GTM Sauce

BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app

Ride a TikTok trend of people crying over their low app scores

One creator got ~300M views in a few months, no ads; lower intent than paid

Mixedword-of-mouthorganic-short-video

What they did

An unprompted TikTok trend: users filmed themselves crying when the app gave them low scores. Not boosted by ads. Treated as a lighter, humorous awareness channel alongside paid marketing.

What happened

Huge viral spikes (one creator ~300M views) but lower intent than paid ads or word of mouth.
Stage
scale

In their words

Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra

Play the episode

David BarnardYeah, that is so cool. What's the number two top growth hack, lesson, viral moment?

Anada LakraProbably when it comes to viral things, the second thing that we did, which is ... Again, kind of funny and unpredictable, it's just social media and TikTok. There was this trend that was going around with people crying on TikTok, when the app gave them low scores. And in particular, there was this one creator who ... I don't know, she got 300 million views in a few months or something pretty crazy like that. Again, completely not boosted by ads.

Anada LakraAgain, another really cool way of getting the product in a more lighthearted, accessible way into people's feeds. So we're not just doing this more serious marketing, but we also have these other lighter ways to get in front of people and make them aware of BoldVoice. Of course, when you do humorous content, you're going to get huge viral spikes, but they're not going to have the same level of intent that you can get from paid ads, for example, or word of mouth. Obviously, where you can really target the messaging. But it's still a really nice, I think, machine to have working alongside the paid marketing efforts.

David BarnardWell, for number three then, I want to ask, what is your kind of bread and butter growth tactic? Do you rely on paid ads? What's the bulk of what you put your growth effort into?

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: tiktok, organic-trend, humor, ugc, low-scores