How to Market a Viral App (500K Downloads Playbook)

Do you know what these three startups have in common? Three letters, UGC. They mastered user-generated content. Because people trust word of mouth more than anything else, UGC replicates that at scale. It looks like friends recommending products and not brands pushing ads. So how do you actually do this? To show you exactly how to scale your product from zero to thousands of users, I invited Julia, co-founder of Playkit. They help startups like Substack or Flow generate over 70 million views and tens of thousands of downloads, posting more than 8,000 pieces of content every single month. We scaled to about half a million downloads really, really quickly. I was the only person doing distribution at all. We didn't have influencers. We didn't have paid ads. In this video, you will discover the exact playbook from zero followers to your first video at 100k views that converts, why your comment section matters. than your video and how to hire and scale to 100 plus content creator without drowning in management let's dive in julia before we start why should i care about ugc or organic content on tiktok i love it yeah i think ugc and organic marketing is really going to be the next biggest distribution channel we've never had a marketing channel like this before where you can really ingrain yourself into your own target audience's community and kind of do marketing from the inside out rather than you know influencer marketing paid ads is really from the outside in where you're able to just put out so many pieces of content learn what resonates with your users and then also understand and learn how you can change and shift your product to actually replicate some of the learnings that you're finding on all these different content pieces so it's really great across the board when it comes to you know messaging but then also for your product as well And what kind of results I can have with like UGC or if I start myself to just publish content on TikTok? Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty incredible. In the beginning and like how I started doing UGC, it was just me working at a startup leading growth there. So I was the only creator, but we scaled to about half a million downloads really, really quickly. I was the only person doing distribution at all. We didn't have influencers. We didn't have paid ads. It was just my job to, you know, post a couple of times a day on TikTok, learn what was doing well, reply to some comments and the flywheel can really spin from there. Okay, I'm hooked. So I'm an indie hacker or a SaaS founder. I have a TikTok account, but I have absolutely no follower and I don't know where to start or to get my first download. What do I do? Yeah, I think the first thing you got to do is you got to do a really, really big deep dive into, okay, you know, I want to get users from my app. who are these users give them a name i think a lot of people who i talk to online on twitter come to me and i'm like okay who's your target audience and a lot of times people can't answer that question for me and my first question back to them is how are you ever going to expect to find and reach these people if you don't even know who they are so do a lot of research and understanding you know who am i trying to reach here who would really benefit from my product and then that's the first step you need in order to start marketing for them once you do that you can you know create the tick tock account um i also get a lot of founders coming to me who are like i don't really want to create content in my with my face on it and i'm like well you gotta get some cash flow then because that's the easiest and the cheapest way to just market your product and to you know get your first users um there's a lot of resources out there now and we share a lot of resources through playkit too on you know how to create those initial videos but A lot of it is just testing and learning to look at and see what other people are doing in your space and with similar products and replicate and kind of go from there. When I started, I wasn't even a TikTok user, really. I was just totally self-taught. And as long as you pay attention and you watch what people are enjoying on the algorithm, then you can totally succeed at it too. It's interesting what you just said. You said that you were not a user of TikTok yourself. And I think a lot of things that stop. founder or anyone actually to start is that I don't know TikTok, I'm too old or, you know, like I'm not a user of it. So how do I even create my account? Or is there like something I should do before posting maybe? Yeah, great question. Yeah, I think too, it's... TikTok is not like, like for me, I'm super non-technical and I'd be like, I don't really want to learn how to code and I don't think I would be necessarily good at that. But TikTok is one of those things where you can really learn a lot by just observing and testing because you get the feedback loop so quickly that you could understand, you know, what works and what doesn't. But yeah, I think when you're going from those zero to one stages, it's really important that. you do all the right things that people say on twitter right so like warm up your account when you have that understanding of your target audience before you even post any of your videos you want to make sure that when you do post those videos are going to go to the right people so how to warm up your account you just created a brand new tick tock account what you do you go to your for you page and you search