– overheard Guillaume yelling in the office.
We’ve coined a new term:
Everyone seems obsessed with quick conversions… might be our fault, we’re talking too much about views & mrr on Twitter…
…however; it has never been more important to build a distribution moat.
Hacking others’ network effects has been the most effective early stage strategy since the ice age:
Airbnb with their now history book famous Craigslist growth hack is an obvious example.
There’s a concept called a “Vampire Attack” on someone’s network effect. It’s basically when you go an steal part of someone else’s network (got big in web3).
There is a better; more “accessible to everyone” attack in today’s media and social landscape. We called it:
The Tapeworm Attack:
It consists of making a lightweight version of your product OR a media information unit related to your product, inside one (or more) large streaming/social platforms — TikTok, Reels, YouTube, or Twitter…
Also works on messaging platforms; you might have seen OpenAI with their WhatsApp integration, and now Perplexity too, with their Telegram one.
In media and social; Autopilot finance with the Nancy Pelosi Tracker is a masterclass of info+memetic tapeworm attack.
There are many many more outstanding examples.
So far we’ve logged 4 main ways to run a Tapeworm attack on TikTok/Reel:
> Build a lightweight version of your product: take an AI companionship language app, for instance: create channels (accounts) for each target language with your very specific UI.
> Build up informational accounts: the Oasis water app is a great example of an informational account on Reel, rating water composition, often over a greenscreen of the app.
Two others are faceless couple questions and astrology:
> Build your influencer fleet from the ground up: ambassador strategies that engineer an influencer you’ll fully control.
Take Airbuds or Locket for instance: they’re generating a massive number of daily views on TikTok, every single day through a horizontal account scaling.
And there is more way: memes, pure entertainment…
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Down the road this helps you to mint your own views and control your own destiny.
Faceless pages, ambassadors, informational, educational, memetic, long form, short form, text, video: there are so many entrance points.
That’s your distribution moat.
That’s the costless CPM you’ve been dreaming about (we should probably also trademark “costless CPM”).
Be more like Warren Buffet:
99% of your views will happen in the future.
Investing in algorithmic social platforms compounds your views the way the stock market compounds your dollars.
One account we run has 40M+ views.
It took 2 months to hit 1M views… then 5M views in a week… then 24M views in the past two weeks.
And if this format continues to rock, it’ll generate many… many more views in the future.
Algorithmic-powered accounts. They build up and exponentiate.
» Median views go up
» 10x viral rate increases
» 25x viral rate increases
» Back catalog gets more views
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll get decent views today, even with a fresh account. And if you’re good, in a few weeks you can get profitable on new accounts.
As you optimize content formats and hooks: that’s when the true 100x value happens.
Look at this girl, she built up an account over 18 months, which now has millions of views.
Then she made an app and turned it into $70K MRR.
Social growth engineering + Horizontal scaling => MOAT for your app/product.
And god knows we’re going to need more MOATs soon (thanks… OpenAI…..).
Good start vs bad start
New account, who dis?
What’s a good start and what’s a bad start — so you know when to give up or when to double down:
A good start is:
> 8/10 videos
> High view variation (2/3x median)
> 1 video at 10x median
> Most videos have comment “what’s the app”
> Every video has 10+ bookmarks
A bad start is:
> 20 videos
> Low Median
> No view variation
> Never go above 1K ceiling
> Low comments / bookmarks
This isn’t science.
It’s a rule of thumb we got from launching 500+ accounts from scratch.
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See you soon,
The Social Growth Engineers Team.
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