how to get 100,000 installs to your app with $0 budget

0:00 so I buil this app last year and grw to 100,000 downloads in 6 months without a budget and after watching this video you will understand how to grow any app to 100,000 installs without spending any dollars so this video will be broken down into two chapters the first part will be um all the Essential Knowledge that you need to know to grow a mobile app in 2025 and the second part is how I grew my app to $100 downloads and for free last year like the whole journey walk through so part one mobile app in 20125 how to grow it and the essential and the essential LGE and the essential Lo logic so mobile apps in 2025 is like

0:49 e-commerce um don't think about it like a software don't think about it like a unicorn setup that will go IPO it is very unlikely to happen um instead think about it more like a e-commerce business that you'll see on Shark Tank like Scrub Daddy right so you buy a Scrub Daddy B sponge on Walmart and then you use it and if it worn out and you still like it and then you will buy a new Scrub Daddy that's how they make money and that's how you spend the money on Scrub Daddy so very similarly so very similarly U mobile app is like commodity just like scrub Dy nowadays it's like a Goods to be sold on super Market but instead instead of like selling scrub D on Walmart we have selling an app like

1:36 dual lingo um on app store it's a commodity it's like a Goods to be sold to the consumers it's like selling clothes it's like selling like s cups or like selling a fidget spinner on the internet uh imagine how you are selling a fidget spinner on social media right so you have a fidget spinner product and you make a bunch of videos about the fidget spinner or you don't even have to make videos people will make videos about fidget spinner and then people who find those videos on the uh social media feed um they would watch the videos and they think that oh this thing is pretty interesting and they click the Linkin bio on that page likely it leads them to a Shopify or an Amazon checkout page and

2:22 then they buy the product and the product um is is delivered two days later to the to their door to the front door and then yeah and then they can just use it so very similarly that is what happening in the mobile app landscape these days you would have an app and then you would have a lot of content or just any ways that you can put your app in front of people's eyeballs and then people saw it saw the videos luckily on like Tik Tok or Instagram reals and then they think the app is interesting and then they go to the Linkin bio of that page and instead instead of like an Amazon or Shopify checkout page now they're going to an app store uh product page they watch the

3:08 like a description and they install it and then they go through the onboarding and then they will be prompt to sort a free trial or pay directly and then they pay for the product and then they can use it in instantly instead of like waiting for two days and if they like it they will continue to pay for it because it is useful for them if they don't like it they will uh turn or they would request a re refund just very similar to how you're buying e-commerce items these days so um if you're building an app in 2025 learn from the e-commerce guys learn from the drop shippers because they are the ogs of how these kind of things works and there's two types of apps that

3:54 can grow utility apps and social apps I have only Built utility apps so far so I won't cover much about social apps um for utility apps it solves a specific problem like tracking calories like uh quitting quitting porn uh women Beauty routine color analysis the utility should inevitably leads to an innate human desire like tracking calorie what we just said uh leads to Bas basically just Health quitting porn is also about health and then Beauty routine is about Beauty and color analysis is also about beauty if you're building some like a news article bookmarking app for University students it's not going to work because you are you can't reduce

4:42 the problem that your your app solve into a very inate human Desire by the way that's the app that I U me and my confounder built as the first project back in like 2021 it failed and so yeah social app on the other hand it encourages sharing so that's it it encourage sharing that is how it grows it seems not to really make sense because sharing is is um is the means to an end right but uh actually here we are just talking about the growth logic so utility app grows because it solves a problem for the consumers and then it can make an a margin that is how it grows and then this spend you can reinvest your margin on marketing channels and growth

5:28 channels that's how it works and for social app it grows because people share it in order to use it the sharing is embedded to uh the usage itself and it is so interesting or the app itself is so interesting that you just can't help sharing to your friends and ask them to use it like um be real like locket or like Tik Tok Tinder all of them are social apps that relies on sharing to use and so if you're building a social app that doesn't really in incentivize the users to share it and then you're relying on people to come back daily to interact with each other then there's not an engine to grow the user base and it's not likely to work um there's a term called K factors

6:17 so it it basically means how many new users will your social app brings in for every single uh new user and the higher your K Factor the faster the growth of your app compound so since I've only built an utility app I will only talk about my experience from the utility app perspective um but actually on the marketing channel or content perspective growing my app is could also be applied to social app is also what people have been doing for social app as well so to recap um in 2025 app is a commodity you need to sell it to earn a margin on each app and speaking about margin you need to understand um CAC and

