Nomadtable · B2C · app for meeting fellow solo travellers
Make the videos yourself until they go viral, then hire creators to copy them
First 50-100K downloads from his own posts; now 60-70 creators and 30-44M views a month
Workedorganic-short-videougc-creators
What they did
The founder was the only content maker for months (from pre-launch), posting hook-and-demo videos on his own TikTok and Instagram accounts until he had formats that went viral again and again. He held off hiring because paying creators for unproven formats is useless: they would not know what to make. Once confident (first creators hired in April), he ran the classic high-volume UGC playbook: many creators each posting his proven formats every day. Surface area for luck grows with the number of creators. He started with about 10 creators and now has 60-70, each posting daily on TikTok and Instagram.
What happened
First 50-100K downloads came from his own content. The network (60-70 creators) now drives 30-44M organic views a month and nearly all non-word-of-mouth installs, toward 1M+ downloads and ~$65K/month.
- Stage
- Pre-launch (Pre-launch to scale)
- Effort
- Months of daily solo posting, then ~10 and later 60-70 creators
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Jay Raavi - Copy This UGC Strategy, It'll Make Your App Go Viral“I kind of started off with just making content by myself. Um, I was the only one for a long time. I probably got like the first, I don't know, 50 to 100k downloads from my own content, I would say.”
“I knew that it would be useless to pay creators to make content that if it wasn't like vetted to go viral. So, that's why I just did stuff myself”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Nomadtable: Test every new hook on your own account; give creators only the ones that hitA good hook works for nearly every creator; founder is the top-viewed poster for 2-3 months
- Nomadtable: Run all 60+ creators yourself in a WhatsApp group, with one-on-one feedbackFounder credits hands-on management for much of the success; no numbers
- Nomadtable: Keep a video format if 75-80% of viewers watch past 3 secondsFormats at that rate average 4-5K views and go viral eventually; about one hit a month
- Nomadtable: Borrow a hit text hook from another niche, react on camera, then demo the appHis first viral video, pre-launch; a creator's version got 74K likes and 30K saves
- Nomadtable: 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
- Nomadtable: Pay creators only $1-2 per 1,000 views, after showing them your own viral videosSigned 60-70 creators with no retainer; top creator earned $8K in a month
- Nomadtable: Always be doing something in the opening, like drinking or tying a shoeNo clear impact; dropped
- Nomadtable: Build a 12-15K waitlist before launching a social app, so it isn't emptyAbout 6K downloads on day one; enough people in hotspot cities for it to work
- Nomadtable: Put your face in every early video and share each signup milestoneLaunch users were invested fans who stuck around through early flaws