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

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Joseph Choi, a former e-commerce marketer and product manager who's now helping app developers go viral on TikTok. On the podcast, I talk with Joseph about what's currently working for apps on TikTok, 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.

Joseph Choi:

Thanks for having me, David.

David Barnard:

So we're going to be talking about TikTok. I think a lot of folks are going to be excited to listen to this episode, but before we get into some of the techniques and things you're learning and working on, why TikTok, and what got you into TikTok marketing?

Joseph Choi:

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 listened to podcasts, and the business that I found was dropshipping. 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 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 learned marketing in now being used in the consumer tech apps space. So in the past few months, I've just been meeting a lot more founders that are leveraging TikTok and short form video to go viral with their apps, and I really think it's a great opportunity to get your first thousand users, 10,000 MRR for subscription apps.

David Barnard:

Let's dive in then, and I wanted to start with why TikTok? So there's so many ways to get attention, press, and SEO, and starting a blog, and all these different things, but what's unique about TikTok that people are starting to find success and that it is maybe a good place to experiment with zero to one?

Joseph Choi:

When you scroll on TikTok 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, brand new videos. So as a creator, you can make videos on TikTok 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 San Francisco... 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 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 pay for the content to put it in front of people, with TikTok, you just have to make good quality content, it can go viral from scratch. Yeah, your cost of marketing 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.

David Barnard:

You mentioned that you started in e-commerce and it seems like e-commerce maybe was a little earlier to the TikTok scene than apps, what do you think has changed or what do you think made it more interesting for apps as of late?

Joseph Choi:

So TikTok Shop launched in November of 2022, so it's November 2024 when we're recording this, it's only been two years since TikTok Shop launched. TikTok Shop is basically an affiliate platform for e-commerce products on TikTok. So as a brand owner, you can upload your e-commerce product to TikTok Shop, you set an affiliate commission percentage, so some people do 15 to 20%, and then creators will automatically can just sign up to affiliate for your product and start making videos, and the payments and everything is handled through TikTok. So in the beginning, this was a huge gold rush for brands because you could just upload your product and then pay commission only to these TikTok 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 TikTok shop, these 15% commissions add up very quickly if you go viral with a TikTok.

So now, there's this whole new class of creators that it's really good at making video content that not only gets views but is high converting. And actually, it's not just views as a vanity metric, it's actually driving millions and millions of dollars of GMV just through these TikTok 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 TikTok Shop has definitely fueled a lot of the innovation in the marketing side. One of the companies that I think is really interesting in this space in the e-commerce space is Tabs Chocolate. So they went from zero to 10 million in revenue in a year just on TikTok shop.

And the founder of that, Oliver, he put the Tabs Chocolate product on hold and he switched to apps, then he launched an app called Studybuddy. And it helps students with their homework, it's an AI app. But 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 once he started doing that, then a bunch of apps started catching on and doing the same thing. Yeah, I think this is the new wave. I think, naturally, apps have always grown through different ways, but I think TikTok is the new thing.

David Barnard:

It's interesting, it's not that apps are suddenly going viral on TikTok or that nobody's tried to make it work before, because famously, Widgetsmith went viral on TikTok in 2020. So four years ago, it went viral, shot to number one on the app store. We've actually had David Smith, the developer of that, on the podcast, and we've talked to other apps that are doing TikTok 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 pioneered the techniques that are now actually going to start working better for apps.

Joseph Choi:

I think that's right. Yeah.

David Barnard:

I wanted to dive into your understanding of the algorithm, and you already mentioned how the For You page drives so much of this, but I wanted to dive a little deeper into that contrast, SEO, so hard to get your page ranked because almost any topic's 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 actually see scale, it's just such a different experience. And so is there anything else about the algorithm that you think makes it so effective for going viral and as a marketing channel?

Joseph Choi:

There's a distinction between influencers and what I like to call, I guess, scrappy UGC creators. In the traditional sense of what an influencer is, I think influencers became a thing around the Instagram era, maybe a little bit before, but basically, they have... an influencer is really... If you think about it as an analogy for creating a movie, a movie production, which is what TikTok videos are basically, just short movies, you have the director, you have the actor, and then you have the audience, 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, a pre-existing audience that they've built trust with over the years through their content.