up terms and you search up questions that you think your target user or your target audience would likely also be searching up um i just talked to somebody who has an app that throws events in new york city for maybe people who just moved to a new city so for that example they would be searching things like how to make friends in a new city or events in nyc around me things like that so then when you post your videos targeting those people who are looking up and curious about those things and those pain points your videos reach them and then in that process as well you'll see what other types of content kind of float in that niche and you're able to do a lot of research and understanding of okay how do i replicate some of these already viral pieces but plug my product in there too There was something like really interesting that you shared is that, for example, if I have a B2C mobile app myself, if I create a TikTok account, I should not like put the logo and the name on it, but more create like a different kind of account with a description that is like almost the one that my ICP, like my ideal customer will have as well. And you gave an example about. Let's say I am a woman who want to learn Spanish in 70 days and that would be my description. And why should I do that and not do my account with like my brain straight away? Yeah, it's that's a great question. Really the goal with UGC and all this content is you don't want consumers to be able to detect that this is an advertisement. Instead, it's very incognito. It feels organic. It feels like, you know, a friend, somebody like you is just posting this content because they really enjoy the product. So everything should feel very, very organic to the sense that sometimes you don't have even the. product name in the video at all and a lot of the conversion comes in the comment sections but yeah to your point i think when you're creating your accounts one of the most important things is make sure your profile picture is like a face of the user who's going to be posting on that account make it just feel like you know something real you're almost looking at ugc as like actors right that are creating these tiktok accounts and and really spreading this message um and that tends to have the highest conversion rates because it gives consumers that sense of discovery that they really discover something themselves okay nice and to continue on that like i okay i have my profile set up everything is ready i'm ready to record my first video what do i even talk about yeah yeah so it goes back to that you know really good target user target audience um research and understanding of them and when you do that warming up process you'll find videos and whatnot that already go viral in your niche. I think the best first step is to replicate what already does well. So if you have competitors, if you have products that already are creating videos, absolutely just recreate that, but plug your own product. And additionally, in your niche there's going to be like lifestyle influencers or just other content going viral organically that might not even be plugging a product continue to replicate those things but somehow plug your product or plug your app in that as well in a again very organic way so just to give me an example like a concrete example of that there is a jack reeks with i don't know if you saw he have like lovely app how would you do for him like how will you go on tiktok and find a competitor or find the kind of content to replicate yeah i love that um it's super similar to lock it so i think what i would first do is lock it is an app where friends couples whatever can take a picture and then it shows up on the other person's screen very similar to to jack frick's app um so i would look at the content that locket is doing and my first step would be to replicate their most viral videos and then i think from there you have a good subset of content that you can create from there then you start to narrow down and make changes based off of okay here is um you know content that did really well how can i iterate this based off of the comments that i got on it what are people really interested in what types of people are really interested in this content and that helps you continue to level up and make changes to the strategy Is there a structure to follow because you say that, okay, you have to find the content that works and then replicate it. But is there like a structure that always works? Something that I should like always follow, hook, main content and CTA or a secret like that? Yeah, I think it used to work really well like that. But I think as people are starting to catch on to UGC and flooding the TikTok algorithm with more and more of this content. formats die out really really quickly because consumers are constantly getting smarter so you kind of always have to be on the next step to outsmart the consumer because you don't want them to know it's an advertisement and when they do they just scroll past so there used to be like okay do hook and demo do like target audience plus pain point equal solution and that used to really work but i think um so many people replicated that that it doesn't really anymore so now you have to get really tricky and um make sure that one your product is something worth people's attention and something people actually want to download, that will help your marketing. And then your marketing can do really, really good storytelling. We do a lot of talking videos now, a lot of like multi-part series, slideshows, things like that. And that works a lot. And something weird that you say, but apparently works is that you should not mention the app or not mention the product. Why? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes we do this. It depends on the product for sure. Again, you want it to feel just organic and authentic and not like an advertisement. I think we now have figured out how to weave in the product name in a way that feels natural. But a lot of people who aren't skilled at copywriting and organic marketing, and maybe they're just into it, tend to do it where it feels a little bit too much like an ad. So if you're on the fence of, okay, do I have the skill set to do this or not? I would lean not. to do it and instead really leverage the comment section show the app in the video um things like that you should be replying to every single comment um we used to also like send dms to everybody that commented being like hey thanks i saw your like this video by the way i'm building this app that does xyz and like it is a lot of work but it also moves mountains when it comes to getting new users because that feels like a personalized experience for them and likely you're not just going to gain them as a new user, but then also their friends and family as well. You say that precedently that comments are almost more important than the video. Is that true? Yeah. I mean, you watch people like scroll on TikTok just like in real life and you see them obviously look at the video itself, but they're pulled up on the video and they're actually now scrolling through the comment sections. It kind of creates this herd mentality of they want to know okay what do other people think about this video what are they saying what are they doing with this information that we're all being presented with the video serves as a landing page for communities to form and if you're able to then control the comment section and control the community you can you can mobilize all of those viewers of that video to do what you want them to do in this case download an app convert to a product become a user whatever in how to do things like that you're replying to everything you are planting comments you do you know reply videos to top comments things like that so then as people are scrolling through those comment sections they see it's all about the app they get a lot of fomo and they're like oh everybody is talking about this thing that i've never heard of i might as well go check it out and then it's really important for you know your app store screenshots and your app store screens to have words that and copy that relates to a lot of the messaging from your viral video so it feels like a very flawless experience for that user How do you find vocabulary to use, like the words to use? I know it's like more on the first step in the like the search of the ICP and like the perfect customer. But how do you find that if I sell a product that is not at all a product I would use, for example? Yeah, I think do a lot of research on TikTok. You know, what types of content people are making? What emojis are they using? What do they say in their captions? How do they do comments? honestly like take screenshots take a ton of screenshots put into chat dpt and ask chat to pull like what are common like slang words or phrases that this group this community is using a lot and then utilize that in your copy as well same thing with like hashtags and sounds just try and mimic what your target audience is doing and that's the best way that you'll be able to reach them and gain their trust and to come back to the comments is there a way to fake it To actually like have engagement in the comment or maybe like make a group of people who comment. Yeah. At Playkit, we have about 150 to 200 creators. And whenever we have a viral video, we send all of them to go flood these comment sections with. comments about the app um but i mean you could do that a million different ways too whether it's like you have some discord group and you have all these kids if you're flying to comments or whatever it is as long as they have profile pictures that stuff can work i would make sure you don't like abuse it because tick tock will definitely flag it and i would only do it on videos that already have a lot of comments um so it's not just like out of the ordinary but it looks like it belongs in the algorithm uh if that makes sense yeah So I followed all your steps. I created my profile. I warm up my account. I replicate what works and I publish 30 videos in 30 days and none of them goes viral. What should I do? Like if they have less than thousand views, like... what do i do yeah um keep going it takes a while i i mean for us we tell our clients usually in the first two weeks so we we post 15 times a week per creator so three times a day five times a week um usually it takes the first two weeks to do a lot of testing so from there that's already 300 videos of testing and understanding what what is working what's not the second two weeks weeks three and four of that first month is when you really start to see virality because it just takes a long time to learn um you know you put a lot of things out into the algorithm and it takes a lot of tweaking whether it's a hook or an audio or maybe i show the product a little bit differently until something finally catches uh but yeah i would i would keep going i think 30 days are really good amount of time to test it depends how much you're posting but um if nothing continues to work i mean sometimes it's a product issue sometimes it's like a okay is my strategy really correct here