Noise · app that pays people to post
Chase viral videos with soft pitches, and flood the feed with hard-pitch slideshows
UGC hits of 1.6-5M views; slideshows add 2M views a month; founder says they drive downloads
What they did
What happened
In their words
Nic Weber - Meet The Guy Who Solved TikTok
Nic WeberWhat's really important here is I'm not looking for these to go viral, right? You can see that there's 2 million views on them in the last 30 days as well, which is a small piece of that pie compared to everything else that's going out.
Nic WeberBut these serve as just total shotgun effect where if you've done programmatic marketing before, you're familiar with how Facebook does retargeting campaigns. We view these slideshows, for us, when we run both the UGC side and the slideshow side, these function very similar to retargeting campaigns.
Nic WeberAnd the cool thing is like if you have something viral for Noise, you're going to see more Noise content. And so we try and serve it up to people in a similar format and very explicit call to action here on what you can expect, right? Where I open this up and it's, "How I completely changed my life. Day one, day whatever." And there's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these going out that drive that bottom of funnel action, …
Nic WeberWe've only really noticed this because we unlocked the scale and distribution part. That's the hardest part to do is to just get everybody posting all the same thing that you want in subtle variations of it to find your winners.
Nic WeberWe could spend time to try and make a slideshow go viral, but that's just not how we are using it for ourselves. We're very much more hunting for the viral hits more like UGC side where we have big ones like this go out like 3.8 million views, 5 million views, 2 million, 2 million, 1.6. Like these are the ones they're driving a lot of that discussion, a lot of that commenting, a lot of that curiosity that then those slideshows just come in with their explicit call to actions to then drive the user to actually go download Noise.
Joseph Choi… need the human to like act like with their face, and it's a little bit more manual versus the slideshows you like you don't put as much effort in. You like put tons of combinations in just to like flood the feed. So it's kind of like a two-pronged approach. You have the, the UGC, which is high effort. You're aiming for like a million views on those, and then you do the slideshows as like a separate campaign. But do you do them at the same time?
Nic WeberYeah, running them at the same time is the best way to do it. We have this section here where you manage your different campaigns and you can see for us specifically, we're running what we call like our premium content, which is that UGC, and then we also run our basic slideshows. And the basic slideshows are the down there just scooping up everything.
Joseph ChoiCan you give the sauce on the system prompt? Like how does it give like good copy? Cuz I feel like some of the examples that you showed with the TikToks, the copywriting and the captions was really good.
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Pay thousands of regular users per view to post content you supplyAbout $0.30 per install on average; 2.5B views across the platform in a year
- Copy a viral side-income video and film posters washing dishes with your caption4-6 videos passed 1M views; $0.08 installs for 3 days; hit #7 in category
- Start with 'Don't get a second job' instead of 'Everybody needs a side hustle'The new opening made the video go viral; the old one didn't
- Say 'I make $20 a night, an extra $500 a month' instead of big earnings'$7,000' claims got called a scam; $20 a night worked
- Post a relatable money-worry video that never names the app, then plant commentsHit #5 in category; one planted comment got 1,686 likes, est. 1,000+ downloads
- Mix hook images, captions and hashtags automatically so each poster's slideshow is unique
- Pay your 30 most active users to post ready-made slideshows about your appFirst slideshow hit 20,000 views in a week; success led to building Noise
- Put eggs in the first image of healthy-eating slideshowsHigher-view slideshows consistently had eggs in the hook image; no numbers
- Have posters cry over a word they can't say while the app roasts themFirst video had 20M views overnight; format ran for two months
- Pause any content format that hasn't taken off within 1-3 weeks and try anotherA 446-post format with ~200K views was paused; its replacement reached 9M views
- Test slideshow hooks on your own TikTok account, adding text inside TikTokFirst post 887K views; one hook image passed 5M views
Tags: tiktok, instagram, youtube, retargeting, slideshows, soft-cta, hard-cta, two-pronged