But what TikTok 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 perform well on For You Page. So now, you're playing the role of the director, and then now, TikTok 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."

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 going to make the videos anyway, I 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 a creator marketing, I think the For You page really enables you to be scrappier with it.

David Barnard:

That's a great analogy, that instead of having to build an audience, it's the content itself that generates the audience through TikTok'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 getting more likes, or are there inputs that you've seen to the algorithm that set aside the content itself? Because 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?

Joseph Choi:

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 TikTok algorithm is. It's always changing, it's shifting. 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, think about if you own TikTok, how would you want to design the algorithm? So TikTok makes its money from advertising and from TikTok Shop. So if you want to make the most money as TikTok, 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 onto the next video and then watch that to completion.

You want people to enjoy watching the video and have some sort of emotional reaction to watching the video. So when people say, "Oh, 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 at the bottom line is someone has to feel something when they watch the video.

David Barnard:

And I imagine the algorithm is 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 the base human experience of TikTok, it's like driving those little mini dopamine rushes. And so the algorithm is maybe 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 context. Is the person... is it 2:00 AM and they're just like, dopamine hit, and they need 15-second videos, or are they more in a state where they can engage with a two-minute video? And so it's probably still context depending on what TikTok is going to feed people that trying to guess at it is, like you said, it's to make people feel something and that's going to be more successful.

Does having followers on TikTok give you any kind of a leg up? 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, and it doesn't matter as much as you might guess?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah, 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 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 left, you can watch videos 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.

David Barnard:

So you have a leg up. And are 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 shouldn't account have a point of view and model some of the old style influencer that this account is all about... if I created one for my weather app, should I strive to create something people would actually want to follow by sharing interesting content in addition to any pitch kind of stuff, or do you think it's more important to just really focus on each video being as potentially viral as possible?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah, this seems like a business strategy question. 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 great to build a brand. I've seen that Instagram Reels 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 having a legitimate brand beyond just going viral every day, it's always good. Yeah, I think that's always a good thing to have.

David Barnard:

Yeah. What kind of apps do you think this works for? You and I actually talked about this 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 how viral you're going to be able to go with a weather app and productivity apps." Maybe Widgetsmith being an exception, 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?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah. So TikTok is a video platform, so apps that have some sort of visual element or highly visual wow factor do very well on TikTok. 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 it. If you look at the TikTok ad library and you go to the top performing ads of all time, they're all utility apps, they're just things like phone storage cleaners, and AI, spam calling blockers, and things like that. One niche 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 exist on TikTok, 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 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, what type of marketing works as a whole, it's like health, wealth, relationships. 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.

David Barnard:

You were saying... looking at the top ads, these phone cleaner and stuff like that, but are those going viral, or those are successful as ads because a lot of money is put behind them? Because there's those two kind of things, a lot of what you've been talking about on Twitter, and you have this community, you're building up of apps working to go viral and use TikTok as a marketing channel, but there's the free marketing go viral and then there's put money behind a piece of content and that performing well. So do you see those productivity tools, and clean your storage and stuff, are those actually going viral, or is it that those just make so much money the creators of those apps are able to put so much money behind them on spend?

Joseph Choi:

They're primarily getting their users through paid acquisition because they can't go viral on TikTok. That was my point there. Maybe I should make a distinction, this productivity apps that solve a deep pain point about your day-to-day motivation and building habits, that's a very emotionally tied product, versus a productivity app that cleans your phone storage. It's a somewhat emotional problem, but 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, let me download that," and then there's a paywall, and then you pay the paywall, versus a TikTok that says, "Hey, are you struggling with motivation? There's the 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 user experience and buying journey is very different, I think, than strictly utility app.

David Barnard:

Yeah. So maybe that's where to draw the line. And you said it earlier, it's like if you have a productivity app that you can make content that people really feel has a higher likelihood of going viral, if you have a productivity app, like we've been talking about, that clean your storage, people need that, but maybe those kinds of ads are less likely to go viral and get a lot of free boost even if they can be very effective on TikTok as a paid. So thinking again specifically about my weather app, which we've talked about, is probably going to be a challenge for me to get going on TikTok if I try, it's that if I'm trying to go viral, I need to focus on that feel side of things, and it's hard to create that kind of feel content for that kind of a utility versus, like you were saying, a more emotionally-driven utility or productivity app. So maybe that's a great way to draw those distinctions.