but if you follow all the steps that you know i give resources on and everything then you should be able to get something if you're really being intentional about it but it does just take time is there something that you do and you replicate on all your customers and always work? Because, you know, people who will watch this video, they just start, they will probably fail for a while before getting results. But for you, with like all your experience, you probably have a little trick that make it possible every time. What is it? I wish it was that easy. No, I think... i mean we're really selective with which clients we bring on now because we know what works on socials and we know what doesn't um and we only have so much bandwidth to take on clients you know so we really only work with clients that were like okay this will go viral on social media and usually that's things like apps about or products about relationships or money or you know how can i be better my career or my school life things like that really like value add products tend to have a really great um viral potential so those are the people we we gravitate towards working towards and that's the type of product that i think works best for ugc i mean i have so many like crypto people or like b2b sas companies wanting to work with us and it's like this just isn't the channel for you when it comes to marketing like ugc is great but it's not for everybody it's really best for those like utility facing consumer apps So mainly B2C. If I have a B2B SaaS, for example, I should not waste my time on UGC. Don't waste your time. Do you have exception? No, I think like TikTok content can work for more B2B stuff. Founder-led content works. You know, I'm building this brand. Here's what I'm doing. Come with me for a day in my life. Kind of stuff works well. But UGC, not as much. I mean, I would be really interested to see how like... Similar UGC play could work on LinkedIn or Twitter, for example, if you can mobilize a lot of people on those platforms. But for the most part, people in their work life, normal employees aren't scrolling on TikTok for work. They want to have an escape and that's what they use social media for. So yeah, I would say steer away. And is there a specific audience? For example, we often hear about Gen Z, works really well. But is there like, it's only for Gen Z, or if I have like an app that target older people, like let's say 50 years old, 55 years old, does it work as well? Yeah, I think whatever target audience you're trying to reach, you just want to make sure your creators represent them. Um, I think this UGC kind of craze started in the college community, college student community, because they're easy to find they're fast they're cheap um it's very easy to work with them and they're wanting gigs you know so that's why it works i think you know the older demos we work with a lot of stay-at-home moms as well and they're really great and it works really well for a lot of products reaching kind of the family niche um much older than that or anything a little bit more like male focused i think it's a little bit trickier and would again recommend more of like an influencer or paid ad approach just because it's so hard to find you know like a multiple 50 year old men who are tiktok fluent and can make a ton of really great quality content it's just more difficult to find those people it's amazing that you share that because honestly i spend my days on x and i see a lot of people trying um content trying distribution on tiktok And it's important that you say what doesn't work as well because people are wasting their time on that. So I think it's nice that you share that. Totally. Okay. I followed everything. I kept going after the 30 days and now I have one video that goes. I would say viral at my scale, more than 100K views. How do I replicate that? Yay. That's awesome. First, you're happy because it's hard. But yeah, I mean, the first thing when you're iterating is like, don't... A lot of people come to me and they're like, oh, I don't want to post this like I already did it. You can just post the same messaging over and over and over again until it stops working. Eventually it will, but you'll make little tweaks here and there. If something's working, like really double down on it, whether you're just like tweaking the wording slightly or you were filming the outside, now you're inside. You're showing a different part of the product. So the first thing you need to do when you have a viral video is you go into the comment section, you're replying to everything. you do video replies to all the top videos and you make those video replies really really focused around your product the nice thing about the tiktok algorithm when you do have a viral video is that when you do those comment replies it gives a lot more views to those video replies from the same people who saw that original video so you can do a very product focused video almost like a traditional ad um but it'll get a lot of views and it'll convert really well because tick tock is pushing that more than it typically would um so after you've done that and then after that's kind of phased out that's when you start to iterate again and again you'll take a lot of learnings from what people are saying in the comment sections if they have thoughts on the product what pain points they share and you can kind of start to riff off of that for future messaging that's interesting so if i have um winner i should duplicate that at least duplicate the structure and the message and like do do the same