GTM Sauce

Reflective Apps · B2C · app portfolio studio

Give creators strict briefs: 10-15 second videos, 25-27 cuts, POV phone shots, trending sounds

Set a quality floor across ~250 creators; results still varied

Workedcreator-opsugc-creators

What they did

Aggregated data across thousands of videos to define what made winners. Briefs (slide decks) split concepts into lifestyle, trend, educational and testimonial; each specified the trending sound, hook type (curiosity, empathetic, reflective), captions, pace, length 10-15s with 25-27 cuts, the number of app shots, and that phone clips are POV looking down at the screen. Angles included morning routine, evening routine, wellness, mindset and vlogs (hook -> habits -> app crossing off habits). Paid someone to scroll TikTok and send a list of trending songs at the start of every week, and updated briefs regularly.

What happened

Gave creators guardrails and clear expectations; still unpredictable which videos went viral
Stage
scale

In their words

Ryan Thorpe - Meet The Guy Dominating The App Store

Play from 22:22
22:21

Joseph ChoiYeah.

22:22

Ryan Thorpewe we is like 10 to 15 seconds long. It needs to be 25 to 27 frames, you know, chops in the video. And cuz we we had so many content pieces, we were able to kind of, you know, aggregate all the data points across all of the videos to make an idea of what made that video viral. And that's the kind of then playbook and concept presentation, you know, pitches, pitch decks, and drafts, and things we would give to content creators afterwards to try to replicate it.

22:50

Joseph ChoiThat's crazy. And you still, to this day, have not figured out why this ad did so well, 66 million views?

30:45

Ryan ThorpeSo, if you go one more slide over, um the lifestyle video would be we would send this to concept content creators, the whole concept sort of style presentation, uh where you would have the trending sound, the hooks, how fast we want the video, um and then video requirements.

30:59

Ryan ThorpeSo, what I mentioned before, the amount of frames per video, how many shots of the app we need to see uh in that video, and all the videos all the clips of that phone needs to be POV shot down looking at it. So, we really get really granular on the video that we're looking for. You know, super strict on this has to be within this range, cuz creators aren't like that. But they have guardrails to follow, uh and then they know the expectations of what we expect.

31:25

Joseph ChoiYeah. Yeah, these are very clear creator briefs. And then it shows you the angles, too. So, first you show, make sure you do trending sounds with, you know, these metrics, make sure you do a a type of hook, make it, you know, 10 to 15 seconds, two or more shots per second.

31:54

Ryan ThorpeYeah, yeah, yeah.

32:02

Ryan ThorpeEx- Exactly. And, and even we had we had um we even paid someone to um basically scroll through TikTok and give us a list of all the trending songs at the beginning of every week. And all of these were just regularly updated, so the likelihood of the trend or the thing catching would just, you know, catch more and more.

32:14

Joseph ChoiMhm.

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Tags: tiktok, creator-briefs, creative, hooks, trending-sounds, pov-shots