Copia · B2C · manifesting and affirmations app
Run a meme account posing as a viral scandal's 'daughter', then plug the app
50M views in a week; the 5M-view plug drove only a couple thousand downloads
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- One account, a few videos over a week
In their words
Phoenix Do - Copy This Strategy, It'll Blow Up Your App
Joseph ChoiIs there anything else that you wanted to share? I feel like you have a lot of good stuff in this.
Phoenix Do… to build like a viral loop, because, you know, really that action is the K-factor for these apps. Scanning, swiping, that's stuff that people can reuse and make content, it's just that it's more forced nowadays. Like apps used to go viral because it was like, "Oh yeah, like I like did this on an app and a lot of people shared it." You gained natural virality. Now it's just reverse engineering and forcing that virality with a viral feature. Another marketing experiment that I tried, that clip at the Coldplay concert went viral when the Astronomer CEO was caught like cheating with his like head of HR. I had this like genius idea and it was like, what if we use that to market like our app? So there's account that got 200,000 followers, I think like 50 million views in like a matter of like a week. And then like the second video, like we had done like a product placement for Copia. That video got like 5 million views and everyone was like, "Yeah, like get the bag. Your dad's getting divorced. Rock it up." That video that had 5 million views though only probably drove like a couple thousand downloads. Wasn't super high converting cuz it wasn't like a clear hook and demo.
Joseph ChoiDo you have links to either of those?
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More from this episode
- Turn a viral ChatGPT prompt trend into your app's first magic momentBecame the app's emotional hook behind trial starts; ~100K downloads overall
- Post videos showing the AI dream-life story itselfWent viral but converted poorly; people don't read and already use ChatGPT
- Hook with 'If you see this before May 7th, repeat these affirmations', then demo10M views on one Instagram video; became their repeatable main format
- Mention the app by name without explaining it, so viewers ask in comments6.6M views and downloads, but an estimated 20-30% fewer than with a demo
- Study creators with 500K-1M followers who sell courses or books in your nicheFound the creator whose format they copied; turned her book idea into an app
- Pay creators with 50K-250K followers, aiming for about $1 per 1,000 viewsFilled the funnel cheaply to learn metrics; no results given
- Add social proof, a short video and tap-to-answer questions before asking for goalsUsers reaching the paywall rose from ~50-60% to 85-90%; conversion doubled
- Hire 40 UGC creators to post one format, testing only the first 10 secondsScaled the winning format; hook results varied; no totals given
- Add a big red 'crash out' button riding a viral trend; post a slideshow12-13M views and 10-15K downloads from one two-slide TikTok
Tags: tiktok, meme-account, news-jacking, product-placement, persona