again and again but also um i would say bet on this one to actually take all the comments make video on the comment and see what people are talking about let's say their pinpoint or the question they have and make a new video about that yes yes exactly exactly Interesting. A video question I didn't ask and I didn't think about it before, but how do I get download? Because on Instagram, for example, you can use many chats and you can send people like automation in your DM. How does it work on TikTok to actually bring people on your app? Is it just that they see the comment, they see the name and then they go look for it or do you send them somewhere? Yeah, that's why the messaging used to be so... powerful because what you basically are aiming to do is you're greeting people in their like doom scroll stuck phase and you're asking them to engage on your piece of content to look at the comments to leave this app they're addicted to go download something go through onboarding and then ideally you know it worked really really well when after they've gone through onboarding they actually come back to that initial video and say they loved the app and they say they love the experience that's like the ideal cycle that you'll get on a really viral piece of content that converts really well um and the best thing you can do is just have those like very organic facing contents or sorry organic facing comments that just are friendly suggestions because people trust word of mouth more than anything else. And that's essentially what this like UGC style of marketing replicates. And do the same video works on TikTok and Instagram? Yeah, TikTok is much more targeted. So you'll have a better chance at reaching your right people on TikTok. You'll probably get more views on Instagram, but it'll be a little bit more bloated where the conversion rate will be much lower. Again, it's all like dependent on the product. Sometimes Instagram is better for like more male facing products. I think men typically use like Instagram reels more than women. So there's like edge cases like that. But for the most part, I would say TikTok tends to convert better. We just cross post all the content the same. And it can it can be pretty much the same. I think if you like really want to get into it from a brand perspective. Instagram tends to be a little bit more high quality, but I would say that's pretty top of funnel and less about, you know, driving conversion. Interesting. And should I do both at the same time? For example, use a post scheduler and post on both at the same time or should I go on TikTok first and then go on Instagram? yeah i think if you use something like a post scheduler to just automate posts to instagram that's like a great easy thing to do but i would spend your like time and energy on tick tock because it's a really great tool for doing that research for understanding your audience for doing the iteration and the strategy um and then instagram can kind of just live as another like landing page for all those videos to also go interesting and last Question on this part is like, what is the biggest mistake that you see founder or indie hackers do with organic TikTok and that they should just avoid? Yeah, I see a lot of people come to me and they're like, oh, I got this video that was super viral, but I got no downloads. And then I look at the video and it's like, well, how would this have gotten any downloads? This has nothing to do with your product or your niche or anything. So it's like, yes, you have to make content that will go viral, but. It has to be around your product if you actually want it to make a change for you. So I think that's the biggest thing. And then after that, it's just like people give up too early. It kind of is a long game and you kind of have to be committed to testing and making changes and iterating. It just takes time. But a lot of people kind of get tired of it before it really starts to work. Classic. So now, okay. Figured out how to do that. I got few viral videos. I get some downloads. It's working for me with my TikTok account, but I'm kind of tired to publish like three times a day and do that because I also have to work on my product. How do I scale or how do I delegate the content strategy? Yeah. So I think the best thing to do is obviously like hire creators, right? So again, you want those creators to look like your target audience. So go for those people. I think the best way to hire people is honestly to make a TikTok post about it or to do direct outreach. I do a lot of like content trying to find creators all the time. And I find that works really well because if you're specific about. what the product is and exactly what you're looking for then you'll get a great steady stream of inbound and you're able to just like pick and choose from there we also do a lot of outbound because we can be more selective on who exactly you work with and that's really helpful I think after you scale to, you know, more than like three to five creators, it's really helpful to bring somebody onto your team, more of like a strategist and a manager. It gets a lot to manage these creators and to review their videos and to give them the strategy and analyze all their content. So it's really helpful to have somebody there that can do that for you. So first I hire creators and then when I have like more than three or five creators, I hire someone to manage them. Uh, first step, how do I know if someone is good or not? Like, how do I hire? Because I never did that. So it's probably pretty hard to do it. How do I