Every December, TikTok fills up with one kind of content: the kind that makes you believe it’s time to create a plan to become a “better version” of yourself starting January 1st.
That is when New Year’s resolutions spike.
1 Second Everyday turned that instinct into a simple, repeatable format.
The app lets users build a video diary by recording one second every day.
They pulled a winning format idea for their app from a 2020 video that blew up to 15 million views:
“Happy new year. here’s an idea starting tomorrow. Take a one second video everyday starting January 1st, and at the end of the year, you’ll have a 6 minute video of your whole year. I did it in 2020.” -> 15M views & 327K saves.
Then, one year later, @1secondeveryday adapted it into their main page and went viral:
“This is your reminder to film a one second video every day starting January 1st. At the end of the year you”l have a 6 minute video of 2022.” -> 8.2M views, 130K saves, and 11K+ comments.
They made the format brutally clear:
A quick selfie video.
A big centered hook.
A promise with a deadline.
Starting January 1st: do X daily, get Y by the end.
That template kept pulling in millions of views, helped them pass 100K followers, and still fits naturally on TikTok even years later.
The tradeoff, of course, is that nothing on hook points to an app.
It definitely helps them reach a million views, but it makes driving real conversions harder since the content stays mostly mainstream.
This one format helped drive their TikTok account past 50M views. And it is easy to do with UGC, founders, or even random clips.
Creators just stand there and let the hook do the work.
Any consumer app that depends on daily repetition can steal this.
Just swap “record 1 second” with your smallest daily action, and make the payoff tangible.
Examples for learning apps:
- “On Jan 1st, learn 1 word a day. By Dec 31 you’ll have 365 words you can actually use.”
- “On Jan 1st, do 1 micro-lesson a day. By the end of the year you’ll have a full skill streak.”
- “On Jan 1st, practice 1 minute a day. By the end of the year you’ll have 6 hours of proof.”
You can take a look at this viral strategy on Shortimize:
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