We’ve met some consumer founders in the past couple of weeks doing incredible MRR scaling on strategies we’ve detailed on Twitter and socialgrowthengineers.com.
We’ve built the largest repository of consumer app strategies, available for free here:
Welcome if you’re new here :).
We’re a bunch of growth hackers sharing insights on organic marketing strategies to grow consumer apps (and sometimes B2B apps).
The Widget War
In the app world, consumer social apps have always been at the forefront of TikTok marketing.
Within the consumer social vertical, we’ve noticed an increasing number of social widgets battling it out, most of them with incredible TikTok marketing strategies.
I’ve covered Yope, CoupleJoy, Locket, Airbuds.
What makes them succeed in gaining views is that they tap into both loneliness and the bf/gf/bff triggers while targeting younger audiences.
They are optimal apps for TikTok marketing. Studying them gives many insights on app ideas and strategies.
Locket unlocked a niche that quickly became competitive. Who will win remains a million-dollar question.
From what I’ve seen, Yope and CoupleJoy have completely outperformed Locket lately with these strategies. They took it to another level.
Look at these stats from Yope (October until now):
What’s interesting is that they’re targeting different language markets—primarily Spanish/Latam. And expanding at a great pace. Their top three videos are in Spanish.
There are also more apps, like Widgify and Mico, that are single-player widget apps focusing on aesthetic strategies.
Hook Testing
When launching new apps on TikTok, we consistently test dozens of hooks.
Our approach is simple: we conduct a research period by sourcing competitors and other UGC accounts in the space, while consistently monitoring accounts we know are valuable in the niche.
We’ve created countless collections on Shortimize while digging through strategies and extracted some hooks that are now available on Social Growth Engineers’ website.
Targeting the right audience and tone of voice is crucial for finding something that resonates.
Glam AI, which we featured here, discovered a hook that consistently outperformed the rest:
This “never saw myself with the right makeup routine ????” a hook that generated 150M views.
Let’s take another example with Turbolearn:
“My Harvard professor literally freaked when he found this… ????” and “I swear my lecturer almost had a HEART ATTACK when I showed him this ????”
Those hooks are extremely similar.
They use a “lecturer” persona with drama-triggering phrases like “freaked out” or “HEART ATTACK,” along with similar language such as “lowkey” and the “????” emoji.
This proves that once you find the right hooks, you can reuse and iterate on them.
However, if a hook is this powerful, it’s likely to be copied and saturated, meaning you’ll need to find a new one constantly.
Once you have some working hooks, micro improvements become essential. Topical hooks can have a great impact.
For example, both Coconote’s creator Sid and Turbolearn used Luigi Manglione news in two extremely viral videos.
In these cases, the app is either featured as a detail in the video or the subject/viral news is used in a comedic way.
That’s what makes it so viral.
Beyond news, there are trends. Looking at Coconote again, the hashtag #womeninmalefields was used in two of their most viral videos, including their top video, which made 41M views and 500K bookmarks.
We started a newsletter that alerts you when we find a new viral audio or trend on TikTok.
You can subscribe here: https://tiktoktrends.beehiiv.com/subscribe
There are many more slight, yet important details. One creator, after experimenting 100 times with the same format, found that holding a fruit increases engagement:
Faceless Studytok videos are all about details:
Some apps are reportedly driving hundreds of thousands of users with these faceless videos.
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