The Secrets of Consumer Club: Insights from Joseph Choi - Superwall Podcast

0:00 all right we're back with another Superwall podcast today I have Joseph who is the founder of the Esteemed Consumer Club joseph is the guy that everyone wants to go to if they want to know how to blow up their consumer app um and I think we have a lot of interesting stuff to get into today so um let's start with introductions joseph um as I said founder of Consumer Club would love to hear a little bit more sort of about your background and um what led to you starting Consumer Club and then we can actually dive into what uh Consumer Club is and why so many people are in it and talking about it for sure yeah um yeah I actually just kind of accidentally found myself in this like app space i'm kind of just a an internet marketer like I've always just been interested in how to make money online and that is weird like I I

0:48 think I I've always thought about distribution and growth hacks and finding underpriced channels and stuff like that cuz I started out in drop shipping and e-commerce i just went on YouTube when I was in college and I was like how to make money online and I found like these videos how to start a drop shipping store on Shopify and do like Facebook ads and stuff um cuz in 2018 I think you know Facebook ads was still somewhat underpriced uh I did like Instagram meme pages but anyway I I worked in tech like worked at Google for a while as well i did startup consulting but um Consumer Club basically is just the place on the internet that I always wish existed which is combining the uh kind of the scrappy growth hack people with the really smart like product

1:36 minded um just scalable like people who think and scale like um how how do you build a tech company out of these uh uh growth hacks instead of just doing you know drop shipping Not that drop shipping is bad i think drop shipping taught me a lot about business and marketing but um so consumer club is a place where app founders come to learn uh from each other about just chasing the current distribution edge and trying to find um how to how to go viral on Tik Tok um go going viral on Tik Tok is kind of the the thing right now but who knows what it is in like a year or two maybe a Tik Tok doesn't exist and is something else but it's really about how do you how do you find an edge um in this

2:22 business awesome okay so it sounds like you had sort of a background in tech um grew up on the internet as a lot of these sort of like internet money um marketers or or product builders do and you were looking for a place to sort of collect like a community of of people like yourself who are who are good at what they do and who are able to make money online is that right and that's sort of what the genesis was for Consumer Club totally yeah got it awesome okay so cool so um Consumer Club for those who don't know it's a it's a Discord community right and there are founders who range from you know indie solo indie devs making you know upwards of millions of dollars in ARR um all the way to venture-backed founders who are taking you know these really big swings at like billion dollar um markets right

3:08 um and I think the thing that's really interesting to me about this sort of uh group of people is while you know the sort of swings that they're taking might be different right like an indie dev you know like a solo founder versus like you know a ventureback founder who who might have raised millions of dollars um it sounds like everyone's sort of collected in this community because everyone's sort of seeking that same thing which is like this edge and distribution right and you kind of referenced it a little bit um at at the beginning there but I'd love to hear a little bit more just from like your you know sort of your own perspective like is that right like these despite these founders you know being seemingly different everyone's kind of seeking the same thing yeah yeah i mean I mean I think that's I mean isn't that what business is about like you're trying to find some sort of edge and like fill a gap in the market and

3:53 whether your goal is to make $10 million and then like go like sit on a beach or if it's like to change the world and like build this like VCbacked company um either way like you want to figure out what consumers want and like solve a problem with a product so if you want to do that um like starting with I think people say like oh start with distribution it's really just like start with the market like understand what does the market want and one way to do that is to look at Tik Tok and see what people are cons like what content are people consuming because that's an insight into like what are the pain points what do people talk about so Tik Tok is like I think people it's like this weird mystical thing that people have different takes about but

4:38 one way I like to see it is it's just it's basically like talking to millions of people at the same time and like doing research and understanding like what the world cares about and um so whether you're like a ventureback founder or you just want to make a few million dollars like you're you you you have to like understand humans absolutely yeah no I appreciate that a lot so um I think something that's really interesting is a tweet that you actually tweeted um you know a while back when you're sort of introducing like the thesis of consumer club and the tweet you know in it you basically said like hey um for consumer club this is really for founders who you know are trying to u or who rather who recognize that distribution um can beat product in

5:25 many cases and for those who see that um business to B2B founders um often learn from consumer and consumer founders often learn um from ecom and ecom often learns from affiliate um there's a few more things that you you said in that tweet but I want to break those two down just a little bit can you tell me a little bit more about um sort of what you mean by those two things yeah I mean I saw it first when I was when I came from ecom cuz um I I'm going to sound like a broken record but I always talk about Oliver Brcado and Tabs Chocolate so Tabs Chocolate is this ecom brands that went from 0 to 10 million um in one year with purely Tik Tok organic no ads and it's really interesting cuz they just like they they didn't do influencer

