Practitioner pattern · Casper Opala (Payout, Casper's third app)
Pay $1,000-1,500 per creator ad, expect 20-30% to work, scale the winners
Winning brand creatives boosted to 35-40M views, earning back ~10x the creator fee
What they did
What happened
In their words
Casper Opala - The Stupid Simple Content Strategy That's Making Apps Go Viral
Joseph ChoiUm, but if you have a creator on your team, um you know, with equity, then they're incentivized to just make make [laughter] unlimited ad creatives, and um or you know, make videos that can be repurposed for free as as ad creatives. So.
Casper OpalaSomeone who has a lot of friends in the creator space, UGC videos, I don't know how companies profit off of, because we charge a lot for them. Like, especially bigger creators don't usually go under $1,000 to $1,500 per video, and that only includes like a few months of usage. So you're just testing. That ad might be unprofitable, so you just threw out like 1,000 or 1,500.
Casper OpalaMaybe 20, 30% of ads will be profitable. Who knows how long and how much money you need to put behind them for them to actually pay off, but I guess with these big companies that are paying us these checks, they have budgets of like 100K to spend on paid ads in this week or this month, or 250K in this quarter, whatever it is.
Casper OpalaSo they got money to put behind it. If one ad creative hits, like I've had for brands I've worked with, they've boosted it to like 35, 40 million views and you already know they're printing off that. Like they paid me x amount of money, they definitely made back 10 times over easily.
Joseph ChoiSo let me show you this. A lot of app founders I talk to have a feeling their app has viral potential, but don't want to be the person brain rot scrolling an hour a day hunting for formats, or worse, burning thousands on creators shooting videos that just flop. Recently, I've been telling every founder I meet about SpaiTalk. It's basically an AI TikTok viral marketer that I've seen a lot of top app growth teams using. You just paste a link to …
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
- Build your own version of an app that offered you a lowball sponsorshipThe first idea tried took off; app reached ~$100K/month
- Reuse the hook of your best sponsored video to promote your own appRemake got ~500K views, ~20K comments and $5K+ in subscriptions
- Give a big creator half the app: you build it, they post the videosTook the app from zero to ~$100K/month, mostly from the creator's own videos
- Check likes vs views to spot which sponsored videos really went viral2K likes on 2M views means paid boost; 50K likes on 2M means organic
- Remake a winning video again and again, changing only the number and backgroundKept working until the format dried up; only two formats ever made real money
- Film a skit asking a sued company for your cut, then show the stepsFirst skit video made ~$10K+ in revenue; one of only two money-making formats
- Talk about the money viewers can claim, not why the company got suedLawsuit-story videos got views but few signups; payout-focused ones converted
- Ask viewers to comment 'claim' and auto-DM them the app linkAbout 50% of people who comment click the link; 6.7% of downloads pay
- Never say your app's name in the video; just say 'go to this app'Speaker says it keeps videos from reading as ads; no numbers
- On TikTok and Shorts, cut the call to action and name the app in a pinned comment'Link in bio' didn't work on YouTube; shorter videos without it hold viewers better
- Turn the creator's best organic videos into Meta adsOne video ran profitably for a few weeks
- Get five creators to post on the same day to climb the App Store charts$9,700 revenue that day; reached about #70-80 in Finance
- Get creator friends to post for free or ~70% off by trading favorsRates ~70% below list, but some posts still lost money, e.g. a $1,500 one
- Pick an app that fits your steadiest topic: side hustles over saving tipsSide-hustle videos always get 300K+ views; saving-money ones swing 100K to 10M
- Sign creators for a year, exclusive, to film 'Hey Amazon' discount skitsOne creator video drove 300K+ downloads; Casper's version got ~12M views
- Give the developer 15% instead of 50% once your videos have proven they sell
Tags: creator-comp, usage-rights, creative-testing, budget