We picked our favorite growth strategies of 2025.
They might not be the top performers or the highest converting ones, but each of them stood out to us.
They earned our editorial pick because there was something truly special about them.
FocusFlight
FocusFlight launched a mass faceless CPM strategy on TikTok, flooding the platform with hundreds of near identical videos at the same time.
Users were encouraged to create a video and only paid by signing up for a free subscription if they hit a specific view count.
Every video was branded with #focusflightchallenge.
Simple faceless StudyTok style demos helped drive more than 200K downloads, perfectly aligned with the back to school moment.
The app itself is highly polished, and interestingly, it is a Chinese app.
OCSN
OCSN is run by top tier growth engineers who scaled the Status social app to hundreds of thousands of downloads and truly understand niche algorithm marketing.
They nailed a clear social identity built around Original Characters, fandom, and roleplay.
By tapping into a deep existing subculture, they were able to dominate attention and funnel it straight into their product.
They also appear to have brought on the solo founder of Fitdrop, known for mastering wall of text videos that pulled in millions of views.
What really sets the OCSN team apart is how well they activate power users, grouping them in Discord, building hype, and creating strong referral loops.
Tone AI
Tone’s strategy received less attention than we expected, even though it operates at an insane Machiavellian scale.
The approach is simple. It is a massive top of funnel play built on high volume and low conversion. Everything is optimized for hundreds of millions of views and fast account growth using one repeatable format.
In most cases, huge view numbers come from repeating the same format over and over.
Some accounts posted up to 12 times per day, both faceless and on camera.
Even with weak conversion rates, the sheer volume of views makes installs add up quickly.
POV Camera
This one likely doesn’t work anymore — but it was legendary and deserves its place here.
They pushed 67M views across 11 unbranded accounts using just 3 hooks and a single repeatable system.
That machine generated 3.9M shares (at the time of coverage) and roughly $150K in recurring revenue.
“I’m still shocked about this unconventional wedding idea.”
“I went to a wedding that people still talk about 9 months later.”
“The entire internet is buzzing about this unconventional wedding.”
Every video followed the same structure:
an AI character narrating the exact same story, layered over stock footage, all programmatically generated at scale.
No brand. No variation. Just brute-force distribution and repetition.
Today, this is extremely hard to replicate successfully due to saturation and platform shifts — but as a case study in high-volume, systemized storytelling, it was flawless.
Nomadtable
With over 100 creator accounts, Nomadtable is a solo founded, solo operated indie social app. It now gets more than 200K downloads every month. Technical founder Jay is moving fast and winning in the space.
Here are a few more direct promotion hooks.
Huge respect for this founder. We wish him a gazillion more downloads in 2026.
And when it comes to indie founders, another one of our favorites is:
PandaExtract
Run by a couple, this web scraping Chrome extension gets most of its users from short form video marketing. It is not an obvious channel for this type of app, yet it works incredibly well when you truly master it, like Floor has, especially while no one else is doing it.
They repeat the same format over and over, adjusting it to new trends, hooks, and styles.
They are a big inspiration, and hopefully many indie and bootstrapped founders can learn from what they are doing.
Finally, and even though we could keep going forever because there were so many smart and creative strategies this year, we will end with just one last example.
MindGrasp
What really sets them apart is how they scaled the “Angry Professor” format across multiple accounts and reached nearly a billion views, all without using AI.
They also consistently bake one of their app names directly into the video itself, making it a central part of the content.
Another smart move was grabbing domains like ihatereading.com, savemygpa.com, and ratemyprofessor.com, then using them as simple hooks that also generate revenue.
This shows how one strong content format can unlock multiple app ideas.
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As mentioned earlier, we could honestly keep going. We covered over 400 apps and their strategies. Next year, we plan to cover at least three times more and share even more insights you can use in your everyday marketing.
Happy new year of viral videos and apps.
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