for a different country and i think that was

[29:52] argentina which we had never done before it's just like a random country but you could connect it back to one tick tock wow yeah we've seen i mean we had david smith on the podcast a couple weeks ago uh and his app uh widget smith like exploded for because of that and like uh he it was just somebody made a video right david that was a story for us like it was it was the same thing it was like not they didn't pay for it somebody just like show how to do a cool thing with this guy's app and it was i mean from our perspective we

[30:22] talked about it on the podcast at the time but from our perspective we we provided his infrastructure for purchases and we were like what the hell is happening like uh it's it's it's amazing one i mean i don't know it's like computer brain guy but like with this like interconnected like we've really like shortened the loop for like the the just like mimetic energy to like move around right like people can like spike this stuff um and it's yeah it's it's it's mind-blowing the the because we've seen it also not just we just we've seen other apps too like you know it's hard to move the

[30:54] needle for our infrastructure because we're for thousands of apps but in tiktok and like some of these and just to a lesser extent instagram can still like drive events that show up on our graphs like what the hell is happening we had one that was a paid one like a kardashian driven one that obviously it's different because you're paying an influencer but um but but yeah it's it's it's incredible and going back to your point about it being organic right first or like earned you could call it two right it's earned it was organic but watching it and being there you know for for you as the first party

[31:31] like to take advantage of that i think is as important as trying to be like you know creating your own content right it's probably yeah yeah as beneficial i mean it wouldn't have gone as well if we didn't have uh a presence on the platform too and i think that just goes to show that you should just be on the platforms and have a voice on the platforms for that moment uh you shouldn't be just jumping on i think there's probably like examples of that with other brands like the cranberry juice like ocean spray stuff that happened i don't think they had a presence on tick tock but then

[32:05] they caught on real fast but just imagine if they already did have a presence and then people would want to be posting about them more but i think yeah just having a presence on there too when that's all happening oh i was trying to place the meme that was the guy with the skateboard right yeah skateboard sorry yeah yeah yeah it's that one uh no it's it was really cool to see that all happen and and be able to show numbers because everybody i mean on the team has everybody in general has opinions on tick tock and when you're able to actually just correlate these things with numbers some people

[32:41] the people that are number people were just like mind blown they loved it like this is great it sounds like the algorithm is very capricious though it sounds like it's very kind of even even you even suggested that there's like intentional randomness like progressive randomness there's yeah there is but then there's also i've made the video like the the four years that i had captured kind of video where you have something playing the back like the the app i have in the background and me just sharing my story i've done that three times i think and every time it's done well so you it also rewards you for doing the

[33:17] same thing over and over which isn't a good thing and that's how you can get trapped but it is a nice thing to lean on when you're like we need a spike let's do this kind of video did you follow the uh the widget smith and home screen customization thing that blew up in the fall okay i was just gonna do get your thoughts on that but uh yeah i mean like like jacob said it blew up on tick tock and i no i know what you're talking about now yeah yeah yeah when everybody was customizing their screens to make it like a theme and everything yep yeah and so that's

[33:52] what jacob was talking about a minute ago was that widget smith was was kind of the center of all of that and it and then and they used revenue cat and so it just blew up um oh that's awesome but that was kind of just this crazy viral wave where what i thought was so cool about how that happened we talked about on the podcast i won't go super into it but she basically gave a tutorial of how to use the app which is like the best onboarding you could ever hope for you know it's like it is a complex thing to like go set up a widget

[34:25] and and configure all these this stuff to get the widgets to show up correctly and it's all a hassle that you would typically as a developer have to think oh man i need to onboard the user i need to convince them that it's worth all of this hassle to get some reward out of it and then she goes and like i mean in like i forget it was like 45 second video maybe even 30 second video it was like here's how you do it and bam like or actually i think she said like she showed the like home screen at how cool and aesthetic it was and and then

[34:59] then she showed how to do it and then she and it was like she it was like this perfectly scripted marketing onboarding thing of telling you how to do it telling you the result telling you it's worth doing telling you it's you know it's worth the hassle of going through these steps and then showing you the steps it was just amazing how it wasn't an ad it was totally user generated it just ended up being the absolute perfect ad because it was user generated and because it was user generated she felt like you needed to explain it all and like tell that story um so yeah it

