GTM Sauce

NGL · B2C · anonymous messaging app

Add invite screens to every app so paid users bring friends

Founder says it works; no numbers

Workedproduct-viralityreferral-program

What they did

Hunter puts easy invite flows and share prompts (sometimes forced) into every product where it makes sense; a text or Story post acts as a friend's endorsement. With paid acquisition, the goal is to get a set share of new users to invite someone right away, which lowers effective CPI.

What happened

Presented as a standard part of his playbook; no numbers.
Stage
growth

In their words

Hunter Isaacson - Meet The Guy Who Solved Growing Apps

Play from 27:14
27:08

HostAnd you have to do that somehow with viral TikToks, ads. Would you add a social element to this?

27:14

Hunter IsaacsonI always like adding social elements. I love adding, you know, invite screens, forcing users to share. I think it's a great way to get stamp of approval from someone. If you text your friend an app or you post an app on your story, for example, it's like an endorsement. I'm a big fan of that. I put that in every product. There's always, you know, easy ways to invite people, as long as it actually makes sense.

27:35

HostIf you were currently at 10k MRR with an app, you want to really scale, so you kind of have some product-market fit, and you have, let's say like a $10,000 budget, what would you do? Like, what are the channels that you think are interesting right now? Curious if you have a take on that.

Hunter Isaacson… I would do is I would break it up into like experiments, right? So, you experiment what cohort came from which ad, or which TikTok video, and then constantly be adapting the formats and adapting it, but doing smaller tests, right? Don't spend all the money on like, you know, one specific creative. I would just test like a dozen of them. I'd really focus on my product-led growth. How do you use those ads in the in the UGC to just bring people in,

28:27

Hunter Isaacsonand then how do you get those people to immediately invite a friend, right? So, like that's also something that's important, like having a social functionality where you know that when you spend something, whatever your CPI is, it's actually considerably lower because a certain percentage of users are bringing somebody else. Those two things kind of come together. Like, what's the best hook to get somebody in? Is it an ad? Is it a video on TikTok? And then, once you have them in, can you get X percent to just share it? And then, I would say your focus should just be on scaling

28:55

Hunter Isaacsonall of that content up, and finding other distribution mechanisms, and just spending your money primarily on like tests. Then you'll basically you'll hit like a format that works. You'll hit like a specific ad that works. And then, you've also solved the product-led growth problem of like getting people to invite. So, it's just like that's the where the flywheel really kicks off. That's how I would do it. I'd just spend it on getting more users …

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Tags: invite-screens, forced-share, effective-cpi