How to Make Viral Short-form Videos for Your App (15M+ views)

0:00 everyone this is deson and welcome to this mini course so you're here probably because you want to make F RS for assas and I'm going to share everything I know on how I make RS for my so I'm going to just show you the results of my reals so that you know that I'm not lying this is my mobile apps it's called rise this is a happy app and then the rules that it gots um it could the most f one is up to 13.8 million uh views yeah so this is the one and there's also other five RS another one is um almost 1 million view with almost 50k people asking for the links and then yeah this is the Google analytics dashboard and from Instagram alone we have more than 35k visitors and yeah all from Instagram so right um

0:48 chapter zero the things that you have to know about when making reals the first thing is is that you have to know that I use shs to encapsulate these three platforms Instagram rules Tik toks and YouTube shorts they all short form videos and are you short to encapsulate them because they are basically the same thing they have the same platform logic uh you can repost the same content that you make on Instagram to other uh platform that's how I do it but they but they repurposing without uh twerking something don't usually work well for me my other content on Tik Tok and on YouTube TRS doesn't work as well as in on Instagram because the Alo form prefer different kind of content um for for example for reals uh it have sets more kind of d divers kind of content entertainment educational content or

1:33 like other kinds of sort of videos it is the most diverse type of algorithm in terms of shorts and there's no specific culture that you prefer because it didn't band uh other regions like India and Hong Kong just like Tik Tok did so that that's why it leads you that Tik Tok is more us cultural centered it's more us us culture based so that a lot of things that could go viral are more inclined to the US audience so that's the thing if you're not based in us it is particularly uh harder to go follow on Tik Tok that's my observation and for YouTube shorts is more localize your language so that you are inclined to see more shorts that are recorded by the your local influencers or accounts and if faor more kind of face videos which means that um if you don't have your have faceless videos maybe you make uh insane edits without showing your face

2:20 then you're less likely to go viral and it is more entertainment focused but these are all just my speculations from being from making so many shots yep so this is the very basic concept that you have to know before proceeding all right so on chapter one I'm going to talk about what it takes to go vir what makes a real or what makes a short when FAL so the thing is if you find this uh chapter difficult to understand you can skip this because it doesn't matter a lot if we go to the next chapter we're going to talk about more handson strategies but this is more about like a overview or like breaking down the concepts and theories behind what makes a real fire and that's just my take so um yeah as highlighted here you can see short is all about culture and subculture culture here not doesn't just means like race or nationalities it

3:05 means like um a more generic way of seeing life is your life experience or like um the things that you perceive as a human being that is culture and um that's the the the the nature of short video it can uh represent a lot of stuff it's not like a full YouTube video where you expect like a lot of value packed together short is all about attention and attention that resonates to your culture then subculture here means that um it doesn't Al also doesn't have a very strict definition what I here means is like um a certain niche of living in your daily lives for example gym is a subculture memes is a subculture internet itself is also subculture hard to understand right that's normal and the thing is it is hard to engineer culture that's what makes you very hard

3:52 to find a real step to go viral because you can engineer culture it's very it's a very fake terms and that's why for art marketing channels like SEO like s or Co email you can all done programmatically automatically or through algorithm because you can calculate something but culture cannot calculate culture and that's one day there's a deep learning model that can predict what will replicate the most spiral reals and that will take a lot of gpus anyways so yeah that's that's the end of the um at the end of the day short is not about supply and demand it's more about attention and resonation from the mass and that's what makes it so hard to make Firs because you have to be part of the mass to make fir to resonate with those people but the M don't bother to create content they just want to consume and that's also makes like shorts that's a funny thing high school students or like um

4:38 University students teenagers they make so many fire RS they are so good at making fire RS because they're so into the culture and subcultures of society and us who who need fire RS to promote ourselves we are away from the mass already so that's the thing and that leads to three things if you want to make far far shots uh understand these three things the first one is understand Fair well about your target audience what do they do what page or account do they follow what post or real do they like understand the culture and the second thing is what kind of culture and subculture do they like do they like watching memes or what kind of memes anime gym what kind of subcultures like gamings what kind of stuff that do they enjoy doing that is a culture that they would resonate with and what is the biggest fire account that they fall in right now yeah you have to figure out that and if you can answer these three questions congratulations you have

