Give a creator part of the app, then build it for their followers

Joseph ChoiWow, just from influencers. So, are you doing uh like TikTok and Instagram?

Connor BurdYeah, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. Um a lot of the times it'll be like cross-posting these influencer posts. So, one of the influencers and like my partner for this app, uh his name's Casper, and he has been driving like insane traffic to the app. I think he's driven probably around 35,000 clicks to the website, more honestly. And that's just clicks without like tracking any of our organic install volume from his videos alone.

Joseph ChoiInteresting. So, that's like link-in-bio clicks?

Connor Burd… clearly he's built like a successful, you know, influencer audience with it, so performs well on his channel. Oh, I was going to say, yeah, like I definitely think I've learned a lot about like the influencer space through working with Casper on this, and it's something that I think like all these I see so many indie developers on like Twitter and whatever, Reddit and all that, talking about like launching these apps and building these apps.

Connor BurdAnd I definitely think that like these indie developers need to just start like spam DMing influencers. I reached out to Casper before I was friends with him, and, you know, I had a mutual connection, and he was like, "Oh, like I have this friend. He's an influencer. Like you should talk to him." I was like, "All right, sure." And, you know, I built this app specifically around his audience. Before he was like before we had an idea of what we were going to build, like I was like, okay, this is, you know, what his audience does like is looking for. I actually came went through a list of like maybe five ideas of different apps, and I made some like Figma mock-ups for them. I was like, which one of these do you think like resonates the most with your with your audience? Because I think these all have potential to convert off of it.

Joseph ChoiMmm.

Joseph ChoiSo, it's actually a great value proposition to influencers to reach out to them and propose like a an equity deal. Do you partner with different influencers for each app that you do and have equity partnerships with with different influencers for each app?

Connor BurdYeah, right now I'm like in the process of um building out more apps with influencers. Um and yeah, like different influencers depending on their size and how complicated the app is, like I'll have different kind of structures for that. But yeah, like every app that I've built basically is like I'm working with a different partner on that app.

Joseph ChoiThat's a really interesting approach. I feel like a lot of people struggle with the very first step of just reaching out to influencers and figuring out how to get noticed, cuz if they have, you know, 2.7 million followers, they probably get a lot of inbound. So, how do you think that you uh stood out when you initially reached out to Casper? Cuz uh you said that you kind of created a bunch of Figma mockups and asked like, "Hey, which one do you …

Joseph Choi… promoting a brand, their video that they create for the brand deal usually will get fewer views than their normal videos. Do you basically just combat that with Manychat and like do the engagement hack or are you are you trying to like uh or do you kind of like price that in for you know, they're normally doing 100K views, uh but if we do a brand deal, they'll probably get like, you know, half that amount. Is there like a thought process?

Connor BurdYeah, I would I definitely don't expect my videos to perform as well as their normal videos, because I typically go for a more like hard integration. Like I'm not I don't want them to just subtly mention it. Like I I want them to make sure they're like really selling it. So yeah, I would expect the videos to get less views. But one thing that's nice again about partnering with these content creators, and like maybe you, you know, have they have less of a a stake in the app if you don't really care about them being more than just an influencer, but then you don't really have to worry about any of that. You can kind of just be like, "You know what? Post as much as you want. Like, you know, here's my my expectations of how much you should be posting." But it becomes a lot simpler when you know that you're both in it together.

Joseph ChoiThat's really true. I feel like like we're we're It feels like we're kind of debating between, oh, equity versus non-equity in terms of just purely the business model and, hey, is there ROI? But what people are not really thinking about is the the business model changes just the human dynamic of the