Turn creator videos with 50K+ views into Meta ads; test at $50 a day

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 …

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?

BenjiThere's a two-step approach that we usually take. First is we set a test campaign. So, we spend around $50 a day. We just test whether a specific creative is worth it or not to keep running and to scale up. And if you have a greater than one ROAS or a really high CTR, then you could assume that it's going to probably do pretty well when it's ran as paid ads. So you just gradually scale up the number from there. So, you start off with 50, next day 100, 200, 300. For this ad, we placed around $3,000 in total for this ad before the ROAS became negative. That's why the number of creatives matters a lot when you're running paid ads so that you get more tickets to the lottery.

Pat WallsThank you for showing that and thanks for sharing some of your numbers. I want to switch topics a little bit since you've launched so many apps. For anyone watching this right now, like let's say you had to start over from scratch, what would be your playbook for building a consumer mobile app in 2026?