5:23 you're very close to getting fire hello so yeah this chapter is about how rails works it's not about like the algorithm explained perspective but it's more on how does it works to like how do you go viral like how how how what should you expect when you playing the r game so this uh picture first this picture um move my face first yeah so this picture basically the key thing is this line this line is look you are not guaranteed to go firal it's not like pay ads it's not like these marketing channels that if you have some input you have some output R doesn't work this way you have luck that would um would like

6:12 constrain your output so if all you did is just inputting time that's your only parameters or variables into this function your output would be doomed because luck would um constraint your output so don't use time as your only variables instead use this content approach tested I will explain what is content approach later but the idea is you can um if you're running a real account or a shorts account there's 100 types of contents kind of content that you can make okay and each of them have a slight difference so you have to figure out which content approach work best for your s so if you are willing to

7:01 do this and test a lot of different content approach then in the beginning your Curve will still goes like this flat but until you find your first fir Wheels Everything Will Change you will suddenly break through the luck barrier because that's the bottleneck that constrain your uh probability of going firal but once you got your first firal rules you can break for this but uh if luck is still here right why would you suddenly go up that's luck right you still have a certain percentage of going viral but if you can continue to test content approach about 25 different content approach you can break through this all right and if you want to ask

7:47 why is 25 so this is this is the idea among all the content approach that you can test right that's 20% of them have the ability no that's 20% of them fit them fit your St some content approach doesn't fit your size at all if you're working on a B2B St memes might not work for you a lot that's like that's that's some exceptional case but usually it doesn't work well but uh if you yeah but there's some uh content approach that works exceptionally well you have to test to figure out them and after you find those fit uh approach you still have to test a lot of things so that you you can go viral so there's another 20% so so only 4% around 4% of your content

8:33 could go viral so that's 25 and then after breaking through uh by first FAL R you would suddenly go up your your videos would go FAL very easily because you have break through the algorithm your the algorithm knows that you can make something that your audience want to watch so the algorithm will push your content to more people and the words that you make later will also be benefit but your n guaranteed to go f every single day right so there's this uh this line algorithm risk you're never meant to break through this a Alor risk so um even how exceptionally well you do this is the maximum that of percentage that you can go viral but this is already a a lot that is huge so that's the thing um

9:21 test your content approach so that's the basic idea of how the rules game work find your first f r as soon as possible that's the do go and this is a meme that I make and I think it basically tells how what is the value of making RS it doesn't just brings you more website visitors like um through this this meme I got a lot of more website visitors but it also got more um Vis visitors for my later RS so it's snowballing right so this is chapter two hello there so hi there so um chapter three is about the algorithm so how does the algorithm Works nobody knows unless you work in Instagram but this is my hypothesis so the first thing is there's

10:08 two types of things that will affect your R distribution content variables is everything that you can control the video the caption the audio the hashtag and all the audience interest this is the thing that you can um see that before posting but this doesn't matter all right it doesn't matter for me at least so I won't bother to to to to um to work on this and then there is performance metrics that is something that you can control at least a lot of part you can control that is your watch time your your replay number of replays which cor relat with your watch time and likes share comments save and impression that is basically also your watch time and

10:55 then yeah and also account Rich maybe is also a performance matri it it doesn't matter to that that point anymore so um among all these things that would effect your distribution these two matters the most the video matter the most of course because it's short form video in the end right and then you have to make good videos that's the thing your videos can be crappy but um there's some kind of content approach like memes that accept low quality or video thatti dozen takes you a lot of effort to edit I will talk about content approach later and then caption caption it matters but it also doesn't really matters but it matters in terms of our content strategies or

11:40 content approach if your content approach is to ask the people to read the caption that the caption matters exceptionally if it doesn't it doesn't really matter you can put down giberish there like there's us these days some some caption that says um the Mercedes CLG is blah blah blah chap GPT generator and the video doesn't matter it has no correlations with that caption it can still go viral so caption doesn't really matter audio matters because this is what people would experience they experience they they hear the audio that they listening to they feel happy that they like they feel happy so audio also matters use trendy audio hashtags and audience interest I don't think it really matters but hashtags in the beginning if you don't have much

12:26 followers it tells you aror from what kind of um account I should distribute your shots too so it also matters and yeah among all these watch time matters the most I'll explain why so these are two videos that I made that went the most viral for me and then hold on right so this one it is 10 this is 12 second long and then it got 10c average watch time which is about 80% people watch a whole ass video this is crazy because normally the a watch average watch time is about 20% or 30% and then because this go viral so the algorithm knows that people like

13:11 this and they will push this to everyone and the same for this one oh I open it The Sound anyways yeah so the same for this one this video 12 seconds and the video doesn't even have 12 seconds only only has 8 seconds to people watch one more time because in this video there's a a joke that's a script so the people are incentivized to watch again to understand a joke so yeah you have to optimize for watch time and so if your watch time can Skyrocket your distribution Skyrocket that's the biggest correlation for RS hey everyone so this is chapter S for

13:59 finding the right content approach for assess that's one thing I forgot to talk about in chapter three while explaining the real s form is that don't buy followers or ask all your friends to follow you that's related to the algorithm because um imagine if you just post a r and the r algorithm it would try to reach people who might be interested in your content and send this R to them to see if they engage if they engage at a certain level then the algorithm think okay some people like this let me try to push to more people oh these people also like it push to these people oh these people don't like it I'm going stop so you stop getting traction and if you don't have any followers you will still get some organic tractions in the beginning that is the like a beginner bonus and then if

14:46 they push to someone and they like it then they will push to other people so if you ask or friends to follow you or you buy followers and they only follow you because they support you then they don't have engagement with your content naturally so the R Al they push to your followers first but they don't engage so they start getting more TRS so get organ TRS I have some I have some content previously that um I I have some account previously zero followers like a couple followers because I still ask like up to 10 friends to follow me because they're my best friends and they will support me and engage for my content and then um it could get like the first couple videos I spent a lot of time editing using good camera and you could get up to 10 10K organic views with just 10 followers it's totally possible the algorithm somehow knows that your videos is high quality and if you just make shitty

15:32 content it knows so back to the chapter four um what is content approach I've been using this term for a lot and what does this means so these are different type of content approach um you might have different definition it doesn't matter as long as you can categorize um different short form videos that is a Content approach mimes is a Content approach that could also be subc content approach um POV videos it is also content approach the uh there's two videos that I mentioned in the chapter three um there's a memes and the other one is a POV videos you should check that to understand what is memes and video video POV videos especially daily series means this is some meta or Trend lately um somebody would take take their phone and say this is day one of doing something this is day two of doing something this day three of doing something and just repeat people love this and then it could go viral this is

16:18 a type of content approach as well but content approach can be integrated with each other like da series itself is the mem because it is like um per cultural so there's other this kind of content approach that I won't explain anymore um yep so then that's just two strategies when you are picking or trying to find your best content approach because as I mentioned earlier there's just 20% of the content approach that fit just s and the first way to find it is immerse in your target audience culture if you're targeting us people it is very hard to create something that resonate with them if you're not from there or if you don't know them so TR best should know about them and then the second thing is um replicate like this is two strategies the second strategy is you don't have to be like a US citizens to understand us people's thoughts or understanding

17:04 culture if you can copy um your competitors right because they supposedly if they're from us or they know their audience your audience they would be making some follow RS so see if there's some accounts in your Niche it doesn't have to be your comparators actually just some accounts or some page in your Niche that Target your target audience for example if you're making a B2B testimonal collection SAS then your target audience might be like Indie hackers right see what Indie hackers like see what kind in heckers like maybe um mes related to development maybe and then see what those pages have like what videos when FAL on those pages that is charies to and then replicate what went FAL for them so this is what you have to do draft a list of 20 accounts that your target might be looking at and drop a list of at least 10 content approach you

17:49 can think of and test ruthlessly and a real format all rules should be related to your product don't make like irrelevant FM page or m page that is um just you never talk about your product that shouldn't be like that um unless it's a personal brand but you should still try to plug your product into the your personal brand Instagram page yep um so that's that's basically it um yeah see you in the next chapter all right so chapter five in terms of finding content ideas there is no secret because just like chapter four copy like find um what page your competitors is making or what page are target audience interested in and then see what fire for them that's is the EAS way but if you if you think that you're a creative you're a creative person you

18:34 can still try to think of your own content that's also what I do so but there's like some guide here every day use Instagram as you would you probably do if you don't you got to use Instagram and then making account to imitate your target audience follow those people that they would follow at least 50 accounts and then every day spend 10 minutes scrolling rules just scroll and if there's some fire rules the rul that you see 90% of them run f r 10% is that you are part of the testing um in process of testing if you can go viral so for those virs think about how you can use those rules for a product got an idea record them so I'm going to show you how how I do that for R so this is my account and then I go to RS and then I'll just I just scroll all right so this one my target audience first of all are people who are looking for self improvement