6:11 marketing and they kind of broke the Tik Tok game by um realizing that oh you don't need people that have audiences to talk about your product you can just hire a bunch of kids uh or a bunch of teenagers and just like have them talk about your product like very organically um on brand new accounts with zero followers and if it's a good as long as it's good content and you show the product in the video then it'll it'll get views um and it worked very well but then this guy he moved on from Taps Chocolate and now he did StudyBuddy which is a a software company so and in public I remember like the day he tweeted this he was like "I'm going to now go into consumer SAS instead of ecom because sure this works in ecom but like

6:58 we could just do run back the same exact strategy but then do it on uh for a product that has better exit multiples better margins less headache of like fulfillment and manufacturing all that and yeah there's some barrier to entry of like building a tech product but if you know how to code a little bit or you know how to AI code now uh in 2025 like um yeah it's like you can use the same tactics but I think why why do tactics start in e-commerce and then they kind of go up to uh tech i think it's like it's basically just like how much of a commodity is the product so like you mentioned affiliate so you know think about like these affiliate marketers

7:45 that earn 10% of revenue that they drive to a gambling site all these gambling sites are like basically similar and then all the affiliates they're just promoting the same offer so they're all competing with each other on the same exact product um so of course they have to find different ways to compete with each other and make their marketing better and better so affiliates I think are the best consumer marketers and you go up one level to e-commerce you're also kind of in a commoditized product you're just selling like consumer goods that you know are not hyper differentiated there there's no like tech edge there's basically it's a branding edge unless it's a completely

8:30 new invention but for a lot of these categories like food and beverage and clothing and beauty skincare and stuff like this a lot of it is just the same products just re repackaged so you're also very competitive um in that space so the the marketing tactics have to be better and then consumer tech like now there's still some barrier to entry to building an app but um it's becoming less and less so like I'm even seeing like people in the consumer tech world now complaining about people copying their apps but then the ecom guys are just like this that's just the game like right product becomes commoditized like the more you're going to get copied so yeah but I I think there's a good thing

9:16 like um yeah the more competitive the marketing the the more advanced the tactics get and it's it's fun to it's fun to follow yeah absolutely okay so that's really interesting so just taking a step back a little bit um you know at the very beginning of this topic you basically mentioned that like hey like um you know there was there was sort of like a really big um I would say like step right when people recognized that um you could get a lot of eyeballs on things without having like a a really large audience or a really you know big mass of followers right just by virtue of the way that the Tik Tok algorithm worked and then which eventually shifted like the the Instagram reels algorithm like you didn't need these these these massive uh followers or influencers to put your product in front of you know a lot of different people um and I feel

10:02 like that sort of was like one of the steps in creating this new sort of like meta of distribution right in terms of of getting whether it was ecom or affiliate or you know even apps at this point it it sort of spawned this whole new set of strategies for people competing with edge right um and so something that I'm really curious to hear a little bit more about is um you know you've mentioned this um in some other podcasts and you know you even mentioned it on this podcast podcast right now like it's not necessarily um about Tik Tok per se it's more so about um figuring out what this like underpriced distribution edge is right um so I'd love to learn a little bit more about that you know like what are um you know what are some uh pieces of alpha or strategies that you know some

10:49 some uh founders in the consumer club have been applying um when it comes to finding the sort of like edge and distribution yeah yeah definitely um yeah that's perfectly articulated i feel like people are Yeah people are focused on Tik Tok but even within Tik Tok there's like micro trends so um I want to show you a couple of things um so I'm just I'm just a student of the scroll so I I stole that phrase from someone else like they're like "How do you like find all these ideas?" I'm like "Oh I just like scroll TikTok a lot." And then I save them in bookmark folders and then I think about like "Wait why did that make me feel something?" And I put it into the category of folder so I just I just study this stuff because it's fun to me um but here's an example

11:37 of like here's all my bookmark folders um I'm just sharing screen but for example like talking head um this format is several years old so this is kind of like the the classic like influencer video like "Hey guys today I'm going to talk to you about whatever like product." Um so this this is still like kind of big um and with an app you kind of have to show show the product somehow like with e-commerce it's really easy you like you hold it in your hand you can like show it on video but with apps it's a little bit tricky you have to like figure out how to show it on the screen um so one way is like just is just like green screen so you can just put it behind you um and then have like the talking head like green screened in

