Lovely · B2C · couples love-note widget app
Post one relationship TikTok a day from an old phone set to a US VPN
150K views brought only 100-200 downloads; replying in comments didn't help
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- One video a day for a short period
In their words
Jack Friks - He Went From Struggling to Make $1 From His App to Turning Down $1M
Joseph ChoiYeah, that's crazy. So many downloads from Twitter, like I feel like most people wouldn't expect that. And then Instagram, or you did Instagram and or TikTok for this one, too, right?
Jack FriksYeah. So I started promoting on TikTok about a week after these tweets went kind of viral, um, and and it kind of started slowing down like the downloads per day. That added, I think, 2,000 MRR or 3,000 MRR just from that like the Twitter tweets and the Russian news. Um, and then I changed the app to freemium from a hard paywall, cuz I got a lot of bad reviews about the hard paywall, and I wanted more of my friends to be able to use it as well. Uh, and then I started posting on TikTok. The first TikTok, I'm using like a US VPN on my old burner phone. I have it here. Um, and just posting one a day, trying new formats, as I said, scrolling in my niche, and I found something that I could probably apply. Uh, my second one I posted hit like 150,000 views at the time the day I posted it. It's like a TikTok about relationship, so it ties into the couples app, but this probably brought, I think, like 100, 200 downloads, so this is one of these formats that is not a piece of gold, it was a piece of like silver, copper.
Jack FriksLots of views, but it didn't convert. And then I kept, um, trying that format to see if I could make it convert better by like being in the comments, but again, like nothing noticeable in downloads. And then I saw a competitor, another couples app making videos that look like this, very basically exactly like this. I made the feature in a day, and I put it out there, and I started making videos the next day with this format. It's like a shared whiteboard, it's not a lock screen. It kind of looks like a lock screen. It's a shared whiteboard feature I already had in my app, I just made it a presentation mode. And then, um, yeah, I mean, you can see here, that think the fifth video really blew up, 490,000 views, and then the next two also kind of kept Like, I posted at this point two a day, and then I scaled it up to three a day, and now a bunch of them have hit like 500,000, million, …
Jack FriksThis So this is directly using the app. Um, it's like an eight to 10 second video, and it's just showing, this is me using the app, and at the end it shows directly the app. So, this obviously converted like 20 times better than the 2x2 slide shows, and this is kind of where I've iterated to at this point. Haven't gone past this format. I don't It's not going to work forever, um, but so far between the Twitter viral post and this format, finding …
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More from this episode
- Scroll your niche on TikTok for 15 minutes a day and save what's going viralHow he found every winning format, though the first 100-200 days showed little
- Copy a viral 4-picture slideshow, add your app's images, and post it 400 times5M+ views, up to 1,000 downloads a day, and a $15K month; faded after ~3 months
- Post a daily talking-head video demoing your appSome blew up, but downloads were inconsistent; ~50-60 a day
- Swap your confusing in-app shop for a standard paywall with a free trialRevenue rose from $500-1K to $2-4K a month
- Schedule a week or two of videos at once to every platformDaily posting dropped from ~1 hour to 10 minutes; the tool became its own business
- Reuse your proven meme slideshow for a new app, naming it only in the captionOne post hit 5M views; app reached $1,000 in its first 30 days
- Tweet your launch with a public goal, then quote-tweet every update40K downloads overnight, 10K from Russia in a day; added $2-3K MRR
- Drop the hard paywall and go freemium after bad reviews
- Copy a rival app's viral demo video; build the feature in a day if needed~20x more downloads per view than slideshows; several videos passed 1M views
- Pay people to post your winning video format on 20-40 accountsJust started; $1,000 spent so far, no results yet
Tags: tiktok, burner-phone, us-vpn, niche-content, no-app-shown