Nomadtable · B2C · app for meeting fellow solo travellers
Film one-take hostel videos with clickbait hooks like 'never staying in a hostel again'
Up to multi-million views, but poor engagement (300K views, 174 likes); dropped
Mixedorganic-short-video
What they did
One-take reels shot inside real hostels: zoom in on a fellow guest, then back to the phone showing the app. Clickbait captions such as 'so this random girlie in my hostel just showed me this and I'm never staying in a hostel again lol' or 'the hostel volunteer is definitely getting fired for showing me this'. The hostel background stops the target audience scrolling and looks nothing like an ad. But the video does not deliver on the hook (viewers expect something gross and get an app), so views come without engagement. Posted a lot, until his trip ended.
What happened
Lots of views (300K on one reel, multi-millions on some, which drove good downloads) but terrible engagement: 174 likes and 8 comments on 300K views. He stopped: the engagement was poor and it needs you to be staying in hostels, so creators can't copy it.
- Effort
- Posted many times (host: 'hundreds') over a months-long trip
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Jay Raavi - Copy This UGC Strategy, It'll Make Your App Go Viral“Like, 174 likes with 300k views is like is like horrible. [laughs] So, one thing that I learned, um, that other people might be able to like, you know, take some advice from, benefit from, is, um, don't fall down like the view trap”
“But, I'm not delivering on the hook very well, 'cause it's just a clickbait thing. So, I think that's why the engagement is so bad”
“Um, but just I stopped doing them, because it's just not scalable. I'm not I'm not staying in hostels all the time anymore.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- Nomadtable: Put your face in every early video and share each signup milestoneLaunch users were invested fans who stuck around through early flaws