12:23 front of you um another way is like phone app demo so if you have like the you literally put the phone in front of your other phone to record the like record what's happening on the screen and show yourself using the app um but talking head I mean this is like a couple years old a couple of the newer things like it kind of shifted last year to to slideshows when people realized like you could just get a lot of views by doing uh Tik Tok carousels and slideshows instead of like full videos and this is there's some alpha in this because it's so easy to make like for example this like these ones like these they're like they're these like storytime things

13:10 where it's like right here's the here's the truth about visiting Japan and then there's just filler slides with kind of interesting content and then at the end they plug some products so this one is for the shower head like oh by the way they're you know they Japan has these shower these water filters in all their showerheads and oh I just realized like oh you don't even need to go to Japan to get these they're just they're on Amazon like what what what do you know they're on Amazon crazy and this has like this has like what millions of I see it has two almost a quarter million likes right yeah yeah i mean this one has 200,000 likes um I don't know how many views it has but they they make this account and then

13:55 they post it they post these videos like every day so not every video hits but I mean they're getting around you know 5 10,000 views per video and then some of them really hit and it's like a million two million views yeah which is which is crazy cuz they're basically taking like basically like a a paragraph or two worth of text and they're turning that and then some like filler photos right and they're turning that into like millions of eyeballs for distribution like what would previously take you know thousand tens of thousands of dollars to you know pump that on like Facebook ads or Google ads like you're you're basically getting you know for um I don't know maybe 30 minutes of your time and like really well structured like you know but broken up into a few paragraphs worth of writing like that's crazy right

14:40 exactly okay so and and this sort of like le leads into the um the trend that you were mentioning earlier where basically app founders are like learning from people who have been doing this for a while in ecom and obviously people who you know do like affiliate are all competing for the same kind of attention and I feel like this this leads to like another interesting kind of segue which is like um I I feel like as we're getting closer and closer and ecom pro ecom people are probably like really well versed in this but ultimately like the two things that are going to really like determine some of the success of your business is one like your ability to um capture attention right and then your ability to convert that attention into like a download or a purchase or you know that

15:27 sort of thing so um I'd be curious to know a little bit more about um you know how people are are discussing that like within the consumer club um I I know that there's a really big emphasis on generating attention um but I'd be curious to know you know sort of what people are thinking about for actually converting that attention into a download um can you speak a little bit more about that yeah yeah yeah i mean organic and ads are a little bit different like if you come from the world of Facebook ads you're used to just forcing your content in front of people's eyeballs by paying Facebook money but with organic you're you're kind of you have to you you have to hack the algorithm which which the algorithm is really just how do you hack attention and then hold attention long enough to

16:16 plug your product so like [Music] um like some other formats that I've seen working are uh just these storytelling i mean you kind of saw it with the slide the slideshows too but as long as you like you you have to talk about the products like so in the influencer marketing days you would just get a bunch of views and then you'd have a call to action at the end and say "Hey guy okay here today I'm going to be talking about these pain points hey do you relate to this or this um well I have a solution for that um here's my my promo code use this code at checkout for 20% off." and then people would go into the influencers link in bio and then click the link but like

17:01 people don't really click links in bios anymore uh especially for apps it's kind of hard to like put a app store link in your bio especially if you have like other links that you want to promote and the the conversion rate is just not very good so a lot of times what people actually are doing is they're just closing the app like they see a Tik Tok video they literally close the app they go to the app store and they search the name of the app that was mentioned in the video so a lot of times the call to actions are a lot softer um I mean even with like Calai um they they don't even mention the app at all they just show the app and the the name of the app on the screen so I'm I'm seeing like the call to actions being a lot um a lot lighter um yeah one of the members of

17:46 consumer club uh Laurent he's the founder of focus tree and uses these faceless creators in the study talk niche where there's these students showing their books and their aesthetic like study setups and in you know a couple seconds they flash like the screen of focus tree and a lot of times the conversion actually happens in the comments where people since it's get since it got flashed and it was like an interesting novel interface it's like Oh you're using this app that has like a digital tree like for your focus what are you what are you talking about like what is that app and then they'll reply the creator will reply to the comment and say "Oh it's focus tree." And that kind of takes advantage of the behavior of people reading the comments and scrolling through comments as they're watching videos um and people do that

18:34 because it's it you know it feels like a social experience totally so wait that's that's super interesting so let's let's double click on that for a bit because you mentioned two apps that I think have done that kind of like marketing really well so Calai I think is is the first one you mentioned and um for those who who don't yet know Blake Anderson and Zach um who built Calai and one of the ways that they like um really rocketed to success was by doing this sort of like um this distribution hack where um sort of like like a a mini niche in and of itself where they showed like the screen with um you know predominantly like sort of like fitness um related content right like people going to the gym and then like you know making this like really healthy food and then very very briefly only for like a second or

