Cal AI · B2C · photo calorie tracking app
Pay creators to show the app in passing in day-in-the-life TikToks
App has been blowing up; no numbers
Workedugc-creatorsorganic-short-video
What they did
Cal AI pays many creators (and puts spend behind some posts) for TikTok day-in-the-life videos: workout, come home, snap a photo of a meal, get calories, move on. Shows the core differentiator (logging by photo) as part of normal life rather than as an ad.
What happened
Host says the app has been blowing up; attributed to this style of content.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Boost Conversion and Retention with Jobs to Be Done — Daphne Tideman, Growth Advisor“they pay a lot of influencers. There's a little bit of mixed messaging on Twitter. People act as if it's fully organic, but they actually pay a ton of creators to create this.”
“they just take a photo of the meal and it tells you the calories and then they move on with their day”
Related topics
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- Move the app mention earlier in videos until views start to dropSweet spot 20-30 seconds in; a friend's app peaks at 60 seconds
- Open 20 brand accounts so each outreach person can DM hundreds of creators dailyHundreds of creators contacted per account per day
- Pay big lifestyle creators to scan their breakfast in day-in-the-life vlogs, 4 times a monthMost profitable content; one video drove hundreds to thousands of promo code uses
- Show a spin wheel that lands on 80% off instead of just showing the discountDouble-digit conversion lift vs a plain discount screen in an A/B test
- Match download spikes to each creator post while volume is still lowEarly on every video showed a clear spike; gets murky at scale
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- Ask dog owners in the park to try the app for a free yearFound many onboarding issues in one to two hours
- Pay for interviews with people using other solutions, hiding the right answer in a list
- Ladder: Let other users cheer you on live while you work outGetting cheered correlated with higher retention; exact numbers not recalled
- Ladder: Ask goal questions up front, then pair each user with a matching coachConverted a host who thought the app wasn't for him
- Welltory: Pull in the user's health data and show insights during onboarding
- Add a $20/year tier using free Apple weather data next to the $40 plan
- Tallow and Ash: Boost a post apologizing for a product flaw and showing the fix
- Coopah: Run ads where a creator shows her stuck results, then the win with the app
- Headspace: Ask the user's main goal and show different content for each