How Reflective Apps grows

Positioned it as hiring 'content creators, not influencers': pay for the video, not the audience, so lower follower counts were better, ideally 2K-15/20K (shows craft, algorithm know-how and consistency). Outreach by DM or email with a simple message, examples of past videos and testimonials, linking a dedicated landing page for creators with testimonials from existing creators. Screening: (1) follower range and consistency, (2) a probation task such as a basic day-in-the-life video following the guidelines, (3) on-time delivery. Pass all three and you can work together for months or years.

For health, fitness and productivity apps, the first week of January is 'the Super Bowl / Black Friday' of results: average cost per download is about half the rest of the year. Spent ~75% of the annual ad budget in the first month; the rest of the year was for testing creators and concepts to rerun in January. January spend set a new MRR/ARR baseline for the company each year.

In 2020, with iOS 14 hurting ad tracking, compared spending money on ads vs buying apps. Bought Done (habit tracker, bundled with 5-6 other apps) at a 'pretty good price' because it was under-monetized, then improved paywalls and in-app subscriptions. Keeping the asset, user base and tech (resellable later) made acquisitions more reliable than ad spend. Repeated for 30-35 apps 2020-2025 across journaling, habits, fasting, money tracking, calendar and mindfulness (Mindfulness App to round out categories). Buying apps was usually the better use of capital, except in January when ad spend won.

A creator happened to use an Emma Chamberlain motivational speech as background audio; comments filled with her name and the video hit 50-60M views until her law firm sent a cease and desist. The team then used early AI voice tools to put the same script in the voices of Ariana Grande, Beyonce and Adele. Some took off, but they could not push it hard because of legal risk.

Level 1: every video in its own ad set with $10-20; shut off after $5-10 if clearly off-target; after 1-2 days and $20-40 of promising spend it graduates. Level 2: ad sets (or a CBO campaign in parallel) with 4-5 videos and $100-500, tested against the same lower-funnel or download targets at bigger spend. Level 3: the 1-2 that rise to the top become evergreen campaigns taking ~90% of spend. Never turn off working level 1/2 ads, so one video may run at all three levels at different spend.

Dec 25 is dead. Dec 26-28: start testing (e.g. $5-10K/day) to find the best ~10 videos, expecting ~2x better performance on Jan 1-2. Dec 28-30: conversion quality jumps, raise daily spend across videos. If Jan 1 falls on a Thursday/Friday, expect a smaller jump; the peak is the first Sunday (Saturday night into Sunday morning), when you 10x spend if early signals are good. Year-round, Sunday-Tuesday are the best days for health/fitness/productivity ads and the 1st-3rd of each month converts subscriptions better; time launches accordingly.

Aggregated data across thousands of videos to define what made winners. Briefs (slide decks) split concepts into lifestyle, trend, educational and testimonial; each specified the trending sound, hook type (curiosity, empathetic, reflective), captions, pace, length 10-15s with 25-27 cuts, the number of app shots, and that phone clips are POV looking down at the screen. Angles included morning routine, evening routine, wellness, mindset and vlogs (hook -> habits -> app crossing off habits). Paid someone to scroll TikTok and send a list of trending songs at the start of every week, and updated briefs regularly.

Flat fee per video, paid for the work: ~$30-40 for lower-tier creators, up to $80-100 for reliable, experienced ones; raises as they produce more good/viral videos. Flat bonus when a video passes ~50K-100K views; when a video took off as an ad, a discretionary $200-$1,000 extra based on known revenue. Chosen over CPM/performance-only pay because videos take creators an hour or two and fixed pay kept them loyal.

After agencies failed to crack TikTok content, built it in-house: reached out to hundreds of creators and automated every step from first contact, interview and brief to video, editing rounds, invoicing and payment. Ran an in-house 'university' teaching creators how to make ads that convert and the metrics businesses target. Allocated thousands of videos across ~20 advertised apps based on ad metrics. Pitched it as a long-term relationship with regular income. Some creators later became full-time staff. Team: founder, one media buyer, one head of content.

Posted all creator videos organically on brand TikTok accounts (e.g. do.habits, growthbundle). Once a video broke out of the 0-300 view 'jail' to ~5-10K views, or drew 10-100 comments even on few views, boosted it with ad spend, increasing it while it hit CPI/subscription targets. If it really took off, ran it as a Spark Ad on the creator's own account: 4-5 ways to push one video. Organic-first is the cheaper route in quiet periods; in peak season or when time-constrained, launch straight into paid level-1 testing.

Treat a concept as proven when it can spend a few hundred dollars a day while hitting targets (most videos run out of steam by ~$100). Then roll it out to the creator pool as a brief for variations. The biggest hit (66.9M views) could not be replicated by 20-40 other creators, though the original creator hit again back-to-back.

Worked with many agencies over the years to produce TikTok creator content; none cracked it, which led to building the in-house creator team.