Post the same 6-second fade-in app screenshot Reel over and over

HostThat's cool. Yeah, I was about to say like it makes for a cool product, then the heatmap is also just visually, it's so eye-catching and it looks really good on TikTok slideshows and like Instagram Reels slideshows. Show some of the results that you've gone with this format, cuz I know you've posted this specific format a bunch of times and it does like really well.

PeterYeah, so we discovered this one format we call the fade-in. It's about six seconds long, just fades in from black and shows an image. And we discovered that, for some reason, it was just like I hacked the Instagram algorithm. Watch time was crazy. Like, I think the average watch time on some of our videos was over double that of the video length, which suggests the average person actually watches it twice. And the the format's kind of getting faded out a little bit now. Like once you find a winning format and start spamming it, it's always going to go that way. But we were able to get, I would guess, it's probably between 150 to 200 million views at least from it. We've a couple of videos hit 40 million. I'd have to scroll down quite far to be able to find them. But like, for example, there's-

HostOh, there's one. 143,000 likes. So that Yeah. the views on that must be like Yeah, multiple millions.

PeterAnd at the end of the day, the conversion ends up being quite low for it. But when it's so easy to go viral with it, it's a a no-brainer for us. It's the kind of thing that takes me maybe like a couple of hours each week to schedule out content for. I built internal tooling to be able to help us with producing things like this. And then once you just find that format, it's a matter of how quickly can you horizontally scale it? Because if you find a winner that goes super viral once, chances are it will go super viral again and again if you hit enough if you take enough the back.

HostSo you said you estimate this one format you've posted multiple times and it's gotten, in aggregate, like over 200 million views over all the videos that you've posted.

HostInteresting. And do you think you should use the same sound for all of these or are you like following trending sounds, too, and using them to like pick up on trends?

PeterWe've mostly used the same sound. I think it becomes quite recognizable. It's almost like a brand sound at this point. It's like a silly Let Me Know song by Future that we use for it. I think you could probably look for more viral sounds, but overall, particularly on Instagram, I don't think viral sounds are all that important. I think TikTok, they have a lot more relevance. But in my experience, I've never found the sound to be make or break on Instagram.

HostSo is there a formula for going viral? Because you said, you know, you're sort of you guys were sort of the pioneers in making the format and then your competitors copied. It seems like when people copy you, they're kind of late to the game, right? So you've already extracted a lot of the value out of it by showing it to people on the For You page for the first time, and then when they copy it, it's not as effective. So I feel like being in your …