Joseph Choi:

I think it's possible also to slightly change the products to become more TikTok native. So I've seen people do this, for example, with health tracking where if you have a Whoop, or an Apple Watch, or a 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 for TikTok, it's sort of improve your health by looking at your analytics. It's like, do end consumers really want to put in the work to improve their health with general good health analytics? Not really, but what some of these apps are doing is they choose one hook, one viral killer feature within their app that will go viral on TikTok.

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, maybe it's a combination of blood pressure and heartbeat, or some other data, but it's a very novel thing. I've 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 TikTok, they emphasize this one killer feature. I've seen apps create features just to go viral on TikTok and then use that as a funnel to their main... the whole ecosystem of features that they have in their app.

David Barnard:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And then that probably somewhat informs your go viral strategy versus the create a great ad strategy, is if you're specifically trying to go viral, you're probably not listing all the features, it's like you specifically want to look for that hook that's going to be unique, that's going to make people feel, that's going to 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 TikTok 15 seconds at a time, 60 seconds at a time, two minutes at a time? It's especially tough because you're ultimately selling something, and we can get into the CTA's, but yeah, what makes a good TikTok creative?

Joseph Choi:

As a founder or developer, 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 TikTok slideshows. So it's like a carousel image where it scrolls through 5 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 get views, which we discussed earlier, it's about watch time, engagement, something that could be shareable. And a good heuristic for thinking about that is if someone was watching this video, would they share it with a friend?

So then if you think about... if you said, "Hey, guys, I just made this app. It helps you look at the weather, and the interface is much better than the normal weather app," it's too salesy. How likely would 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 send this to my friends." So how do you create that emotion, it's got to... Basically, it has to be funny, it has to be controversial, or 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 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 then you also want to sell the product. The more you sell the product, usually, the less shareable 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 recording. And one of the really good apps in this space is called Quizard AI. And they have a TikTok 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 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 asleep, just sleeping in lecture. But 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 the value proposition of the product. That's one of the examples that hits really good engagement and also selling the product really effectively.

David Barnard:

Let's dig into a couple more examples. I know there's an ADHD habit tracking app that's like doing really well on TikTok. What's their content? What's so shareable about what they're doing?

Joseph Choi:

This might be a Gen Z trend, but I think Gen Z cares a lot about mental health. Sometimes, Gen Z over self-diagnosis on certain mental illnesses, ADHD is definitely one of them. They describe ADHD more as a personality trait than an actual diagnosis. The trend is out there and 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, 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, or they show themselves walking into the room and 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 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 the 50%, 60, 70% watch time, and then you plug the app at the end. Then people are like, "Well, it's okay. I just got all this relatable 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 TikTok. 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 product as a solution for the topic that you're talking about.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's really cool. And then another example, RizzGPT. What are they doing content-wise?

Joseph Choi:

So RizzGPT 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 it's writing this Gen Z idea of rizz and being charismatic over text. And their strategy is very interesting, they have dozens of TikTok accounts all posting pretty similar content. I don't know if you've ever seen the split screen content where you get subway surfers on the bottom and then you get some Reddit story on the top, or some text message story on the top? So RizzGPT uses this format a lot in a lot of their videos where they have Minecraft 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 app, by RizzGPT.

Another thing they do is they do the screen recording so that they're live typing, and then there's a pause and they're like, "Oh, no, what do I say?" And then they swipe over to the RizzGPT app, they input 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 main point of watching the content for most viewers is to just watch this entertaining conversation between two people on a dating app, but certain percentage of people that watch will relate to the content and say, "Hey, actually, I use dating apps. I sometimes struggle with writing pickup lines, so I'm going to actually download this app that they just shilled to me." People know it's an ad, they know it's an ad, but if it's entertaining, it doesn't matter."

David Barnard:

And are those going viral? Are they 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?

Joseph Choi:

Oh, no, these are very viral.

David Barnard:

And the virality there is probably the conversation, right? It's weird, goofy, and they probably try and pick... you want to see what the person's going to respond on Tinder to this crazy message or whatever.