19:19 they are in like a low stage of their life they want to get that together so this kind of people are like people who looking for self-improvement Solutions so this mes it doesn't directly relate to rise because this is not targeting or this is not motivational enough for my target audience but the pattern of this memes um I wouldn't say it I wouldn't say this this is mim but it's also having the pattern of mime I'm not I didn't really understand this rules actually but what rice could do is is for example like my idea of style lifestyle in 2020 and the picture is something that is um maybe a shitty lifestyle or like a Rich lifestyle right like a rich lifestyle driving uh uh Tesla or like a um flying

20:05 business class to Dubai and then I have to do comparison that's the core of this mem then I was do something like my my my lifestyle in 2024 um I am broke a I'm broke a I didn't achieve my G dream and show picture of a loser and boom then I show Rise um as as the result of the Hulk and tell you that if you use rise you can get back your life together to achieve your ideal Life Cell in20 so that could work if I think this could work I copy it I copy this and then I paste to I have a page called ion strategies and I just record a list of ideas and I just paste here right and continue like this one this is totally irrelevant but no that's no but this is

20:52 just irrelevant um this is relevant because this is a person who is looking for self-improvement and then and he is insanely good so maybe something I could do is I could use this as a Hulk and then um after this I just put like if you want to be like him just R but this is like a very cheesy edit I won't do this but this is like some kind of things that you could do um Irrelevant this is relevant um I do this a lot for my account because this is a meme this is a caption this is the whole video I could use alternative caption for us how it feels when me and my bro started the r 66 say like program together that's it I the same audio the same picture I can do it right now actually to show that how

21:38 this work I download this R right I download this r i download it I open my cap cut in advance to save time I open cap cut hold on this is downlo delete and then open cap cut yep and then I didn't even listen to this real because I'm using my mic and I can't use Instagram page audio but I think it because it is distributed to me so that went viral so I can trust the audio so you get it here and then this is laging I'm opening too much tabs um but that's the idea you get it I would

22:24 paste a video here and then I change the caption to fit my product but that is the content approach of memes if you're doing Mims then that works and Mims Works especially well for b2c products if you're B2B Sorry mems probably doesn't fit you but that's exceptional case again drop.io they are B2B and mimes uh s them a lot right so what I would do here is text and then default and I just type how it feels to start a live Reset program with my bro and both failed okay I had to add some joke here to make it fun and people engage to the shots and then uh layout alignment uh background

23:10 white black this the text no what is this sh yeah this is thex um hold on something went wrong this is thex all right yep yep and then 10 oh hold on hold on yeah that's basically it and then use AR B that's is my go-to font that's why there's no reason you can just other fonts um yeah that is it I will edit it a bit but it is good to go yeah hello so for chapter six making your first RS funny enough I already demonstrate how I would make a rules on

23:56 the last chapter so uh get your content idea ring some five ideas if you are just starting pick one must be plug in your product like must be showing yourselves unless you're doing a personal brand type of content that is relevant to your Niche but you don't want to plug too much to to already that is acceptable but otherwise um plug us and get a good camera if you're going to shoot your products your UI POV especially if it is a mobile app you have to use a good camera if it is a web based app it is all right to not use a good camera but still use a good iPhone and then use C cut a free tool and Powerful feature so download cap cut and use that learn cap cut maybe on the internet find a YouTube

24:43 tutorial like 30 minutes you could learn most of the basics of cap that's it no secret make your first real as soon as possible if you decided to go to reals today then get your all the things sld out um by tomorrow and post your first R by um two days later that's the plan hello so chapter seven is about your profile setup this is not very important this is not very important in terms of the whole picture you have to test content approach you have to find out your content approach and you have to find good content ideas to post so a profile doesn't really matter all right so it doesn't really matter but this is the part that you can optimize so the thing that matters in terms of profile setup is the fight your fight is means that what does the person who clicks into your profile feels now how do they feel do they feel that okay your content

25:30 your account is cool I want to follow you or do they think that account is funly I want to follow you um so there's different kind of Fes so these are some example account that you can check them you determine a f based on your target audience and your market like what kind of f you want to deliver to your target audience and what's go well go well with your product only you know best so you got to decide that but chill and Goofy have about five go far the best because this is funny humorous but yeah it also depends off if you're B2B ass um not sure if CH and go is where you want to go um that's like more brand brand positioning side um yeah should also test what F work so for me um the vibe of Rise is kind of between motivation and funny chill because I have some content that are serious and then like

