We’ve gone viral on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X—without spending a dime on paid marketing.
Growth hacking on social platforms is our bread & butter.
In The Social Growth Engineer newsletter, we share actionable, viral organic growth strategies every two weeks (or so).
Welcome if you just landed here!
Last week was stressful—we thought TikTok was getting banned.
So, we extracted 46,606 hooks from 1,000 TikTok accounts we were tracking for the Viral TikTok Tracker (link to sheet at the end).
But first—
We’ve collected our favorite formats for solo founders making apps. These generated millions of views and helped them bootstrap their apps:
Three Best Solo Founder TikTok/IG Formats
There are three ways to do a solo or bootstrapped founder IG/TikTok viral account:
Informational Demo Founder-story
Informational
Our favorite one. It’s about generating educational / informational content within your niche.
Founders sleep on this one a lot. It’s the strategy that ripples long-term while also being effective short-term.
A great example is the Oasis Water app (38M views):
By growing such an account, you essentially create a “media” page within your vertical.
Using your own product as a background asset in the video content, you naturally create an authentic acquisition machine.
The solution is nested with the problem.
Oasis’ founder averages 30K views per video and has multiple viral hits. He’s making tens of thousands of $ a month from this. Solo.
In most cases, you’re building a product you already have expertise in so it’s rather effortless to turn your domain knowledge into your own little media machine.
Demo
The faceless demo format is a great way to get into short form video content.
If you have a “disruptive” (or just different enough) app, film your phone giving a tutorial or showcasing the app/website with catchy hooks and story lines.
Repeat this daily with slight tweaks, study retention rates to improve hooks and edits. Eventually, you will crack the code for viral demo videos.
Dump Phone shows how it’s done:
His best videos did 10K+ bookmarks, and netted him thousands of downloads:
It’s accessible and it’s faceless. Give it a try.
Founder-story
The last one, is the explanatory format.
“I built an app…” format works on both IG and TikTok.
The founder of this fit-check app nailed it, repeatedly:
Use long text overlays to tell why you built the product: like “X and Y had a baby.” or story tell why and how you’re building the app.
It’s optimal for social or Gen Z-focused apps (also works for other types of apps).
In the case above, he’s doing 7-second videos with a long story text over himself frantically moving around.
One “talking head” variation by Josh Rozin, where he pitches his new app, following the same “X and Y had a baby” narrative than above:
One more edited variation by Miquel, where he built an account showcasing his team building the app live. With this strategy, he got 1M+ downloads and #1 in Spain:
Post daily, or multiple times a day, tweak, and let the algorithm do its thing.
First Content-Market fit, then Product-Market fit
The idea of finding a content-market fit before building a product is fascinating to me.
For a founder, the hardest part can be distribution.
If you already have a niche audience – a newsletter, Twitter following, or TikTok channel – you have unlimited user access.
Obvious in retrospect, powerful in practice.
We’ve done both ourselves. Shipped products without and with content-market fit.
Sustaining content-market fit takes time, but makes your life much easier.
I’m not talking about pyramid-like LinkedIn-or-YouTube Guru-style content to sell worthless info-products.
I’m talking about selling actual apps and software through pre-established social/media pages.
We recently featured this TikTok account:
They found a content format first in a niche and repeatedly went viral.
From there, they built an app and funneled the traffic to it. The algo juice they have is strong, and future videos will perform. Giving them a consistent source of traffic.
They might not have known they’d launch a product before launching the content.
But by reversing the process, you can establish content credibility within your vertical(s) and then deploy software to sell around it.
An audience needs to be established within the niche you’re creating products for.
Even “build in public” tech Twitter influencers like Marc and Tibo mostly push products to audiences that’s other “build in public” founders.
They’re essentially leveraging to maximize their established impressions.
And that’s okay.
Most of the time, you’ll stick to the vertical where you have expertise or an unfair advantage.
So if you want to reverse-engineer this as a business model:
» Build pages around specific niches
» Beat the algorithm with the content
» Reach content-market fit
» Launch a product in the niche
» Keep the same content with a CTA
A new Twitter/X Tracker Account
We built an App Store Tracker internally that we’ve been using for a while now.
Maria toyed with the idea of making a new automated account first (we’re already operating the Viral TikTok Tracker account) and convinced me to ship it.
We launched it the day before yesterday and it’s already followed by 1,400 people.
We made this just cuz we love to see new apps popping up:
You can find it here: https://x.com/appstoretracker.
46,606 TikTok Hooks and 50 viral patterns
So we thought TikTok would be banned so we extracted 46,606 hooks from 1000 brand consumer app TikTok accounts.
Using AI, we categorized the accounts into 25 categories and 155 subcategories based on their captions.
There’s a LOT of insight here for finding viral hook inspiration.
After analyzing the data, we identified 50 viral patterns (save this for later):
Get access to the spreadsheet directly here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z8fx1FE18sVmZFVWr1u0rADXgYxJHM5z2VCVFUf3zjc/edit?gid=0#gid=0
…
That’s a wrap.
Make sure to share the newsletter with your friends & family: https://socialgrowthengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe
If you don’t follow us on Twitter/X yet, we’re posting daily about TikTok marketing strategy breakdowns, and other organic marketing ideas.
Guillaume’s profile: https://x.com/iamgdsa
Maria’s profile: https://x.com/themariaines
Until next time.
The Social Growth Engineers team.
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