$35M & over 1M users w/ wild animal tracking app & viral UGC

Pay $17 for a basic bracelet and track an endangered Gorilla, Shark or Sloth via mobile app. They made over $35,000,000 and more than 1M users (140K app downloads/mo).

A wild idea making millions from a viral UGC TikTok strategy:

Fahlo was created in 2018, by Carter Forbes and D.J. Gunter. 10/10 business model.

They sell bracelets/stuffed animals with a unique ID that let you track one endangered animal across the globe (with the app)

Recently, they started a new recurring pricing model: $14.95/mo and you get a new bracelet + surprise animal code every month

Selling online (Amazon, etc) and retail (zoos, museums).

Bracelets sell for $20, plush for $35 10% of profits are donated to wildlife NGO partners

Revenue is > $35,000,000 and estimated to double this year.

App registered +140,000 downloads last month & ranks #61 on App Store

End of last year, this UGC video went crazy viral:

tt@aimeehall46 posted a series of 3 videos about her tracked dolphin => 16,800,000 views

First one was a video of her worried about Bill in the midst of hurricane Milton:

11.2M views, 1.8M likes, 15.8K comments and 81K bookmarks

Most comments are asking about app name:

Then she did two more updating that Bill is alright and etc

This type of viral content on TikTok had been running before

In total, 31,833,100 views over 17 UGC videos. This one got 2.5M views 1 month ago:

Hook => “they sent me a video of my penguin (crying emoji)” + crying audio

Over screenshot of map tracking in-app => 1.1K comments and check this:

Obviously, they’re not physically tracking a new animal every time someone subscribes

So a lot of comments are users surprised they got the same animal

Probably adding some new names for existing tracked locations/images

Still, main account has 159.8M total views (tt@myfahlo)

Most viral videos are all UGC formatted (vs faceless animal ones that get systematically less views)

Hook example – “this guy ordered a glass of water for his animals tracking bracelets so that his seals could swim”

They have been posting non-stop since 2020.

Still riding trends now like this one that I sent out last week on the Maria’s Trend Finder newsletter:


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *