Train 2-10 creators until one goes viral, then scale to hundreds

Pat WallsAll right, let's talk about the distribution side of things. What do some of those numbers look like? Like, how much reach and distribution do you need to have an app to hit over $100,000 a month?

NicoleFor Glam Up, we built it 2 years ago. At that time, we were doing faceless UGCs. At our peak in a month, we got around 40 to 50 million views on TikTok, and I think around 200 million views on Instagram. For Sprout, late last year, we were doing an average of 100 million monthly views. We actually had a 7-day period where we got a total of 400 million views, which is insane. And during our most, like, scaling era, I would say we were managing around 200, maybe a bit more, active creators at the same time.

Pat WallsThat is crazy. This is the reality of building a consumer app. You really do need to reach an insane amount of people. I'd love if you could just break down this sort of distribution strategy. If you had to start over from scratch today with a new consumer app, which a lot of people are watching our channel are building in consumer, what would be your playbook? What would be your steps to getting it to where some of your apps have been?

Nicolebut obviously, if you have capital, you can do paid ads, influencer marketing, but I would say in order to find the viral strategy, try all of these maybe around 2, 3 weeks at a time, and every time you try a new strategy, really milk the hell out of it. For example, if you are doing faceless content, you can try slide shows, you can try videos, you can try different ways that you can do the slide shows.

NicoleYou know, there's so many things that you can try within one category, and just keep iterating and keep testing until you find one. Second is the proper UGC system. One thing that's really important, though, no matter what you do, is you need to have a deeper understanding of your app and your content more than your creators do. To get started, either you can just be your own UGC creator, but let's say if you are uncomfortable doing that, then

Nicoleyou can just onboard 2 to 10 creators, train them until they go viral. Once you find that, then you can scale it and build out a proper system. So in order to build a system out, there are a few steps. Step number one is sourcing. Whatever you do, you need to try to find the creators that fit your content strategy. For example, if it's talking head, you need to find creators that are good at yapping, they're good at talking.

NicoleIf you're doing reaction videos, you need to find creators that are really good at facial expressions. And over here, you have inbound and outbound. For inbound, you can do application forms. Put out inbound application forms in UGC group chats on Instagram, on Reddit, or on websites like Slasher. For outbound, you can hire some VAs to do outreach to micro-influencers. And step two,

NicoleAnd this is completely tailored to our app. First, we have a Typeform, and then I do a bunch of videos and modules to train our creators. Here's a little example of how a module would look like. For example, when it comes to creating content, I will walk them through the content bank that we have, and we always have a quiz at the end of each module just to quality check on the creators and make sure that they have completed the course.

NicoleAnd then third step is the management. So some apps, they hire influencers to manage UGC creators. Some other people, they will hire their top UGC creators, bring them on more full-time to manage the rest of the creators. Some apps, they will manage them via Discord chats. You can have bi-weekly feedback calls, monthly feedback calls, whatever it is. Eventually, you'll have to figure out a system that works for your working style and the content strategies that you have.

NicoleAnd then step four is once you're big enough, it's time for you to systemize and optimize even more. For example, you can start a referral system for all of your UGC creators, you can have dashboards to analyze the growth and analytics. So there are a lot of things that you can optimize and play around with when you're at that point. I think all in all, it's really important to turn virality into a system and a process. It might be lucky at the …