GTM Sauce

Runify · B2C · ranked running app

Copy a proven app's viral Reels format for your niche before building

Millions of views; one copy hit 2M; ~50 videos drove the whole waitlist

Workedorganic-short-videovalidation

What they did

Picked Liftoff (ranked gym app, $100K+/month for 12+ months) as the model and studied how it acquired users. Adapted its rank-ladder video (rank icons with times, icons generated in ChatGPT) to running times per distance. Each video took ~30 minutes to make and was scheduled with a scheduling tool. Posted fewer than 50 in 2 weeks, before any app existed. Race distances were varied; track and field distances went most viral. Three Figma app mockups were pinned on the Instagram profile.

What happened

Millions of views in the first weeks (one video ~2M); 2,000 waitlist signups and 90+ $5 payments from this traffic.
Stage
pre-launch validation

In their words

Caleb Dean - I speedran an ai app from 0 to $100k exit in 26 days

Play from 24:02

Caleb Dean… to make a note a note, at the time of um the validation, they were doing like 200, 300k a month, so they've been doing like pretty decent numbers, like over 100k a month for I think at least 12 months. So it's not like this app's been out for a couple months or they've had like a like a few high-performing um months. But yeah, like a big thing was copying their like distribution and just seeing, okay, cool, they're making this sort of money,

24:02

Caleb Deanbut how are they actually acquiring their users? Is this something that we can replicate in our own way? And one of their sort of formats, which I'm sure I think you've had the the founder of Strongr on the podcast, he had one of the formats where it was like the body graph of like a gym workout, and like we weren't really able to replicate that for Runify cuz we didn't have like an a graph like that, but then I came across, yeah, this video right here, where it just has their rankings, and we're like, "Oh cool, like I can just do this for running."

24:34

Caleb DeanSo if you like legit look at the other video that we made, I think this one got 2 million views, so it's pretty much like a copy, and like those icons are just like ChatGPT generated. Pretty much like my thought process was, let's just make a couple of these, and then like post them, and then see like how the the audience responds. And we ended up like just posting nine of these videos per day like throughout a week, and through that, like we had millions of views. But what I think was super valuable is like with that traffic we are we're actually getting, we sent them to

25:06

Caleb Deana website which I just like used ChatGPT to make like a I think it was still there, it's runify.xyz. And pretty much that was like a Stripe link with a landing page on it. So it's like we're actually doing something with this traffic. You can see it's such a shit website, but gives like an idea of what Runify might look like, and you can become an early adopter and pay $5, or you can join the waitlist and, yeah, put your email in. And we had, I …

28:12

Joseph ChoiYeah, that's-

28:13

Caleb DeanAll from such a simple format. Like the the actual content took me 30 minutes to to make, and then we just scheduled it on like a scheduling tool, and then used ChatGPT to build a HTML site, which just sent them to a Stripe link. It was so simple.

28:28

Joseph ChoiThat is crazy. Like 30 minutes to make the the piece of content, and then, yeah, like with ChatGPT, you can literally make a site in like a minute or like 5 minutes if you want to make it a little bit more high quality. And then you just posted like the same piece of content several times a day. Would you basically make the same exact video and it would go viral every time?

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Tags: instagram, copy-competitor-format, pre-launch, rank-images