GTM Sauce

Pingo AI · B2C · AI language speaking app

Make viral videos for learners of Russian

About half of new users came from Russia and couldn't pay; Russian content killed

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What they did

Russian-language creator content went very viral, but mostly among native Russians (one UK-based creator had 90%+ Russian viewers). Apple, Google Play and web payments are blocked in Russia by sanctions. Now checking creators' language and viewer geography when recruiting, and working on making videos viral among learners rather than native speakers.

What happened

Around half of new users (e.g. ~12,500 of ~23,000 new Android users) were Russian and couldn't pay: spend on views that never monetized.

In their words

Morrie Schonfeld - How I built a $500k/mo ai app (so you can just copy me)

Play from 27:28

Morrie Schonfeld… for and where they're based, and kind of trying to like guess their geo-target as best as possible. So this is our new users this month. This is iOS on the top. This is Android on the bottom. Pretty like healthy. Like the big spike here, we went really viral around here. These videos kind of died off around here. But if we look at the breakdown So this is Android on the bottom here. Look at the breakdown of Russian users. It's like half Russian.

27:28

Morrie SchonfeldSo like, you know, 10, a little over, that's 12,000 users. That's like 23,000 users. There's 12 and 1/2 of those 23,000 users are from Russia. 5,000 of those 12,000 users are from Russia, and it tapered off a bit cuz we killed our Russian content here. But our Russian content was working really well, and so we got half our user base from Russia. So a huge spike in Russian users, a lot of virality. They converted well, like we got a lot of users. It was like really exciting until then we kind of realized, oh, wait, like they're not converting well,

27:59

Morrie Schonfeldand we completely forgot that you can't transact in Russia. Google Play blocks it. Apple blocks it. You're not allowed to do web payments. Like you're not allowed to do business in Russia. And so these were like kind of like dead users. Like it was just a lot of spend on views that did not monetize at all.

28:16

Joseph ChoiAre you able to control that just through the content itself, or is it something about the location that they post from?

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Tags: geo-targeting, sanctions, unmonetizable-users, russian