Suno · B2C · AI music app
Lean into people hating your category to drive comments
Called the easiest way to go viral; no numbers
What they did
What happened
In their words
Drew Levin - I Studied 1,000,000 UGC Ads, This Is What Will Grow Your App
… for a new brand and it's all 10 minute videos and the average watch time of one of his videos was 16 and he drops the cta at the ninth minute and somehow this is working now we need to have a whole section in this interview just about like emerging formats because i think like a lot of people are sort of getting used to the hook and demo and like text on screen and all that stuff like 10 minute long yapping videos is kind of insane so i want to
dig into more of that too but um so you said snag it's like the getting free stuff basically that sounds inherently viral are there any other like interesting examples of like features that inherently go viral that make you see easier yeah so things that like rage bait so like for example like ai stuff if you if you have an ai product you should actually lean into the fact that people hate ai so like suno's done this well if you look at their comment section on their tiktok videos It's all people are like, I hate this, like AI music, like this is so unfair to artists.
You want to get under people's skin a little bit, but also show value. That's like the easiest way to go viral. If you look at like, you don't want to put other brands down, but you want to make it obvious that, you know, like that there's something like peptide companies are doing this too, where it's like, you know, like this is so bad for you, but like you want to make people feel something. The peptide example is interesting because that's like an emerging, what are they like rallying against? Is it just like food industry and like stuff like that? food industry i mean you see all the scanning apps like whether that's you know like olive or like just any food scanning app supplement scanning app there's a thousand of them you look
them up on the app store they're all just doing so well they're leaning into trends all we see so many glp1 companies on side shift now it's like the new biggest probably the most common signups you see is glp1 companies and they're all just doing the same thing just leaning into like i mean the younger generations now are just obsessed with health i'm just gonna google like you don't have to out anyone but i'm just gonna google glp1 apps and …
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More from this episode
- Tie videos to job-market anger: 'I have a master's and can't find a job'Talking-head version got 9.6M views; 6-7 of ~15 early videos hit 150-300K
- Hand creators viral videos to copy; review every post for the first 3 daysCommon to every successful creator campaign he sees
- Hire one manager for every 10 creators to keep them postingEvery long-running successful program has many managers
- Turn the TikToks that already did well into adsCPMs well under $1; also lifts the account's later organic views
- Grow an app mainly by running creator TikToks as adsHit #1 on the App Store, secondhand; cheapest acquisition
- Run creator posts as Meta partnership ads with targetingConverts better than TikTok's boosted creator ads in general
- Have creators post to four platforms; pay for views only on the best oneSpreading among brands; adds reach while hedging pay; no numbers
- Pay creators $800/month for 60 videos, plus view bonuses capped by viewsCPMs fall from $5-8 in month 1 to ~$0.80-0.90 at $100K+/month
- Cap a viral creator's monthly payPaid ~$4K instead of ~$75K for 180M views; creator left
- Pay creators only a share of ad spend or sales, nothing up frontOne creator made 35 videos before earning; hurts loyalty
- Run creator videos as TikTok ads to win B2B customers'Really good results', secondhand; very cheap CPMs
- Post daily 10-minute story videos with the call to action at minute nine'Somehow this is working'; no conversion numbers
- Train your own creators with a 6-hour course on making app videosCreators earn ~$10-15K after 1-2 months; early quality complaints
- Pay creators yourself when a brand fails to pay themExtreme creator loyalty and referrals; costs up to ~six figures/month
- Have creator managers also coach the creators#1 in the App Store music category, secondhand
Tags: tiktok, rage-bait, controversy, ai-backlash, hooks