7:03 LTV so CAC means customer acquisition cost and it means how much it cost you to acquire a new users for your app so this applies if you are running ads or like um influencer campaign and if you're doing organic growth like um shop on videos which I will cover later on your CAC is basically zero aside from your own labor and time cost which is beautiful and your LTV means lifetime value which means how much how much revenue can you earn from a paying users throughout its life cycle and say an average pay users um will use your app for say 3 months and then until he turns

7:48 or cancels your monthly subscription price is uh $5 each then your average LTV is $15 that means you can earn at most $155 on average $15 from one paying users that is a very important math because you can calculate whether you can scale your growth from by comparing your LTV and your customer acquisition cost and but of course you still have to account for cost like uh text and Sh uh App Store commission which is typically like a 20% for new apps and but excluding that yeah if your l2v is $15 and if your l2v is larger than your CAC you are profitable and but again in this video I'm not talking

8:34 about too much on CAC because the budget our budget is basically zero and lastly um the very important concept you need to understand is channel so many people don't don't understand what even is a channel so Channel means ways to get users and this is also just a e-commerce uh uh terms Channel means how you get um people to buy your products to distribute your distribute product so um shun videos like Tik Tok Instagram reals YouTube shorts they are a channel meta ads is also a channel search ad is a channel influencer sponsorship is a channel ASO is also channel the only difference between channel is CAC so organic Shone

9:20 videos and ASO probably have the lowest CAC um that you can find for mobile apps and meta s have higher CAC so you may ask like then why are people still using High CAC channels like meta ads it's because there's a growth ceiling and scalability issues in C low CAC channels like for Rice uh we use organic shortform videos at as the main uh growth channels and we manag to grow to 100K more installs but it kind of just flat after that amount because you just have like a ceiling for every channels but if you use like a met as then there's not much these kind of scalability issues so that's why since our goal is just to hit 100,000 insults

10:05 for free we'll only focus on the organic shorts Channel and that leads to part two of this video all right so part two um I'm going to share how I crack the organic short channel for rise and so this will all be just a very uh factual walk through of what I did last year for rise and uh let's get started so first of all organic shorts means uh free and homemade inhouse owned internal sh form content um organic basically mean free on my in my dictionary here and inorganic means sponsored mean it is external so shorts means Tik Tok and real or YouTube shorts right and the

10:53 reason that shorts is so important as a channel for mobile apps these days in fact you could find basically any channels other than um other than like uh meta ads no and you can find that basically any channel other than ASO uh relies on short form videos distribution meta ad inevitably you just talking about like a a meta at real or like Tik Tok ads or like um sponsoring influencers what they make they are just making Tik Tok videos right so the reason that short phone videos is so suitable for mobile apps is because um the attention span design is just perfect enough for you to sell a product and then so perfect enough for you to um integrate something into the shop one

11:40 videos and the fact that after watching the video you can just insult it right away from the Linkin B of that creators or that page so the journey from exposing to a product or a marketing material to getting the product is so smooth um much smoother than e-commerce product um so that's why it is so important to master how to use shopone videos as a channel for mobile apps and this that is also why the stock price of appen have grown so ridiculously high these days because mobile apps business just managed to uh grow much faster much more efficient because shop on videos as a Channel or as a paradigm is also

12:27 developing so ridiculously fast these days in last two to three years because the algorith became better and people have a better internet access and their phone became better so they can uh watch more videos they have more screen time so back to the topic um I actually made this video on how to make follow videos on Instagram easily for your app and it covers some factual methodology I used so please watch this one and I'm not going to cover methodology in this video instead I'm going to talk about how I apply those methodology to to rise last year to give you like a walk through now I'm going to talk about what exactly happened to me um last year on how I

13:13 make a rice go farro and how I approach going frro for me last year so there's five steps to use organ sh videos for your app so first you have to start an app official Instagram page and then the second is to come up with three to five content formats the third one is to stop posting uh once daily and the fourth steps is to double down on what works and move away from what didn't work and the last step is to keep evolving on your content format and strategies when you hit a marginal return so here's what happens for Rice those who don't know rice is a

13:58 self-improvement app that gives you a 10 weeks program to improve your life and so my target audience are people who need self-improvement and who need to get their life together and so by understanding this I need to further break down what kind of content would my audience watch on like Instagram or Tik Tok and so that's the the part where you have to uh come up with content formats so content format basically uh so content formats basically means what kind of videos would go vir or would have people enjoy watching on uh on Instagram or on Tik Tok that is also relevant to your Niche so um the way to find cont format is very simple just um become your target audience by following people who um your clar audience will follow if it's self improvement they follow those self- Improvement gurus or Pages if it's like your a booty app they follow like booty creators and then try

