How to Scale an App From $0-$10,000 (Beginner Marketing)

My Tik Tok account pulled in 50 million views, 120,000 followers, and was the reason I was able to scale my last app to [music] $44,000 per month in monthly recurring revenue. I didn't have VC funding. I didn't have a massive team. I didn't have a production [music] studio filming my content. This was not luck. I developed and followed a very simple process that allowed me to consistently go viral. And I was able to share that system with other creators who also went viral for my product. And in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how I used organic content [music] to drive millions of views, turn that attention into app store downloads, scale with micro influencers who didn't break the bank, and then take the best performing content and run it profitably on paid ads. I'm going to be showing you the actual Tik Tok videos and the revenue dashboard so that you can see how [music] this worked step by step. And even if you don't want to show your face on Tik Tok, if you don't want to be making content, you need to watch this video so you can learn how to leverage other creators to go viral for you. Let's break it down. Okay, this is it. The five-step viral organic views blueprint. But before we jump into it, of course, I will show you my revenue dashboard so you know that I'm not capping. And as you can see, we scaled our previous mobile app to 44K per month before selling the business. And I have not done this once, but I've done this twice. This is our new business, our new mobile app posted. And in the last 4 weeks, we have done over $123,000 in gross volume on the platform using the same strategy. A majority of this traffic is organic traffic from different channels, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram. So, with that out of the way, let's jump into it real quick here. If you're enjoying the video, drop a like on the video. It encourages me to make more content like this where I'm dropping sauce for free. And if you do like the video, it will tell the YouTube algorithm that you want to see more content like this. Content that actually teaches you something instead of all the usual brain rock content that we're used to on YouTube. I would definitely appreciate it. Oh, and by the way, I've put together a group of driven app founders, and we meet three times every single week to talk about our mobile apps, how we're building, and how we're scaling our mobile apps. So, if you want to be a part of that group, shoot me a DM on Instagram, stephven.builds, and I'll add you into it. All right, back to the content. I am going to be showing you exactly how to conduct market research, how to hire hundreds of creators on the low to post about your product consistently, how you should be posting content, and how your creator should be posting content, the calls to action, the most important part of your video, how are you presenting the product, and then of course scaling that winning organic content on paid ads. Do not sleep on paid ads, but we'll get there last. Let's start at the top, market research. To be honest with you, I could delete this entire document and leave market research because it is the most important part of this entire process. If you understand how to do market research, you will win. So, what is market research? Before I posted a single video on my Tik Tok account that I grew to 120,000 followers, I did one thing. I watched content. I watched content for five or seven days and I understood what was going viral in my niche before I created or other creators created a single piece of content for my brand. And if you do that and you follow this market research method, you will have a much better chance at going viral. If you open Tik Tok for the first time and you make a random video and try to attempt to go viral, you will fail. But the good news is there are hundreds to thousands of people going viral in your niche. It does not matter what niche you have. I guarantee if you follow this process, we will find you viral videos that you can take inspiration from, you're going to learn from those formats and you are going to post similar content. We need to understand the viral themes in our niche. We need to understand the hooks that these creators are using, the story lines and the way they are presenting products if they are. So, first step, open your phone and you can search Tik Tok organically. You can go in and you can type in any keyword on your phone on Tik Tok. Let's type in macro tracking. And then we can click videos. And what we can do is filter by most liked of the last 6 months. And Tik Tok will show you the most viral videos in your niche. Should I end the video here? I could. This is all you need. Here are all of the most viral videos within your niche that have gone viral organically on Tik Tok. Up until this day, I have the same spreadsheet that I have used. I put all of my inspiration content into a spreadsheet like this. I did exactly what I just showed you. I note down the concept, the CTA. I note down the story line and I have them all saved in one Excel spreadsheet. This Excel spreadsheet is going to be your best friend. It is your market research. It is your guide. These are all the winning formats that you have found that have gone viral organically. And you can do this on any platform, Instagram, YouTube. Search organically and find the most viral content in your niche. What you can also do is use a site like viral ad library. And again, this document is going to be in the description. If you want this entire document, I will put it in the description for free. So go check that out. One tool that you can use is viral ad library. Here you will find a library of the most viral organic content for any app. You can type them in. You can filter by categories. We can go to productivity and we can see the most viral productivity apps here. All of their viral content and you can see a breakdown. Use this as another resource for your market research. The next two tools I'm going to show you, these aren't as good for finding viral organic concepts, but they are incredible for finding winning creatives in general, especially for paid ads. We have the Facebook ads library. On the Facebook ads library, you can type in any company in the world and you will see all of their ads. How is this