know? Yeah. I think the best thing you want people who are, you know, have gone viral before who've made content before, um, whether it's for other apps in the tech space or not, uh, maybe it's for TikTok shops things or even on their own account, but you want somebody who is very TikTok native and. understand social media and is excited about your product um also like is responsive and can the goal is to find somebody who can you know iterate and make changes to content but most likely what will happen is you'll just hire executors who you tell them exactly what to post you you're the one analyzing the content you're updating the strategy and they continue to just execute on what you're telling them to And then that manager strategist person can eventually take over that role and, you know, make sure the creators are posting, analyzing their videos, iterating on the strategy and continuing to give them like updated instructions. So it's important that I do it myself first to learn and then to actually hire people and ask them to replicate what I did. Exactly. Yes. I think that's always the best way. And how much should I pay a creator? Yeah, I would say industry standard is usually around like $125 to $175 a week for 15 posts per week. And then that's like flat rate plus bonuses. Typically bonuses look like $100 for 100K views, $500 for 500K views, a million dollars, sorry, $1,000 for a million plus views. The million dollars would be cool, but we're not there yet. Yeah. So that's typically what it looks like. I would recommend flat rate plus bonuses. And should I get my money back pretty fast? Like the ROI is pretty fast or should I think more long-term with content creator? I would think more long-term. I mean, not too long-term though. It also depends on your product, right? I mean. marketing is one thing and you could kill marketing but if you have a product where your funnel to paid conversion isn't very good then that's also an issue you want to solve so before you scale up with creators you want to make sure that you have a very sustainable conversion rate as well i don't work as much on the product side so i don't have a ton of experience on like exactly what that number should be um but you want to feel comfortable going in it's like okay i'm going to pay these creators this much if we can get this many views it'll bring on this month this many dollars um instead of just kind of throwing everything at the wall all just to see what happens. That's kind of a lot of thing to manage on top of my product. So how do I manage that actually? How do I track if they get results or not? How do I not get lazy and like let them do their work and find out three months later that I actually lost a lot of money? how would i do that yeah we we actually had to build our entire software uh for this and this is what we build our agency on now um it's called like ugctracker.com tracker t-r-a-c-k-r um and we have like a little bit of a different software that's internal facing versus what we offer externally but this is what we built to manage our creators so you can see okay who posted today we get notified if somebody misses a post it tells us exactly how much everybody needs to get paid that's where creators upload their videos so we can easily you know check approve or x deny here's a comments that you need to change something um and creators have a portal too so it allows them to you know log in see their tasks and everything like that so as much as you can be automated by tech That's really helpful. Otherwise, it's really hard to like be in Google Sheets and like have a VA count how many videos your creator did. And that just gets very convoluted very quickly. So yeah, honestly, obviously I would recommend Tracker because that's exactly what we use. And we have like 150 creators. We post like 8,000 pieces of content, if not more, every single month. So yeah, as much as you can use tech to leverage the management, I would say. Can you tell me more about Playkit and what you do actually with your agency? Yeah, so we run these large-scale, high-volume campaigns for consumer apps like Substack and Flow Health. Clients typically get 1,200 pieces of content with us per month, 600 unique on TikTok, 600 cross-posted on Instagram. And we started about a year ago and have really pioneered this UGC space when it comes to the tech world. It's been really fun because we've been able to work with really cool brands and really great founders as we kind of navigate this new world of organic marketing. But yeah, our goal is really to one, drive downloads, but then also UGC is amazing because you're able to shape kind of how consumers talk about your products. So as we grow and as we talk to more enterprise companies who have definitely nailed down distribution, but they're trying to shape how everyday people talk about their products and their companies, they come to us and they look to us because We're really able to integrate into the community and change the way that people think and talk about things through this organic style of content. Do you have any case study to share with us, like some really good results that you got? Ooh, yeah, that's a great idea. Can I share my screen? Is that possible? Yeah. Okay, let me pull something up. So one of my favorite campaigns is this one called Cantina. They're an AI video generator. actually is sean parker his company uh this one was super fun again like i said you want your content to feel very very organic um so what happened was instagram meme pages actually found this content and they reposted