Massive · B2C · AI job application app
Check Stripe or RevenueCat after each viral video to see if it sold
Now 3-5 viral videos a day and can't tell which ones convert
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Dan Vykhopen - This app makes $2m/year using this ridiculously easy strategy
Dan… conversions. But I will tell you, I think we do maybe 3 to 4 million views per week roughly. Host: That's a lot of views. Dan: Yeah. So when we were doing like 500k views, we were actually probably converting as much. We just started to scale up on the influencer and UGC side a lot and test a lot of new stuff and it didn't work. So that's the position we're in now is like, we really wanted to get more views. We figured out what was getting views
Danand we thought we knew what was converting, and we tried to scale that up and it broke. So I think it's a constant game of like, there's no proven way to look at when you get a video and when you get downloads and views. Like early on it's actually great, because you're not getting that many viral videos. So when you do get one, you can clearly see in Stripe or in RevenueCat, whatever, that like is this converting. And you have to build that muscle early on, so that you can know when you're getting lots of viral videos like which videos are converting, cuz right now we're getting
Danthree, four, five viral videos a day kind of thing. And like, I don't know which ones are driving conversions, so you have to know that beforehand before you start doing multiple videos per day. What drives conversion? I think it's different for every company. It should be about problem and solution. Skits, for example, for us don't work, because they don't target the problem well enough. I think there's a lot of nuance here. General ideas for content guidelines is we found a hook that consistently converted. It consistently found the right audience. So you need to, number one, target the right audience.
DanIf you hook them with the right problem, then you've got them. And then if your solution actually solves the problem, you can convert them. So that first part of getting the right audience with the right problem is actually the hardest part. One example is like, we've done a bunch of skits that are targeting like college students. College students don't convert for us at all. They kind of just like don't care about internships, they don't care …
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More from this episode
- Post 'if I built this, would anyone want it?' on LinkedIn before building8M impressions and 5,000 comments from ~500 connections
- Collect a waitlist with LinkedIn posts like 'top 200 companies hiring now'40-50K sign-ups, but only ~0.5% signed up at launch and almost none paid
- Post on Hacker News and send heartfelt personal messages to scraped emailsFirst 100-500 paying users; ~$20K MRR after 8 months of grinding
- Pitch the app as 'Tinder for jobs' instead of describing the AIFounder estimates 2-3x more views and better creator reply rates
- Post comedy skits aimed at college studentsCollege students didn't convert at all; skits miss the problem
- Open with 'Stop using LinkedIn to apply to jobs', not 'Indeed'LinkedIn hook: ~1M views, high conversion; Indeed: 11M views, only ~$20K MRR
- Make 80% of videos remakes of formats already going viral; 20% new ideas
- Relaunch your stalled UGC creator program with fresh energyAn 11M-view video in 4 days, but only ~$20K MRR; program died
- Scale creator videos from 500K to 3-4M views a weekNo more conversions than at 500K views a week
- Pay influencers a monthly retainer to post about the appGot views but few conversions; followers weren't job hunting
- Change your subscription pricing behind a hard paywallRevenue doubled; no details on what changed
- Use paid ads to learn what converts instead of guessing with organicRevenue up 50% from ads; method not described
- Copy a proven onboarding from another app and focus on ads instead
- Run ads that name a very specific pain, like 'run 10+ miles with tight hips?'Converted Dan after 6 ads despite a painful checkout; ads live ~2 years
- Film a friend 'discovering' the app, with two faces and a moving cameraGoes viral consistently with one or two formats; widely copied
- Have a creator repeat one format for weeks, building on any 6K-view videoSame format went from 382 views to 1.7M; founder says it converts very well
- Recreate real people's job-offer videos with actors; sell in the commentsDan calls it illegal; commenters caught on and videos are being taken down
- Grow a simple app purely on paid ads, without outside funding$200-300M a year, 30% margins, doubling yearly
- Sign up ~100,000 TikTok Shop affiliates for a product everyone can useDan guesses nine-figure revenue
- Front your bootcamp with an AI quiz funnel offering 100% scholarshipsRevenue tripled in under a quarter from a $50M/year base
- Sell the same note-taking app to older users instead of students~3x TurboLearn's revenue on 1/5-1/6 of the downloads
Tags: organic-attribution, conversion-tracking