real? I'm not sure. But we can, for example, type in Dolingo here and we can see all 59 active ads. We can download these videos. We can learn from these videos. Dualingo is not running these 59 ads unprofitably. This is a big company. They do tens of millions of dollars per month in revenue. They're smart. They have a team behind these ads. And I just showed you all of their winning ads for free in about 30 seconds. You can type in any company, type in your competitors, type in people in your niche, and you will see all of their winning content in one page. Cheat code. Tik Tok also has this. We have the Tik Tok ads library. You can explore the top ads on Tik Tok. Add them to your spreadsheet. Okay. So, once you have done the market research and you have identified viral concepts within your niche, you need to post the content. You should have a very solid understanding of what top performing content in your niche looks like. Every piece of content that I posted on my account was based on some viral concept that I had already seen someone else do. Like this mirror thing day 1, day 2, day three or like this college story or like this 14-year-old in my comments. Every single piece of content that I posted was based on one of the viral concepts that I identified in my market research. That's why I got out of 200 view jail because I understood what content was working. One very important step you cannot skip, especially if you're starting a new account, is to warm up the account. What do I mean by warm up the account? If you create a brand new Tik Tok account and you rip 10 posts on it in the first 10 minutes, it's going to look like a bot. That no real person does that. So, you need to sit on the account, and you can do this during your market research phase. When you first create an account, scroll, like, comment, engage, act like a real person, follow some people, warm up the account so Tik Tok understands that you are a real human being. And once you have it warmed up, you need to post and test a lot. Again, I will bring up my account. I posted hundreds of times. I committed to posting one time every single day. And again, if you don't want to post on your account, no problem. I'm going to show you how to hire creators hundreds of them on the low. But when you are posting, you need to be consistent. Even if the views are lacking, even if the views are small, I'll show you an Instagram account that I've been growing recently. We just hit 23,000 followers. The views are cranking on this. 132K in the most recent video. I posted so much and got barely any views. But I stuck with it and I kept doing market research and I kept posting formats that I knew would work and eventually the views started to improve. 40K here, 17K here, 9K, 20K, 11K, 13K. You need to stay consistent. The name of the game here is consistency. And again, whether you're posting, you're hiring creators to post, not every single piece of content will go viral, but it only takes one. It only takes one viral piece of content to change your business overnight. I promise you that. It happened to me and I'm going to show you that video here in a second. But you need to stay consistent. Posting frequency and strategy, minimum one post per day on the account. If you can get up to three, five, amazing. Post as much as you possibly can. But remember, base every single post on the market research you did previously. To emphasize the importance of market research, I'm going to show you a video that I came across. There were many videos like this. I saw so many videos going viral of this exact format. People saying they're quitting nicotine, dropping their vapes in water. Look at this video. 269,000 likes. That video got 3.7 million views. You want to want to see something crazy? [laughter] Recognize that guy? Yeah, there's me. Exact same format, just replicating it, but for my product. And look at that product placement, baby. 70,000 likes on that video. That video pulled in 1.1 million views, drove tens of thousands of downloads, all because market research, baby. Now you understand the market research aspect. You understand that you need to post a lot. Now, how do we hire hundreds of creators to post about our product a lot? This is a cheat code. This is how you really ramp up the volume and the views that your brand can get. There is only one place that you can go to hire creators to make content for your brand for free. And you only pay for the good content and you get hundreds of them to post. and that is on good old Postit app. You can try out the platform for free and you can launch a deal. Spoiler alert, Postit is my product, but I want you to try it for free. I want you to get content for free from a lot of content creators and this is exactly how I'm scaling my latest app. I'm running deals on Postit. So, here is the deal that I ran and this is exactly how you get content creators to post about your brand. You post a quick project overview explaining what your product is, what it does. You have rules for the content. You can choose where you want the creators to be from. So, if you only want US creators, you can choose that and boom, you will start to get free content flowing in from creators. And what happens is you can view the content and you can decide whether or not you want to pay for it. The creator is going to bid. They're going to tell you how much they want for that piece of content and you decide For example, [music] she wanted 30 bucks for it. We approved. She posted on her account and we own the video and the Spark Ads code. We got 208 different creators to all submit videos to this deal, and we only paid for the ones that we absolutely loved. $15 for a piece of content here, $35 for a piece of content here, $40 for a piece of content here, $25,000 followers, $25 for a piece of content, $118,000 followers, $100, 2 million followers, $55. This is the fastest way to work with creators in mass. So go over to postitapp.com. You can launch a deal for free. You can try it out for free and you can start getting content for free. Okay, now arguably the most important part of the video calls to action. And this is where everybody messes up because you can do all of this correctly. You can post a bunch of content. You can hire creators. You can get millions and millions of views. But if you're not pitching your product