it on their meme pages because they thought it was you know memes so this one was really fun we posted a ton of content brought in almost 70 million views 30k downloads for them um at a really low cpm so like record low cpm that is super rare to achieve but i think this was a really really great example of you know you can make great great organic content if you build these viral loops into your products and i think um that might be a step that a lot of these like indie hackers are missing out on now where There are so many resources now on how to do great marketing that sometimes we forget the step of, but it's really helpful to have a great product feature as well that helps kind of leverage that marketing. So that's a fun one I always like to share. Another one I like to share, this is Hunch. They're a dating app. Also really fun. This one we never, or most of the time we never really mentioned the app name in. the videos for some of them you did like you could see here but we really leveraged the comment sections where we were able to do so much storytelling in these videos it's a lot of like oh i had this horrible experience doing this um or has anybody else experienced this it opens up the conversation in the comment sections for other people to share their pain points other people to share their stories and then our creators were able to go in and say hey you would never have this experience on this app or have you tried this app yet and we found that helped conversion a lot it's amazing because i mean ugc has been here for a while but i feel like this is really a new way to do that like before as you say it was like hook presentation of the product cta and now it's really you don't talk about the product but it's almost like you talk about the pain points or it will almost be a Reddit post that you actually post on TikTok. And then after that, you just go in the comment and people ask what's the app or something like that. And it works. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Really interesting. If you could give one piece of advice to a founder who wants to start creator marketing today watching this video, what would it be? Yeah. I think a lot of people look at it as like a small test, but UGC is something that it's different from influencer or paid ads where you can kind of just send a brief to people and, you know, get good results. It's so new. You really have to handhold your creators and handhold your team in order to get the best results. So if you start your creative program or if you start creating content, it's something that you do have to invest a lot of time and energy into in order to get the best results. Because it just takes so much time to learn and analyze and make changes. So I think the best piece of advice is set yourself up with that expectation. And also don't be discouraged when you post 100 videos and only one of them gets 10K plus views. All of those failures or videos that don't go viral serve as learnings for you to get that viral video for the next time. It's just a lot of learning. And I think a lot of times it can feel very discouraging when things aren't working right away. Amazing. Well, Julia, thank you very much for everything. I will put the link of Playkit just in there in the description. And yeah, if you want to learn more, just go on their YouTube channel, Playkit. There is a lot of content. So thank you again and have a great day. Thank you. Super fun.

🔹 Never miss insights from the best founders: https://floriandarroman.com/newsletter

Want to get unlimited app download through organic UGC?

Meet Julia Pintar, Co-founder of Playkit. She helps apps like Substack and Flo generate 70M+ views and thousands of downloads. Posting 8,000+ pieces of content every month with 150+ creators.

In this video, you'll learn:

- How to go from 0 followers to 100K+ views that convert
- Why comment sections matter more than the video itself
- Exact creator hiring playbook (pricing, management, scaling)
- How to warm up your account to reach the right audience
- Why you should never mention your app name

More About Playkit:

📩 Playkit Newsletter: https://playkit.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_clips
📊 UGC Tracker: https://ugctrackr.com
🚀 GrowthKit (Coupon Code: PLAYKIT222): https://growthkit.xyz
📺 Playkit on YouTube: @playkit_media

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
1:07 Why Should I Care About UGC?
2:03 What Results Can I Expect?
2:38 How Do I Get My First Download?
4:16 I'm Not a TikTok User - How Do I Start?
6:13 Should I Use My Brand Name or Create a Personal Account?
7:51 What Do I Even Talk About?
9:48 Is There a Structure That Always Works?
11:04 Why Not Mention the App Name?
12:19 Are Comments More Important Than the Video?
13:41 How Do I Find the Right Vocabulary?
14:35 Can I Fake Engagement in Comments?
15:22 30 Videos, No Virality - What Do I Do?
16:47 What's Your Secret That Always Works?
18:10 Should B2B SaaS Avoid UGC?
19:02 Does This Work for Older Audiences (50+)?
20:28 I Got 100K Views - How Do I Replicate It?
22:31 How Do I Actually Get Downloads?
23:51 Do the Same Videos Work on TikTok and Instagram?
24:47 Should I Post on Both Platforms at Once?
25:24 What's the Biggest Mistake Founders Make?
26:19 How Do I Scale and Delegate Content?
27:47 How Do I Know If a Creator Is Good?
29:08 How Much Should I Pay Creators?
29:43 How Fast Should I See ROI?
30:33 How Do I Manage and Track Everything?
32:07 What Does Playkit Do?
33:09 Do You Have Case Studies to Share?
35:46 One Piece of Advice for Founders Starting Today?