19:19 two using the app to like scan the food to get the caloric content don't mention it otherwise and that's like that has also been popularized by uh Laurent uh with focus treat right just in a different in a different vertical studying versus you know calorie tracking this is awesome yeah so I think you can actually kind of see it right it's like this really quick kind of like cut frame where you're only seeing the app you know maybe even for like half a second right and it's this is interesting because it kind of like builds intrigue and curiosity and you you kind of mentioned it earlier where people will then take to the comments to try and figure this out i've sort of likened this is like the comment section of Tik Tok is where you know where the conversion kind of happens it's kind of like the Reddit you know u comments are

20:06 are actually where all the gold is found or it's sort of like a little mini Yelp review for what you know the app is can you can you speak a little bit more on that yeah yeah yeah um yeah it goes a couple layers deep so like you you can convert people on the like in the comment section um of the video itself you can also reply to to a comment and um make another video out of like a video reply and that will first of all show it to to the person that you're replying to like it'll directly show up in the notifications but then a lot of times if you're scrolling through Tik Tok sometimes you'll find if you really enjoyed a video like the next day you're going to see that reply because you engaged so deeply with that original video so you it's almost like a Facebook

20:54 retargeting campaign where you're targeting the same people that engaged with that original video with the video reply so sometimes the video reply is where the conversion happens as well where someone in the comment says what is it what is the app and then you reply to that and say and then you and then that's where you hard sell because now you're able to retarget all those millions of people that watch the first video and then actually follow up with the CTA the next day or the next you know few hours whenever you make the video um yeah but yeah definitely I mean Tik Tok Tik Tok comment sections are great great source of just market research like seeing what people actually people are very unfiltered in Tik Tok comment section definitely you can see like the the heartbeat of of

21:40 like culture and like what people are actually thinking definitely heartbeat heartbeat is such a good way to describe it so for for someone who's like um starting out and and building you know a consumer app um what's what's like the one two three checklist that you would give to them um if they wanted to start basically get started with like you know marketing through Tik Tok for their app like you know what direction would you point them in um other than you know consumer club being the first step what would you what would you point them towards yeah yeah i mean if if if it's your first business like first business or first app like do do you have some experience yeah that's that's a good clarification um I think just to make it easier let's say that um you're you're

22:27 not new to like business or app building but you you want to get more involved in like sort of like Tik Tok distribution or um you know a method of distribution that isn't just like forcing eyeballs via paid ads like what would you where would you point someone right right um yeah the thing is like viral ideas like there isn't necessarily a an existing viral idea for every single app so a lot of times it actually starts with the um reverse engineering like what would make a good viral moment on Tik Tok and then building that as a feature into your product so to go back to Cali it's basically what Cali was like the real

23:12 retention and like what makes Calai a business is the calorie tracking it's like retaining the user every day telling them here's over time how many calories you're you're you're eating and the macros which is the same thing as My Fitness Pal but you know who is the dominant app in this space for a long time but Cali is like it's the it's using using the AI vision to look at uh take a picture of your food and then do the calorie tracking so the main part of the app is not even really the scan it's really the the tracking so if you have an if you have an app and let's say it's like you know workout tracking you you might not be able to make a viral Tik Tok out of just workout

23:58 tracking so a lot of times it comes down to like how do I how do I think of um an I um a piece of content that's already out there on TikTok that gets views already and then how do I turn that into slightly change modify that to make it turn it into a video that uh plugs my product so I can give uh another screen share yeah absolutely um I'm going to plug this tool uh I actually built this tool so just shilling my own stuff right now but that's what we want yeah i built I built the tool because of just the insights of people in consumer club and trying to figure out like how do you how do you get that find those winning formats that promote products so let's say you're in

24:43 like um let's say you're doing like uh something like with mental health or like a lot of these AI uh rapper apps are using either voice or chat to like talk people through journaling or mental health issues or um you know things like that so um one thing you can do is you can do this on Tik Tok search can just search for videos but um if we want to find like okay what what is out there already so let's just find like ADHD mental health journaling um sometimes like think of adjacent niches like oh people who are having like relationship problems there maybe that's a source of like mental health issues so relationships so let's just

25:31 search some of these keywords and then we let's find videos that are currently doing well in those niches and then figure out how do we make how do we slightly modify these videos to plug an app instead so like some of these um such a sick tool that that you just pull all the metrics on that like right from the jump yeah yeah so we have the main like the main metrics like views engagement but then the number here is like how many how many times more views did this video get compared to the median engagement for that account so this is like it's not just the account