[35:31] was just it was just a really fascinating little blurb lip and then and then you know a lot of apps have been going viral because of tick-tock since then i forget there was another another one recently that was like super random like some kind of calculator or something that got into the top 100 in the app store oh that's cool yeah so it's just crazy have you all thought about product changes to try to incent that behavior to like try and encourage folks to make videos aside from you mentioned the like sharing thing but there seems like there could be other ways to kind of like

[36:05] plant some more of those viral spikes around yeah uh something that we're working on i don't know if i'm actually probably allowed to say what it is because it's not but yeah maybe i should keep it secret we have things planned we're thinking about it yes we do we think about ways that we can incorporate it in the app and we want to think about more ways i mean we've had tick-tockers that have influenced product changes to just even the ability to flip like mirror their video i don't know if you know what that trend is but there was this uh effect they had on tick tock that

[36:38] would mirror your face and it makes it look bizarre when you flip it for some reason it's a psychological thing and so then everybody was telling us that we need to have a mirror button so they can flip it back the correct way and we made that change and people were really happy so we definitely listen to everybody on social about stuff and yes we do think about product changes and are trying to think about more for the future to encourage people to post but definitely making sure that there's no um pay wall with that too is important you know if you want to make hay off of like organic or viral or

[37:17] something like that it has to be i've worked on several like viral organic or viral sherry features like stuff like this the only ones i've ever had be successful are the ones that are like core to the product which means like you have to think about it early right you have to think about it early on i mean you can add stuff later but like unless it's like consequential or like easy or interesting like it's not actually gonna get to that viral coefficient that makes enough of a difference um but but doing the product work in some ways is gonna be higher leverage than like trying to make your nth video

[37:49] right yeah it's just making the product more shareable uh yeah we'll go further we have those conversations and people try to loop in the marketing team too and pick our brains about hey we heard about this product request and we want to know on a scale of 1 to 10 how important is this for the success of the app and like how much is it going to affect it and we'll talk about it and be like well that filter is not really that important you can hold off for like next summer or something it's it's having those conversations and they're really important i think everybody on the team talks together

[38:23] about the features what do you think are some other ways and specifically getting back to the algorithm that that helps you stand out so you like aside from trend chasing i know the like popular songs is one thing right because if you use the background audio from a video that was trending the kind of audio trends separate from the video right or separate from topics and things like that are there any other kind of tips and tricks to to help your video stand out even if you're not um you know doing specific kind of trend chasing that's a difficult one because that kind of comes down to like you and your

[39:07] personality and what makes you different as well and that's a really hard one that can take a long time to kind of flesh out but if you're not trend chasing it's kind of playing around with features in the app and kind of seeing new ways that you can play with it i know i had a video on my own personal account that was using their voiceover effect that they have where the text is read out by a woman and i would misspell the names of like popular celebrities on purpose and i found out that i could actually drag the misspelling out of the video you couldn't see it but

[39:42] it would still do it and then i could put the actual person's name so i could make it seem like this voice is just completely butchering these names in the worst way and it went viral just like thinking of these like random ways that you can use these features or like tricks is really important and it's super fun and people love it so i think yeah just diving into using the app itself there's so many features that go on and new ways that you can use them and that's how you stand out is just kind of making like a little bit of a tweak to something so i'll uh you know just to

[40:18] look into the future because if it you know having seen having seen myspace and then now then facebook become cool and not cool and twit i think twitter's not cool anymore probably not right now i'm on there so no it's my social media of choice tic tac is like the rising cool like do you have any like i mean you know imagine you're in a multi-decade career of doing something along those lines do you do you think about or imagine like what what might be next or like what the kids think what what the kid on the bus might be talking about in in five or ten years

[40:50] all the time yeah but i mean i have been on new platforms all the time too and they just flop sometimes you'll think it's a great thing but it's often because people think they're putting out something different and they're really not it's just the same thing but looks a little different different colors maybe or you can't force people to use an app you can only get people to like naturally kind of come over there and a lot of companies too will pay people to come and use their app to seed it right yeah to try to get people to come over there and generate fake viewers or fake users really um yeah and