Joseph Choi:

Anything to do with dating. 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 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.

David Barnard:

It seems like based on, and it is fun to 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 success of these three that we've talked about. But it seems like so much of getting good at TikTok and having multiple videos go viral over time is just watching what other people are doing and learning. Are there any tips for how to keep an eye on what's going viral, how people are effectively doing this?

Joseph Choi:

You should follow me on Twitter. I post content about this. The way that I do it is I just scroll on TikTok, I scroll on TikTok and Reels. 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 ad, but it seems like it was paid for, I put it into one of my four swipe files in the TikTok folders or the Instagram Reels folders, and I categorize it into what type of content it is. So if it's a slideshow, then I'll put it into the slideshow's folder. If it's a talking head content, I'll put it into the talking head folder. If it's like a skit, like the Quizard AI lecture hall one, I'll put it into the skit folder. So yeah, I think just being an active consumer and consuming from a producer mindset is how I've always thought about marketing.

If you want quick hacks for just getting a bunch of ideas for content, there's tools out there. I think if you just Google best performing TikTok content for brands, I think there's a lot of websites that try to aggregate some of that content.

David Barnard:

It's kind of funny because when I'm on TikTok or Instagram Reels, I'm a middle-aged man, Instagram knows that I really like family humor, so like 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 people like you. And I wonder if you have an advantage as a young techie in New York City and your habits may be more aligned with those audiences where things are going to go viral, whereas my dad content on Instagram... I don't spend much time on TikTok, so I'm using Instagram as an example, but it's like the algorithms do kind of pigeonhole you, and so while being a consumer helps, you probably want to find ways to break out beyond where the algorithm has pigeonholed you. So it seems like those websites and other resources, I've learned a lot following you on Twitter to see what's going viral in those age groups that I don't see that kind of content when I'm scrolling.

Joseph Choi:

That's very true. I think the algorithm does pigeonhole you. If you're thinking about researching content in a specific space, there are first-party research tools that TikTok does give you. If you look up TikTok keyword research, I think there's tools that give you insights into underutilized keywords for TikTok search. And then if you go on the TikTok creator marketplace, you can also find creators that are putting themselves on the marketplace to be hired for sponsored content, and you can filter by niche, and if you look at their videos, you can see the types of branded content that they're making. So that's another good research tool.

David Barnard:

You had 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?

Joseph Choi:

The TikTok ad library. So just like the Facebook ads library, TikTok has similar products where you can just see all the top performing ads. You can even see the click-through rates and the watch time on the ads, so you can analyze those videos. They show you a lot of good data.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And I guess 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 what kind of content we create that we might put money behind. And 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 keep that context, you're not going to go viral with some of the techniques that these storage cleaning apps are using in their ads, right?

Joseph Choi:

Definitely. Definitely. That's exactly right. Yeah.

David Barnard:

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's 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 TikTok video?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah, this is super important. Consumers, in general, not just on TikTok, but consumers, are hyper aware of things that feel like ads. As a general rule, one interesting thing about TikTok 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, "Click on my link 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 You 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 the top five apps I use for X, Y, Z pain point. 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 name five different apps and then your app is one of them. It's a genuinely useful video. It's similar to Google SEO strategy where it's like these articles that 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 follow the call to action, go to the first one, or the second one, or whichever one is your app. Another one is, 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 vibe of actual disposable cameras. But they're going really viral on TikTok with slideshow stories.

So they say the first slide is... so it's all wedding based, weirdly enough. So they say, "Here's five controversial rules that we had at our wedding recently," and then there's this image of a wedding. And so that's a great hook. It's a very negative, 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 vibe for taking the pictures at the wedding. So they have multiple accounts making these slideshow videos. And the app, the CTA there is, I had the guests use the POV app. So they directly mention the app, but it's part of a storyline rather than saying, "Hey, go download this thing."

David Barnard:

Yeah. And it sounds more organic too, 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, man, that's super slick.

