Reflective Apps · B2C · app portfolio studio
Hire agencies to produce creator content
Didn't work across many agencies; replaced with an in-house team
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
- Effort
- 'a lot of agencies over the years'
In their words
Ryan Thorpe - Meet The Guy Dominating The App Store
Ryan ThorpeYeah, so it was it was basically an evolution of the Facebook strategy that from 2018 to 2020, 2021. TikTok was new. It was um, you know, open season. There wasn't much competition. TikTok ad platform was also kind of really driving you to use their ads platform tools and products, so they were incentivizing uh your ad spend to go even further.
Ryan ThorpeSo, we just dove on that and just kept building out a real creator army in-house, because we worked with like a lot of agencies over the years, but no then no one could really crack it internally uh for us. So, we just thought, "Why don't we just do it ourselves?"
Ryan ThorpeSo, we reached out to hundreds of content creators, built an in-house uh automated system that basically took a content creator from knowing about us right the way through to being able to make a video for us that converted. And we taught them every step of the way, and we automated every step of the way from interview to concept or brief that we sent to them right the way up to video that they would make, editing, going back and forth, …
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More from this episode
- Pay small creators in each country to read a script, then run it as Facebook adsDrove ~$3-4M ARR, but ad spend matched revenue
- Buy under-monetized apps and fix their paywalls instead of spending more on adsFirst deal paid back in 12-18 months; 30-35 apps bought over 5 years
- Run your own creator team: train them, brief them, and automate hiring through payment~250 regular creators, thousands of videos; drove tens of millions of downloads
- Post every video on your own TikTok first; put ad money behind the ones that take offCheaper testing off-peak; breakouts pushed four or five ways
- Test each video with $10-20, move winners to bigger campaigns, let the best 1-2 take 90%1-2 evergreen videos took 90% of spend; run by one media buyer
- Once a video holds a few hundred dollars a day of ads, have creators remake itSometimes compounded; the top viral video failed to copy across 20-40 creators
- Spend about 75% of the year's ad budget in January, when installs cost halfDone hit #1 free app in the US on Jan 2-3, two years running
- Test ads Dec 26-28, raise spend Dec 28-30, and 10x it on January's first SundayGuest's playbook from his ad accounts; no separate numbers
- Put a famous person's voice behind the video as the hookOne video hit 50-60M views, then a cease and desist; AI-voice copies partly worked
- Give creators strict briefs: 10-15 second videos, 25-27 cuts, POV phone shots, trending soundsSet a quality floor across ~250 creators; results still varied
- Recruit creators with 2K-20K followers by DM, send them to a creator page, then test them2,000+ creators on the books; ~10% became regulars, 1-2% of those went viral
- Pay creators $30-40 a video, raise to $100 for reliable ones, and add bonuses for hitsKept creators loyal long-term vs pure performance pay
- Sell the app to employers, using stress tests to prove it lowers staff stress
Tags: tiktok, agencies, outsourcing