Many founders and marketers out there still think that faceless short-form content only works for certain apps or niches with platform-specific visuals.
Drawly’s story is here to prove that those limits are really just in your head.
This simple drawing app is blowing up on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok, having pulled in over 122 million views.
Yet, they never show a face.
Drawly is actually a social drawing app, where you can draw in multiplayer rooms.
You open the app, pick a lesson, and start drawing with a friend or a stranger in real time.
It lives somewhere between chill sketching and party game energy.
They are scaling fast, and their MRR has doubled in the past weeks. In the last 30 days, they’ve pulled in 80,000 downloads and $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue (App Store and Google Play).
Drawly runs on freemium model with a quick paywall right after a (very) short preview.
Pricing is $4.49 weekly, $8.49 monthly, or $44.49 annually. As they hustle for new users, they’re now offering a special discount of $19.99 for the first year.
A multi-platform engine
Drawly is now running 55 faceless accounts and spreading views across all three major short-form platforms.
- 33 TikTok accounts → 24.3M views
- 12 Instagram accounts → 38.2M views
- 10 YouTube accounts → 59.4M views
That is 122M total views since they started uploading in July.
You can check all of them here: https://app.shortimize.com/c/2b10IQmJJv4E7M
Some of these accounts are branded as digital artists…
…others like real user-generated-content.
None of them show any faces.
And they are all posting an average of one video per day.
Drawly uses the same core format across every account and platform, the “tablet and pen” format we first covered in April.
It’s nothing but an app demo, recorded from an iPad. Then you do what you can to take it from just a boring drawing to an entertaining watch, optional side of drama.
This is their go-to for every single video.
With their multi-player feature, they have an amazing opportunity to include this drama element easily. So that’s when they pulled off this variation where the creator is drawing in real-time with a stranger.
It usually goes like this: the stranger picks a style, the creator copies it.
The video below pulled in 20 million views on October 19th on Instagram Reels.
It’s enough to get the comment section flooded with comments of people asking for app name.
What’s incredible with this kind of strong visual hooks is that without even trying, they attract the attention of people from all corners of the world, no translations needed.
The exact same video pulled in 7.6 million views on YouTube Shorts and 806,000 views on TikTok.
Another version that went viral everywhere recently is one where the stranger is drawing super slowly and the creator asks him to speed it up. The story unfolds on-screen.
On October 25th, one of these videos secured 5.4M views on Instagram Reels.
Once again, the exact same video did 457,000 views on TikTok and a very similar variation racked up 3.1M views on YouTube Shorts.
The Drawly team is no stranger to engagement farming either.
In this video, they hook the user with “My iPad broke”, and continue on the story through text pointing out how the whole screen is grey and sharing their partner is suggesting they might be colorblind.
Comments pour in with hypotheses on what’s wrong and recommendations on how to fix.
Sometimes, you have to test a hundred different formats before one finally works. Other times, you strike gold early, but then you need every trick and hack you can find keep it fresh enough to beat content fatigue and copycats.
Whatever app you’re building, don’t underestimate the power of visual hooks. Drawing, cheating, love, heartbreak…whatever it is, stories are timeless if you manage to trick the viewer to stay and care about how they unfold.
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