correctly, those views mean nothing. And a call to action in a good organic piece of content is going to be very counterintuitive. The key is to not be salesy. The key is to not talk about your product, overexlain your product. The key is to get those sneaky CTAs so that people are sold before they even know it. I'm going to show you an example. Again, I'm going to show you that piece of content that I pulled from my market research, and I want you to watch for the call to action in this video, but I've been hitting my vape for I don't know. There it was. No hard selling, no explaining the features, no telling people go download my app to do X, Y, and Z. No, it was a sly call to action. I did that time and time again. I'll show you another example without knowing what's [music] inside. So, I'm going to show you. On the outside, we have the colorful metal casing, a 3.7 volt 500 milliamp battery, and a coil wrapped in soaked cotton. Check out this app if you need to quit. That was it. This is what I did time and time again in my content. This was the best performing call to action in my videos. A sly, non- salesy showcase of my product. Now, the winning call to action for every different product is going to look slightly different. But the key thing you need to focus on is what is the one killer feature in your app? For me, it was the vape monitor that tracked how much time you had smoked that day. That was it. That was the one killer feature. And if I showed that in my videos, it drove installs. What is your feature? What is the one feature that you can show visually about your product in a Tik Tok video where people will just get it? They will understand. What is the one killer feature? If your content feels like an ad, if you are trying to sell your product too hard, it will not work. The audience on Tik Tok is evolving over time and they understand when they're being sold to. Your goal is to intrigue them again with viral content formats. intrigue them, draw them in to your video so it gets organic views, and then you do a quick sneaky call to action and they're sold before they they can even think about it. Something else you also definitely need to do is optimize your profile. As you can see here in the description of the PuffCount account, it's a quick we don't have a ton of stuff in our bio. We have this is the app that helps you quit. That's it. Simple explainer of what the app does. We have a download call to action here and then we have a simple link to download the video. And on top of that, we have pinned our best performing sales videos to the account. They're pinned because they drove the maximum amount of downloads. Every time someone goes into the profile, these are the first two videos they see. We want everybody who views the profile to go see those. Another extremely slept on way to integrate calls to action is to engage with the audience and be active in the comments. Again, I'll show you this video where I dumped, you know, it into this glass of water. And I'm always engaging with the comments. I say, "What's your account?" encouraging someone to figure out how much they're they're puffing every single day and all that stuff. And I also once I see that a video is going viral, I always This is day [music] six of No Nick November, replying to one of those comments. And these reply videos will go mega viral for you because they're shown in the comments of your original viral video. And these reply reply to comment videos. These can be hard sales pitches. These are the only videos that you should be hard selling on. Look at this one. I'm hard selling because I'm stealing the traffic that this viral video is getting organically. This video that I just showed you was a reply to a comment from this video. So, when someone opens this video and they go into the comments, they are going to see this one and watch it. And again, that's why I'm able to hard sell in this video and get 6,000 likes and 100,000 views on this piece of content. That is a hard sales pitch. This video would not have performed otherwise. Little pro tip for you there. All right. Now, let's cover really, really scaling these campaigns. scaling with other channels and again scaling with creators. Once you have done all of these steps, you should have a nice library of content. I had hundreds of videos that I made myself organically. And if you're using posted, you will get hundreds of videos that you can use from other creators and you'll be able to download and use these videos across other channels in ad campaigns. You are going to have this library of content now wherever you've posted it. Tik Tok, Instagram, you can repost that content to every other platform and you should repost it to Instagram reels, to YouTube shorts, to Facebook reels, to Twitter, to X. There is no reason to not repost this content everywhere. And you should upload your best performers to the paid ads dashboard. That is what really has taken all of my apps to the next level. When you find an ad that can run profitably, you are spending to send views to it. And as long as your customer acquisition cost is lower than your customer lifetime value, you will be able to scale to the moon. Now, I've dropped a full video explaining my exact paid ads strategy. So, I highly encourage you to give that a watch. It'll be in the description, but real quick, you need to upload your best performance to the paid ads dashboard and definitely do some research about retargeting campaigns. You can retarget all of the people who have viewed your content and have checked out your profile. Those are going to be high intent users. You can retarget people who have watched 80% of your winning paid ads. Retargeting campaigns are going to be your real winners here and you should be set up for success because you have this massive library of content. So again, watch that full breakdown video I did on scaling with paid ads. To recap, first we're doing market research. We're posting a lot. We're staying consistent. We're adding sly call to actions in the video. And we're scaling the winners using posted and paid ads. That is your blueprint. If you have any questions, you want me to review your content, review your app, leave a comment here, or shoot me a DM on stephven.builds. I will always get back to you on Instagram. Hope you enjoyed the video. We'll catch you on the next one.