You know what I have been noticing lately?
More and more, the format itself is becoming the product.
Look at Halo and Yapper (AI video prank apps) on one side, and Evry and Wayk (alarm apps) on the other. They are the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger trend.
Take those two alarm apps that came from the viral “Apple alarm not going off?” TikTok format. Both teams saw the format blowing up and built an app directly on top of it. In just a few weeks they were already doing more than $50K+ in revenue (each).
This trend matters a lot for casual consumer mobile/web apps because many of them are quickly becoming commodities.
Of course a company like Duolingo is not going to zero.
It has brand recognition, distribution, and network effects. Simply cloning Duolingo with the same strategy is not the right move. The real strength is not just the software. There is real research behind the learning system.
But the product structure itself can often be moved to another vertical very quickly. Sideme is a good example of that.
From a TikTok marketing perspective, this approach has clear advantages. The format is familiar so people instantly recognize it. Viewers are more interested. The UX and UI are already proven.
The downside is that you are basically doing free market research for companies like Duolingo that can copy you the same way you copied the format. AI is becoming the ultimate equalizer.
Now let’s go back to the format idea.
Take Halo, or a text to brainrot tool I recently found on TikTok.
Do you know how many SaaS products like this exist? There are dozens (if not hundreds) of wrappers around the same AI models. I have seen many of them appear and disappear.
They have almost no moat. So unless you dominate SEO, the only real way to distribute them is to attach the product to a viral format.
That is exactly what they did. They created a video format that reached more than 6 million views and they keep repeating it.
One thing they could improve is the domain name. SEO sites often use names like “PDF to something”. The same idea works for viral tools/apps. Something like BoyfriendToBrainrot . com would immediately capture the use case.
Another strategy would be to break the product into very specific niche use cases and optimize each one for the format that drives traffic. Everything becomes tuned to increase conversion from the viral format.
In other words, the product serves the format.
And if software can soon be generated infinitely and almost for free, this may actually be the future.
What we are seeing now is just the beginning. The tip of the iceberg. Once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.
You might be thinking, “G, how do I actually make money from this?”
My answer is simple. Every day I scroll for about 30 minutes and I look for gold. What you want to find are untapped formats.
Untapped formats are accounts that repeatedly go viral with the same idea or way of presenting information, but they have not fully monetized it or built a product around it.
Here are a few examples I recently found.
One was around Valentine’s Day. Girls started posting funny websites their boyfriends built for them in a 2010 style design. The format kept going viral again and again. If you moved fast, you could have built a product around it.
Speed matters more than ever in a world where nothing is very defensible.
Another example is a creator making videos about commenting on Hinge prompts. The execution is excellent and I have not seen many others doing it yet. It is easy to repeat and clone, and several “rizz” style apps could easily be built around that format.
Then there are formats where many accounts are doing the same thing and all of them keep going viral. I am not even sure what product should be built there yet, but statistically it is a strong and scalable format.
This is why research matters so much. If you find the insight before everyone else, you move faster. Being first is becoming more and more important as we move toward a world of infinite software generation.
When software can be generated instantly, many products start behaving like infoproducts. Timing and distribution become the most important factors.
Formats themselves are not defensible either. Do not fool yourself. The only real advantage is your ability to spot the next format faster than everyone else.
For example, someone on our team created this format below that quickly got adopted by almost every language learning app.
It ended up generating billions of views. Yes, billions.
How much did we capture from it? Probably just a few percent. It still brought a lot of downloads.
This whole game is similar to quant trading. Your trades get picked off by algorithms and arbitrage players.
Your formats get picked off by competitors doing the same thing.
But human traders still make millions by spotting the right opportunity before everyone else.
So you cannot complain about it. You just have to keep getting better and faster.
It really is a brave new world.
Best,
G
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