GTM Sauce

BlueThrone · B2C · app acquirer

Build an in-house team making cheap UGC TikTok videos for the apps

First viral video took 6 months and several people; gets faster with practice

Mixedugc-creatorsorganic-short-video

What they did

Multiple people across disciplines research and produce UGC videos showing the app with a CTA at the end. Individual UGC videos can cost as little as ~$5, but the team time is significant.

What happened

Took six months to get the first viral video; guest says the process speeds up and needs fewer resources as you optimize.
Effort
six months, multiple people across disciplines

In their words

Buying vs. Building: Scaling Beyond a Single App — Josh Peleg, BlueThrone

Play the episode

David Barnard… somebody with this more kind of financial asset approach, the buyer is going to say, "Oh, well, wait, 40 hours a week of a great marketer's time creating these assets that go viral on TikTok," or whatever kind of organic motion that you have, if it's a high either cost because you're paying creators or a high time cost, acquirers are generally going to look at that as a cost basis and not look at that kind of an app as a financial asset, right?

Josh PelegCorrect. I think us in the industry labeling this TikTok strategy as organic is very misleading. And even though you could pay $5 for a single UGC video that shows off your app with a nice CTA at the end, and you may as well get a million, 2 million views, which may convert into a 10% conversion rate and you get some downloads from that. That being said, the time invested to get to that point is significant. And I'm talking from experience. We recently built this UGC machine at Blue Throne. It took us six months to get our first viral video. And that's not one person's time. That's multiple people across multiple disciplines doing the research, doing the execution. So, there is a cost associated to this organic. But like all great mechanisms within the app business, you get better over time and you optimize and you're able to hit those targets faster with less resources as you get better, for sure.

David BarnardSo, then, what would your advice be to somebody in that position? Either they're just getting started and they're thinking, "Hey, I'd love to build this app and exit it in 12 months." I mean, I see this on Twitter all the time. Like, "I'm going to build this app and I'm going to sell it for 100k in a year." What would your advice be to a founder like that today to optimize that for a meaningful acquisition?

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: tiktok, ugc, viral