[41:27] that doesn't work either so i i do think about it a lot i haven't quite seen that yet for what the new thing is i think tik tok has stayed around a lot longer than i thought because i remember talking about it with people at vidcon a couple years ago where we went when do you think vidcon's gonna go just because we were all scared because of fine when that drops i mean that affected so many people and it impacted them in a positive way too because some people had already set their sights on uh youtube or doing tick tock it's either you chose short form content

[42:01] or long form so just being ready don't have all your eggs in one basket it's kind of like the big thing and be looking and just be aware of what's out there it doesn't mean that the thing will be the next big thing it just means you should be aware of it in case it does become a thing yeah i would say like taking your company brand onto very unproven platforms is probably not a great use of time right like you want to wait until there's something there yeah i think it's with a smaller teams it's definitely us trying to think is an hour gonna really be worth it or is it

[42:34] really more well spent if it's an hour of me making some tick tocks in my apartment probably the tech talks right now it's kind of a random thing but it's fun but but how do you approach that then because there is value in the experimentation of like seeing what's next so do you kind of think okay i'm going to waste two hours this week checking out new i mean you probably don't time box it like that but there is some value in that experimentation how much are you time are you spending on on that experimentation because it sounds like that's i mean that's kind of been a theme of this

[43:09] whole conversation is try this try that see what sticks see what happens so and there's value in that so how much how do you kind of view that time that you're just throwing stuff against the wall uh it can really range and that just depends on what apps are out there our uh ceo caesar's awesome at being in the loop with the tech world and kind of seeing what platforms are being talked about on twitter so twitter still is a relevant thing relevant for something yeah early millennials yeah aging out of anything relevant exactly like he sent us apps that were like whoa this is really cool and even if it's not

[43:51] something that blows up it can still help us with our app too and like internally yeah we're like that's a really cool onboarding video i have never seen anything like that that's super helpful and that that's just the team being curious about stuff and i think that's so important is just to also if you're in social media you should just be i mean on social media and i'm definitely on social media way too much but that's what i do with my own time too i'm not like making an account for one second every day on every new platform that exists and like trying it out i'm trying it out on my own own time

[44:26] sometimes like on my own account and that's the best way is just to see how you like it and how it's working for you and your friends to use it i can't remember what the app was called it's like paparazzi i think yeah maybe that's what it's called yeah that went viral for four days or something right this went viral for four days or whatever and it was great and we were like whoa this is so cool that's like one of the onboarding videos that were like this is awesome it's got like the the phone was like vibrating and stuff while you were like going through

[44:55] this onboarding experience it was so cool uh we didn't stick with it but that's also because we're like we don't have as many friends as like a bunch of kids do so maybe that's a different experience in their world maybe they're all talking about it more um but yeah i think just getting on it and seeing it can be a valuable thing and using it for your own time and actually creating content on the platform is important it's not too dissimilar from how developers use new like coding tools right like you try it for side projects i mean it's one channel for revenue caps talking about

[45:28] our own growth is like we want to make sure like selling into bigger older companies it's a little sometimes it's taking longer we're able to do it now but like it's much easier to win like yeah the like inconsequential or less consequential side project uh and then you know ramp that into something bigger later right yeah then sometimes a better place for that experimentation definitely it's funny i was thinking about it from an app developer's perspective so we have the tools guy the social media person and the and me as the app uh focus so exactly what you were saying is is how you want to prove out your own app

[46:04] like i've had apps where i send out a beta and people stop using it like a couple days later and so you know when you go onto this social media platform and you're trying it and your own personal use just drops off then it's clear it's not as sticky where most people get on tick tock it's like they're hooked and they're going i will not open the damn thing like it is too good like i got twitter enough in my life ruining it like i don't need this other one yeah yeah but for but for the developers out there you know when you send out a beta you

