Snag · B2C · app for finding free stuff nearby
Interview 100 creators, keep the best 10, pay a monthly fee plus per-view bonus
~10% of interviewed creators pass; $1-2K profit per 100K views; one video hit 240K views
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- First four months after launch
In their words
I Built A $30K/Month App: Here's My Exact Process [Idea, Build, Marketing]
Pat WallsThanks for sharing that. Ideas are worthless, but they're also kind of everything. You still got to have a good idea. But if you can launch the HideGPT app and there's 20 other competitors, you need something else. And this is what everyone in the comments are going to say right now, "Starter Story, you don't talk enough about marketing, building is easy now." So let's talk about it.
BenjiSpecifically what we did is we ran UGC campaigns at scale and then turned those creatives into paid ads. So essentially, how this works is you reach out to a bunch of creators first, and then filter them one by one by interviewing them to see whether they have that virality built in them. And typically, we get a 10% conversion rate. So for every 100 creators we interview, we get actually like 9 to 10 good ones. Then you put them on a monthly retainer plus a CPM structure, and then you test them. If they're doing over 50,000 views per video, then those are great videos that you can run on Meta ads.
BenjiSo you can set up test campaigns on Meta ads and then figure out the ROAS on it. So if your ROAS is greater than one, that means you're making money from your app. And Meta ads is not a linear growth structure, meaning that if you're making 10% profit margin when you're spending $100 a day on Meta ads, it does not imply that if you spend 200, then you get 20%, because there's diminishing marginal return. So you have to see whether your ads are …
VideoI seriously can't believe she just put them on Snag for free.
BenjiSo, this video got 240,000 views. What we typically see is with every 100,000 views, we can make around 1 to $2,000 that we can directly make from subscription profits.
Pat WallsThanks for showing that. Kind of shows how simple these videos can be. This video got 240,000 views and I'm sure you created a bunch of other videos like that that also crushed it. You mentioned that then once a video like that works, then you run paid ads on that specific TikTok video. How does that work?
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More from this episode
- Turn creator videos with 50K+ views into Meta ads; test at $50 a dayOne ad took ~$3K of spend before returns went negative; more videos needed to keep scaling
- Film the videos yourself when you can't pay creators; hire an editor on a package dealFilmed thousands of videos for earlier apps; no results given
- Start from the ad pitch, sketch in Figma, then build with Claude Code in hoursGets a working app (no back end) in 4-5 hours; used for 45+ apps
- Charge a few dollars a month for access to free stuff worth hundredsFounder credits it for a very high conversion rate; no rate given
- Email people who cancelled to win them back
- A/B test your paywalls
Tags: tiktok, creator-vetting, creator-comp, retainer, cpm, soft-sell