Tolan · B2C · AI alien friend app
Hire a group of college-age creators to post lots of TikToks on their own accounts
About 1 in 20 videos takes off; viral days brought 10-15K installs and #1 in category
Workedugc-creatorsorganic-short-videocreator-ops
What they did
Hire non-professional creators (side gig, e.g. college students in New York or locals) to produce lots of short videos showing Tolan. Keep them in a shared group chat to brainstorm and try angles together, with direction from the team. Pay per video or on retainer, not per view. Videos go out on creators' personal TikTok/Reels accounts, separate accounts and the official Tolan account. Most get few views; winners are sometimes, but not usually, boosted with paid spend.
What happened
About 1 in 20 videos pops; viral videos (one hit 10M views) drove 10-15K installs a day, pushed the app to #1 in its category and 800K+ downloads, with ARR at multiples of $1M.
- Stage
- Growth (post-launch growth)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Fueling Growth with AI and Viral Product Features — Ajay Mehta, Portola“we have almost like a a chat of folks that are making content together, that are coming up with different ideas together, that are that are trying different things. And that's almost just like we are it's like our organic content production machine, I would say.”
“Yeah, it's it's kind of a combination of per video, or like even like folks on retainer, and so on.”
“And like they might not even be like professional creators, right? It's a side gig for some folks.”
Related topics
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More from Tolan
All 13 Tolan tactics- Quiz new users, match them to an AI friend, then start a voice chatAdvisor credits it as a big part of their success; no numbers
- Show a shareable card of how the AI character's personality maps to yoursAdvisor calls it a viral artifact people share; no numbers
- Start with a 7-day free trial, then tune trial length to limit AI costs
More from this episode
- Tolan: Onboard with a fun voice quiz, then have the app bring answers up laterUsers call it a wow moment; part of what lifted early retention
- Tolan: Soft-launch the app for free to see how people really use itSome users talked 30-40 minutes a day right away
- Tolan: Put up a paywall 2-3 weeks after launch to cover AI costsGrowth self-funded; renewals give a clearer product signal than free usage
- Tolan: Make videos of people using the app while studying, cooking or getting readyStudying ('up at 3am') took off first; a cooking video got ~10M views
- Tolan: Pay creators with about a million followers to post a video on their accountNewer effort; these do better on average than the small creators
- Tolan: Hire artists to make a bright, cute character that looks great in videosLow install costs even on paid; users show it to friends and post it unprompted
- Tolan: Make the AI companion a friendly, non-romantic alien instead of a human80-90% of users are women aged 15-25 with normal social lives
- Tolan: Improve conversations and add a shared planet until D7-D15 retention risesD5, D7 and D15 retention went up; growth then started paying off
- Portola: Raise a small pre-seed first, then more from the same investor after launch$10M seed in total
- Tolan: Run small paid ads from day one to test retention and conversionLow install costs gave room to experiment; organic later beat it