Lovely · B2C · couples love-note widget app
Copy a rival app's viral demo video; build the feature in a day if needed
~20x more downloads per view than slideshows; several videos passed 1M views
Workedorganic-short-videofeature-development
What they did
While scrolling the couples niche, Jack saw a competitor's video going viral on TikTok showing a lock-screen-style shared drawing. He turned Lovely's existing shared whiteboard into a 'presentation mode' in a day and started posting the next day: 8-10 second videos of him using the app, ending on the app itself, with native-sounding captions ('tag the one', 'may this type of love and care find you'). Went from 2 to 3 posts a day on TikTok, then posted the same videos on Instagram. He didn't analyze why it worked: 'if it's going viral for them, I can make it go viral for me.'
What happened
The fifth TikTok hit 490K views; the first Instagram Reel got 300K and several passed 1M, all within two weeks. He estimates it converts ~20x better than the 2x2 slideshows. With the viral tweets, Lovely reached ~102K users, ~$10K proceeds and ~$4.2K MRR in ~10 weeks.
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- 2-3 posts a day for ~2 weeks
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Jack Friks - He Went From Struggling to Make $1 From His App to Turning Down $1M“And then I saw a competitor, another couples app making videos that look like this, very basically exactly like this. I made the feature in a day, and I put it out there, and I started making videos the next day with this format.”
“It's a shared whiteboard feature I already had in my app, I just made it a presentation mode.”
“So, this obviously converted like 20 times better than the 2x2 slide shows, and this is kind of where I've iterated to at this point.”
“I knew if it's going viral for them, I can make it go viral for me, so I didn't have to think about why it's working.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Curiosity Quench: Scroll your niche on TikTok for 15 minutes a day and save what's going viralHow he found every winning format, though the first 100-200 days showed little
- Curiosity Quench: Copy a viral 4-picture slideshow, add your app's images, and post it 400 times5M+ views, up to 1,000 downloads a day, and a $15K month; faded after ~3 months
- Curiosity Quench: Post a daily talking-head video demoing your appSome blew up, but downloads were inconsistent; ~50-60 a day
- Curiosity Quench: Swap your confusing in-app shop for a standard paywall with a free trialRevenue rose from $500-1K to $2-4K a month
- Curiosity Quench: Schedule a week or two of videos at once to every platformDaily posting dropped from ~1 hour to 10 minutes; the tool became its own business
- Doof: Reuse your proven meme slideshow for a new app, naming it only in the captionOne post hit 5M views; app reached $1,000 in its first 30 days
- Lovely: Tweet your launch with a public goal, then quote-tweet every update40K downloads overnight, 10K from Russia in a day; added $2-3K MRR
- Lovely: Drop the hard paywall and go freemium after bad reviews
- Lovely: Post one relationship TikTok a day from an old phone set to a US VPN150K views brought only 100-200 downloads; replying in comments didn't help
- Lovely: Pay people to post your winning video format on 20-40 accountsJust started; $1,000 spent so far, no results yet