26:15 it isn't funny but there's also memes so um you can have a mix between different kind of Vibes just make your own decision so after locking down the fight um you have to make your bio write a bio that is just but there's like just a rform um use your tagline and then use your website uh links to as that's it so don't over complicate this part so finally you have your R uh edited and prepared to Poe what to do and how to poe just post don't overthink this is an example the most FAL r that I made is is kungu Panda uh MIM I have to sit in my draw for two weeks after I edit it I didn't post it for two weeks because I thought it didn't allow with my brand it didn't really align with the

27:01 with the fight that I was testing earlier I was testing like mtiv and serious fight so but I only had like 150 followers back then I do don't have I don't have to overthink so after I post it it blew up that's why you don't have to overthink and pose every day until you got first F RS that is the key and the consistency and after getting a first F RS you don't have to Pros every day I suspect that it might negatively affect your short distribution actually because um Instagram don't want to show your rul all the time so you don't have to post every day after you have first thr one fireal the definition is at least 100K views that is fireal any other any less is not viral if you see

27:46 your R getting zero views somehow there are some examples um like some people send me their views just keep stucking at zero it Instagram is not willing to distribute the shots probably because of it is to you didn't spend much time in editing it and maybe you just copy another accounts RS and just directly post it without like um editing anything so IG somehow knows that maybe they have a an AI model that screen your rules I don't know but so that's where you have to up your editing game and if you have time you can make multiple accounts to test from content strategies I had a lot of content I had lot of content strategies tested and a lot of accounts prepared in the beginning so I can speed up the iteration so that's also what you should

28:32 do if you are serious chapter nine the question that we will all want to know when will it get viral will I get viral no answer no correct answer to this question somehow um someone made it on the first day someone never got it that's the algor RK that I mentioned in chapter 102 that's Aro risk somehow you could do perfectly but the AR doesn't like you or um your Market is just too hard for R to distribute so at some point you have to give up for me around 10 weeks I got my first St R before that I created four accounts 12 content approach tested memes POV videos and personal brand and then um um assess assess te edits and

29:21 then animes stor some quotes etc etc posted almost daily and I didn't even repurpose all the platforms because um Tik Tok and YouTube shots doesn't work well for me and also Tik Tok was banned in Hong Kong so I had to spend so much effort to post on TK to and then I didn't rep the TK to that's reason so it's not a mess for you to go viral if we just focusing on the r game is enough to get good traction but it should help if you have time yeah okay Final Chapter what can you do more to get viral um after you post your rules and do everything that you will mention in the previous nine chapters the other things is that first because shorts equals to culture get enriched

30:07 culturally it doesn't mean that you have to read books uh doesn't mean that kind of culture but it helps read books for get like enich culture helps but um get more exposed to different kind of culture that's the thing um understand more on the culture of your target audience and also critically try to observe the culture that you're exposed to every single day especially on Instagram what kind of culture are you being immersed into and if you can observe that and explain the culture behind then you have the ability to replicate the culture and transform that into reals that can promote your product that's the ultimate goal and be patient um also explore other channels don't just rely on reals because it takes a lot of time to um get the break

30:54 breakthrough point so um yeah that's that you have diverse your risk and engagement Group which means um there are some people who invite you to like let uh a let's like each other's post that my work in the beginning at least for me it didn't work out but I was invited to some engagement group in the motivation Niche uh in Instagram because rice was in that niche in the beginning and also right now and they were just like like each other's post but none of our post really gone viral so somehow my meme G fireal but it's not really related to the engagement group um you can also try real boost I tried it and spent like um I think $20 us on it in the beginning it didn't help me on

31:40 getting the meme Farrow but that could help me in terms of like the aam knows that I am serious about doing reals I don't know if that matters so um it could help but don't spend too much on it like Beyond $50 that's too much because reals the best thing about reals is organic you don't want to pay it on reals unless you're doing Meta Meta is another strategy so don't spend too much money that's it um yeah that is the end of this course I also have a bonus here to talk about how to do sponsor RS um and then yeah that's it just basically if you enjoy this course um let me know um send me a message on X if you have finished this course I'll be very happy to like chat and see if anything that I

32:25 could share more on and then yeah checked out my latest project as well marketing Ai and then we are launching on produ soon so I appreciate your help if you can upad us like later and then yeah uh join our wayist here if you're interested in it yeah peace oops