Joseph Choi:

One more is this one's really good for talking head content. So if you get 100 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 X, Y, Z authority figure about this thing?" And it's just like the viral video might exist, it might not, but 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's just a good hook. And eventually, it'll get saturated, everyone's going to say the same 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 CTA is, I've seen this one in the ADHD niche going back to that, but you just start with a pain point and then give helpful tips, so that you say, "Oh, 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 app as tip number three out of five, but the basis of the video is that, "Here's these hacks, or life hack, or ADHD hack." Actually, if you go on TikTok and you search #ADHDhack, you'll get lots of examples of these videos of people sharing their ADHD hacks, and you can replicate some of those copywriting structures.

David Barnard:

What's interesting to me too is as we've been talking through all of this, and you said it earlier, is it some apps specifically build features to go viral. And I wonder if that's actually a good product strategy, is that if you're building features that people care about, that are interesting, that have some natural pain point that's going to bring people back into the app, if you're building features that don't have any kind of a hook that's going to go viral on TikTok, are you really building something valuable for folks that they're actually going to use? 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 emotional connection that's going to bring you back to it, or it doesn't have that wow factor that's going to inspire people to use it.

If this whole strategy and finding things that are likely to go viral on TikTok, it's 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 what people are going to connect with.

Joseph Choi:

100%. 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, and 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 your wait lists, then you can build the app after you market it. There's this app called Breezy, the founders in the community... It's basically a social note sharing app, but 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. So yeah, that was Breezy, the Breezy app.

David Barnard:

I wonder if that's actually even a good strategy too. Because as far as hooks go, that's another kind of hook, being an insider, being in the know, 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 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 waitlist for when this comes out?" Versus building it first and then creating the marketing. That could be a really cool strategy. And then you do that, and like you're saying, that's how you validate whether or not these features are going to hit or not. I've launched 22, 3 apps over the last 16 years, and some were hits, and some were total duds. There wasn't a ton of correlation between the amount of time spent, or I probably should have found better ways to do product validation ahead of time.

And so for side project apps today, for big 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 TikTok, and if it doesn't, maybe it's not the feature to build next.

Joseph Choi:

I just want to give one more thing relating to this. This is an infinitely repeatable tactic that just... it happens year over year, it's just Spotify Wrapped, if you just remake Spotify Wrapped, but for X, Y, Z niche, that concept goes viral every single year reliably. 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 style of the music that you listen to, and then they used that as a hook 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.

David Barnard:

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 TikTok is going to sell apps, middle-aged man talking about apps. There'll be a lot of folks like you who will, in your framing, be the actor, the director, and do everything. And I think for people who can pull that off, that's going to be a ton of fun, but for a lot of folks, 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 what are your top tips for finding and working with creators to help implement what we've been talking about?

Joseph Choi:

I think influencer marketing, traditional influencer marketing is very expensive. If you reach out to some of these creators on who have more than a hundred thousand followers, a lot of them will hit you back with their media kit and it's all... sometimes they even have an 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 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 TikTok, 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 feeling of what it takes to go viral. They've probably thought about, "Oh, why did that video go so viral? It's the way that I said these words in these ways, it's the way that I did the hook." So they know what it takes. And then lastly, is just human touch, just 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 sponsored videos yet, that's the perfect person that you want to reach out to. They're probably not making that much money from brand deals, so you can pay them cash and they'll probably gladly take it. It'll take a little bit more training, teaching them about the app, and telling them how to structure the video scripts and things like that, but yeah, I think finding low follower count, but charismatic creators is the way to go.

David Barnard:

And then how would you suggest structuring payment expectations in those kind of low follower count? They're probably aspiring creators, they don't have an agent, do you write a contract? What do you offer the creators, and how do you structure the deal to make it work?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah. So a lot of these creators are used to getting reached out by these big CPG, e-commerce companies, they just do gifted campaigns, so they just get a free product in exchange for a video. So in your outreach message, whether it's an email or a DM, if you just explicitly say, "I want to pay you for a video in cash," you don't have to say how much, you can figure out negotiating the rates later. But say explicitly, "I want to pay you for video. My app does this. I think your audience would be a great fit. I really like your content." And then typically, how you structure that deal is, 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 there is such a low follower count creator and you want them to go viral on the For You page, you can have them make a brand new account. So you can have them make a new TikTok account and name it something else that's 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 TikTok 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 fairly cheap.