14:44 to um see what kind of uh content you would be recommended on Instagram feed or Tik Tok feed and then what you have to do is try to conceptualize them into different categories so for Rice I have I I I managed so here it is uh like March last year I was planning what kind of shorts I'm going to make so I in the end have sorted out four kind of um formats that can be made for rise for example I would have U uh the app official page with some POV videos so this one it means you can just check out this product so they are an Instagram page and then they just have a a hook and a recording of their product and that's a format that they will be looping for entire year without changing anything and that work for if your product is aesthetically Pleasant aesthetically Pleasant and that's also what I try to design R into and then we have anime style uh clips and shorts um we also have like a black and white motivational edits and clips and then we have more creative cinematics fil for Pages uh motivation content so I

15:31 identifi this short content format because I try to became my target audience and in fact I am a target audience so that's what you need to do as well for your products try to come up with like three to five content formats that you can make content from so then the next thing is you should try to come up with um just start to come up with content so it doesn't necessarily have to be about the product for example like this um among these four content only this one is directly relevant to your product and these are not directly relevant but you should somehow integrate your product to the content um uh and I actually made a mistake here so you see that in these four short um formats only this one is about my product and if I can do it again I won't bother to run pages that doesn't is not about my product because it could be appealing to my tget audience but in the end I could not um use them to distribute my product so this would be a waste of time and so if you really can't

16:16 manage to find some format you can just start with um an official page and making PV videos but there's also a lot of other format that can sell your product while um it is not a videos for example like straight interviews for example like um uh what's it called like a skit and still run these pages but try to be try to incorporate a product in some of those content that will also work but the the point is just to come up with content format and the next thing that you want to do so now I'm going to share with you how my content format changed like uh and evolv during last year so here uh this is the first ever post of uh my Instagram page so it's March the 1st of March I haven't even release the app yet I was just testing content

17:01 format so this kind of content was really like a phro those days you have a film footage and then a r caption content and you see that I didn't even talk about rice because uh back then this was not even called rice app. life it was called something like rice. self-growth and the logo I made a new logo other than my app logo because I'm trying to all I'm trying to I want to build a them page and then I can um occasionally promote my product there so all these content they're not about the app and then this is Cinematic edit and it got some likes and there's a huge blockers for growing a real page is that initially you don't get any traction so

17:48 the cold start problem um people say that you have to warm up your pages but sometimes it didn't even work if you warm up so my take is just to stop posting as soon as possible and if you're lucky for example your IP doesn't really duplicate with your previous Pages you can get some organic VI pretty light earlier in early stage like I have another page uh earlier that is running simultaneously with this page I think in the first three videos I already got like a couple thousand views and they are just some really nice anime edits and but it got banned somehow because I was using anime footages so it could happen and for my experience with rice this AG is that all this content it didn't really have much views until one

18:35 uh meme real after that real I got like a a 40 million real uh View and then everything just stopped working so here you see not relevant to rise not relevant to rise and for example here I started to realize that I can't be just making these kind of edits right like this one I use 66 days so it's kind of relevant to rise right now and I actually show apov V footages and this one this is not even about self-improvement I don't know what I was talking about back then but it still got some likes yeah it still got some likes so here I started to realize that I need to be using um my apps footage like this one is bad but um I

19:20 don't get much views anyway so then I talk about habits more often because it's more relevant to my Pro uh to my app and I use like uh this uh task is also something about my my app and then I still don't get much view so what I did next is that I tried to just just steal video from Tik Tok that went viral to test if um it's something wrong with my page or if the content itself because if you steal a fa viral video on Tik Tok and then you put it on your page if it doesn't go fireal and it's very likely something wrong with your page because for example this this content it got 82 likes in the pre previous one it got 29 likes and then this one itself it is a very nice

20:07 video so that it went far it's not about your page anymore um so this one as well it got 92 likes because I also stole it from another Tik Tok page and that's why I keep testing new content like this one I made it myself it's not good so I it only got six likes so then that is a Tipping Point where I started this I launched this I posted this real so this is actually from my brother and laib what a cool guy so laib is building this um MMA fighting AI trainer app amazing product and then I

20:55 use their real as inspiration often and matter of fact don't be too ashamed to steal RS because I got stolen a lot from other Pages like I think Kyle also got some inspiration from my content some occasionally and so it just it's just it is just fine um you should keep evolving that's why I use the term evolving um you can steal people's content every day that's fine as long as it works for you but likely it won't because the algorithm is so Sensi sensitive to novelty and originality if you copy it maybe it would work for one time but you would not be as thorough as the original uh creator for uh for sure and so this one I I saw that holy