[46:35] know your beta people might not be your exact target market but you should have some level of like stickiness in in the app the signs of product market fit um anyways i do want to talk a little bit and we need we're getting short on time but um you're launching a new community feature with community manager or tell me about that because i actually don't know all the details yeah uh i think you mean brand ambassador program that's what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah yeah i announced that on the panel that day that we were launching that and we had over like 200 applications for people to join our brand ambassador

[47:17] team um and we have a marketing team of three people to manage that team so we had to narrow it down a lot unfortunately but we had you know over 200 people submitting videos of why they wanted to be on this team and this team is for us to be able to connect with people in the community uh to kind of just start a brand ambassador program because we've always wanted to do that it's been talked about forever so we just made the leap and we narrowed it down to um 26 people and announced them last week and so we're getting them all on boarded and ready to go

[47:51] and we've got like people from all over the world that are ready to make some content about one second every day but that's kind of the thing is they get you know connections with us and can have impacts within the app as well as like free merch and things like that uh that are really fun and then uh we get some content from them in exchange which is kind of like the user generated and hopefully we'll be successful and we'll see some like really cool things from them we're just excited to see what they create so so the so the goal is is to be more directly connected

[48:31] with some of the people who are already creating content in the space and then and it's not a paid gig it's it's uh they like you said they get paid in in paid in merch right in merch and but i imagine that's not exclusive merch you can't put a dollar value on it right yes yes exclusive yeah what what i mean what was the pitch to them specifically yeah uh the pitch to people in general was to be a part of the community to identify uh if you identify as a one-second everyday fan which we've got a lot of big super fans out there who have been using

[49:07] the app for eight years to you know a year and they just love it and they just want to be a part of that and really kind of make their own with it like if they're a writer they can submit a blog post if they uh really like social media they can focus on tick tocks to make uh for us to post and kind of like help give them shout outs they just really want to have experience some of these kids are uh some of them are like kids that want marketing experience some people are like older that are just like i love this app so much and i promise i will make the

[49:39] coolest videos for you and here's like what i do and they're just so jazzed about it and they're gonna get like the younger people that are newer to the app really excited so we're just excited to see them interact and everything and then uh get content and like new ideas because i'm just a one person making stuff for social media and i want to see kind of what people naturally make we're not trying to force them to make anything we're not telling them that they have to make this kind of video it's just whatever they want to do and then they can discuss within the community

[50:11] so i'd like to take this opportunity to announce the revenue cap brand ambassador program uh david figure out the details i don't know i don't know you sort it for me this is this is blowing my mind though i mean and again i mean the whole reason i wanted to have you on the podcast is like you just are thinking so differently i mean i know brand ambassador is it i just i've seen brand ambassadors i know the general idea you know but i just never would have thought it could work for an app so it's so cool that that you all are just trying this

[50:42] new thing and having users help with your marketing and yeah and then being so like thrilled to do it that's just incredible so much better too than like a bunch of like stale like uh like you know like facebook ads you generated on fiverr right like like get some real you know it's so much more valuable that's mostly how people find out about our app is through word of mouth and people posting about us so it only made sense and and we knew it was the right time because we had all these people asking if we had a brand ambassador program and that's kind of like how we sold it

[51:14] to the team too is being like hey people are asking people are interested this is the time to do it and just try it there's nothing to lose let's go for it see what happens um and then hopefully from there we'll be able to just keep growing it and we'll just have this like awesome connection with our user base and what's been really so cool about doing this podcast and talking to so many folks is that different things just click for different people so you know if you're listening to this podcast you have an app that isn't content heavy you know maybe social media is not the perfect fit

[51:49] for you and maybe you're not going to be able to have brand ambassadors and things like that but the point is you don't just have to buy ads on facebook like there are so many different avenues to explore and this is one really cool way to do something different and to very cost effectively grow an app without just dumping money into ads so it's so cool and we do need to wrap up um is there is there anything else you want to share we're going to put links to your you know of course your tick tock and uh one second every day uh but anything else you wanted to share as we

[52:22] wrap up i know i think that's that's it thanks so much for for having me i had a really fun time talking about all this with you guys this is like my passion so it's great to chat well thanks so much for your time this is super insightful yeah thank you thank you to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time

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