How much to pay just basically just depends on the level of experience and how much ROI you expect 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 MRR from just one creator just posting every day. So the retainer, you get what you pay for. If you pay for a really good 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 on what the creator wants.

David Barnard:

The thing about paying a CPM though is that it has to actually deliver. And so if they create something that goes insanely viral but doesn't actually send people to the app, or it 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, it gets 5 million views, now you're on the hook for five grand, but then the CTA wasn't very strong and you don't make much money on it?

Joseph Choi:

Yeah, totally. That's why the creator brief is very, very important. You should agree beforehand on all the things that are required from every single video. So if 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.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Earlier, you mentioned that in e-commerce, part of what really blew up was the affiliate model with TikTok shops. Do you think there's potential for that on TikTok with apps doing affiliates? I've actually talked to and probably have them on the podcast at some point, the founder of GoMarketMe, and what they're trying to do is build a platform for affiliates. In what cases do you think it would work? What do you think are 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 a hundred thousand dollars and you're giving a 50% of first conversion or whatever and they can make 50K, it 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 TikTok?

Joseph Choi:

I think it's great. It's always the gold standard of marketing. As the brand owner, obviously, it would be great to have zero risk upfront and just have people do free marketing for you and only pay if they generate revenue for you. The problem is TikTok is... consumers are very savvy, they don't really like clicking links in bio. They want to feel like this video is just telling them 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 link in bio clicks, I think that has always been, and will always be, a good way to partner with creators. It's like traditional influencer marketing, they have an audience, they have a lot of trust, but typically with those deals, there's always a base rate.

In addition, I think there's a talent constraint... or there's a supply constraint of good creator talent. I think creators actually have... the big creators 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 advocate for the scrappy creator marketing, non-traditional influencer marketing, because in that equation, I think the supply demand is reversed, I think there's a lot more creators that are underpaid that brands can start paying. So TikTok Shop for apps can definitely exist within a certain context of influencer marketing.

David Barnard:

I've actually been playing with offer codes recently. It's something, again, I'll probably do a whole podcast on or 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 use code, Black Friday? I'm probably going to do a Black Friday promotion, so it was top of mind but, "Use code," whatever, "to get 20% off," or do you think on TikTok, that kind of thing just wouldn't work, "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 TikTok?

Joseph Choi:

I think if you got creative with it, it could definitely work. It just can't be in the same way that you would sell the promo code through an influencer. 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 had the creator say, "Guys, did you see that code? I just used it. Have you seen this hack that you can use to get this thing for 50% off?" Maybe that could... I don't know how legal that is, but there's probably other ways. There's always creative ways that you can incorporate codes. So I could see some potential with that.

David Barnard:

Well, Joseph, it's been fascinating. I've learned a ton. I think this is going to be really interesting to folks, especially just this kind of new trend that... We've talked about TikTok 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 know you actually have a community of founders who are all working on this and trying to crack... 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?

Joseph Choi:

Definitely. I appreciate having you in 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, Wombo AI, Bloom, investing for teens, Autopilot, copy trading, the founder of Yik Yak, lots of people of different backgrounds or finding value from the community, whether it's venture-backed and you're trying to learn these scrappy marketing strategies, or your bootstraps and you're just learning to... you want to find the current edge of TikTok organic and other user acquisition. We're a pretty small community just trying to keep it, tighten it, just sharing the latest tactics.

David Barnard:

The community's been great. Discord, so it tends to be extra chatty, and I don't have a ton of time to be following along with the chat. But I love how you do the weekly summaries. So every week, you take the best insights, because it's your community, and you do have the time to be following and chatting with folks and stuff. So the weekly summaries are super high signal, and the best of conversation and tactics and what's working, what's not. And then really, this whole podcast was that high level overview of all the things you're learning in the community from other founders, and things 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, we're going to be doing a webinar where we actually dig into some of the specific videos that are going viral, some of the tactics. 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 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 talking to you again so soon. And we'll have a link to sign up for the webinar. And then once the webinars happen, we'll link to the YouTube in the show notes. We'll also link to the community and your Twitter. So yeah, if you've enjoyed this episode, want to learn more about TikTok, 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.

Joseph Choi:

Thanks so much for having me. This has been fun.

David Barnard:

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.