21:41 it got 32 million views how come and I I sto it and rewrite the script for rise and then it just works it just works um so then I realized that hey I try to conceptualize why this uh real work much better than my previous real right so I figured out that this is a MIM and people really lik MIM in general as a as a social media content and if Kyo have been using U MIM so much as a as a Content format maybe and Kyo and rice is kind of in a uh similar Niche maybe I can also use MIM so I started to make more camera just died doesn't matter let's continue um so I started to make

22:26 Mims um that is similar to Kyo or just meme in general that is relevant to my product and I think I posted the kungu panda mime somewhere like here and then I see holy I should make more memes and then this one is a MIM it didn't really event phal and then I started to post more Meme and at by that time I think this format was really popular those days like um uh yeah so I make the this made it also viral and then it just talk off compound interest and all the audience that you gathered here and then all the content that you posted before it will have some ripple effect like this one this is post before the kungu panda m

23:13 but people who saw the K Panda mem like right here they find my app and then they watch my other videos it was just like a 10 videos I've posted by then I other than the archive one because some really stupid videos I will archive them and then this one this is the another com content format it's called POV videos it just have a Hulk and then show your product and then uh it also gets a lot of traction here then and then these are the two formats that I was keep looping uh at that time and then this is a meme kind of matched with a POV format and this is a POV format and then um uh POV format MIM p p v format POV

23:59 format you can see that each is the same format once you found a format you can just Lo it and people comment this is a comment automation also another way to get more um traction I really encourage you to do that in the early stage um so uh this is um this is uh POV videos I guess kind of like a PV videos yeah but yeah P videos and the mem and the mem are really cheesy to be honest like very cheesy uh but it just uh work it just kind of works and I sometimes I would be testing new format this is a rating format I would say I have a rating screen or like a screenshot on Rise and turning it into a

24:47 funny little story I pretty like this one I don't know there's a watermark here and but it didn't really worked right comparing with other videos is severely underperformed so this is also PV videos and I was just keeping looping MIM and POV videos and I started to feel the bottleneck for example um here I will be still posting like uh uh POV videos but there's some um uh um Boton next already it although it got a thousand comment but it's not really that much converter because by then I haven't have Android version yet most of the people are Android users who

25:34 really want the app so uh you can see that the likes have been is so there so little like already comparing with the comment so I will be I have feel I have a feeling that um POV videos is uh starting to have marginal return that's where I have to test new format so then I come up with this idea this is called like a I call like a screenshot format basic make a feature in your app that is very interesting you can just make it full distribution actually and then um turn it into a screenshot or make a screenshot of it and then add captions or add interesting story line that can be uh that can um turn the screenshot into the story and then make it a real

26:20 that's it so i s to make it test it didn't really work in the beginning but you have to just test the um the caption it's all about the hul and so this one it get a lot of views so then this format um started to work so I just keep milking over it and I actually have like uh also be posting some POV videos occasionally to to yeah and just uh keep testing and then you see and by here by here the view have also declined a lot like 16 K or 14k so uh this was like a short Peak and then it didn't work much afterwards so I still test it but it's

27:06 still pretty bad so then I I was testing uh other formats like this one it's like a four uh four grid so this is very hard to categorize I would say that it's like between a MIM and like a POV videos kind of and so here's an other format that I kind of made so it's like a what do you call it like a do dock on your main screen so putting four apps here and then put a caption I think um this is something that every app can use but it is you it really relies on novelty like the first couple guys who SED this format format like myself could like um

27:52 could um could have the to rip can rip the profit from this format but if you are like late comers like right now if you still want to post it it's not going to work so then I started to test new formats like this format a for grd habits uh format by my uh very good friend J uh Jack he made he created this format but it didn't really work out for me I would say and then then I try to switch my format to now it's like somewhere between memes it's it's just it's just very much memes right now and but these days I'm also testing new format like a a book quote I can't really come up with ideas on how to like U make this a long-term thing because um

28:38 only This Book quote works like this quote and then this quote is very Sim uh book book page is very similar and they both work but other but but other Pages like these doesn't really work so now I'm still evolving and making new content but there's so much content that you can make BAS basically so you just have to test it and find the best way for yourself um yeah I think that's is basically all the things that I can cover right now um watch the the video that I made last year on how to make real I think that would be very helpful to you so if you have any questions um drop a comment um I will answer them one by one good luck