26:18 is a is a strong account it's that the video itself actually did better than the account so that means like the algorithm is picking it up and it's not just getting views because of the followers um so let's remove ADHD keyword because that's like seems to be taking up everything um here's a here's a great format so here's [Music] this is an interesting format it's like a 7-second video that just has the song playing in the background and some B-roll of a car and it's just long text so it kind of it's a hack where the video loops over and over again because people are taking a long time to read the thing so then in the Tik Tok analytics the watch time is like 5x retention because people watch

27:06 the video like five times in order to read the whole text but then the but then the text has to actually be good and like interesting so this one says "My therapist told me when someone constantly asks if you like like or love them or if you're mad at them it's not because they're so it's just kind of this um tidbit about uh mental health and therapy." But then you could you could definitely plug some sort of app maybe hint at some kind of app but then not name the app because that might be a little bit too aggressive and then maybe some people in the comments will be like "Oh like any apps you recommend to you know deal with this issue." And then you can plug the app so totally totally yeah it's I've seen um I I've seen a few apps like take advantage of that where you have you know and and there I think the

27:51 interesting thing with all of these is like there are layers and like metas to each individual layer right like I've seen I think something that a lot of people will be familiar with is like Minecraft B-roll right in the background where there's like someone playing Minecraft like jumping around on different blocks um you know in this case it's like the video of someone driving right with like text on it um and it's interesting because they're all they're they all are trying to accomplish the same thing right um but the way that they like hack attention or that you know the way that their hooks are just like slightly different is really really really intriguing um and uh yeah I guess I'd I'd love to know a little bit more about sort of like what inspired you to like want to even build this tool in the first place because I I imagine that a lot of people were probably trying to do this manually

28:37 right by like going through accounts and seeing what the you know median views were for someone's videos and then you know like using a spreadsheet to calculate this so I'd be curious to know a little bit more about what like drove the inspiration for building this yeah yeah i mean yeah it's just like how do you how do you find how do you make this type of marketing feel more scientific and more predictable because a lot of times it just feels like a lottery um you post a Tik Tok and then you don't know like why it went viral why it didn't go viral but it's just like because Tik Tok is you know it's a content graph like it you like the content itself is what gets the views uh based on engagement retention whatever so if you can find those videos that are already doing well then um it's just

29:24 it's just a hack to to find to get uh to to get views and to validate your market first before maybe maybe even before launching um or like even before like hiring expensive influencers that are like more expensive like high production content you can you can hire creators to just copy videos and you can char you can you can pay a lot less for that compared to giving a creator like free reign over the full creative direction of the video just saying like hey make a video for me promoting this app then they have to storyboard it think of do the research themselves but if you just say "Hey here's a video that you can just copy it like second for second and

30:11 just modify this little part then you're doing the creative and then you're just paying the creator for their time um uh instead of like their creativity." So I So yeah a lot of people in Consumer Club were were trying to figure out okay how do you not pay like a,000 $2,000 just for one video right and like the answer a lot of times is just hiring people um like doing the creative yourself and then giving um giving creators like a really well well- definfined brief so this is just a way to um do that but I mean if you if you have creators that um that make high production videos too like you can like you can give them

30:56 these videos as well leverage that yeah totally and for anyone who uh has experimented with influencer marketing um I think it's really funny because I you know for you'll go and talk to like an influencer and they'll say like hey I want you know two or $3,000 for this video and you'll have to pay me like a retainer fee on top of that and it's funny because you know they might post the video on TikTok and it could flop it could get like 800 views so this is kind of a way to protect against that right is like you're able to sort of create these with a more scalable blueprint in a more sort of like scientific or at least measurable way without having to like rely on this audience that may or may not come through from you actually paying an influencer yeah yeah i mean and this still relies on you like

31:43 deciding that this content has somewhat of like commercial intent um so you can't just like get views and then magically just hope that it'll get conversions like there should be some hypothesis behind why you're choosing this type of content like for this one for example I see the last line is like "Hey did you know people who struggle with anxiety depression can't remember a lot blah blah blah." And the last line says "If this is you maybe this account can help." That is a call to action that's saying like "Hey check out this Tik Tok account." But you could change that CTA to something like "If this is you maybe you should try out meditation apps or maybe you should try out you know something else." And then that's

32:28 like the CTA so um there there should still be some sort of um like goal to to getting the views right that's actually a really good distinction that I think is probably worth calling out like um I think a lot of people get started in this game and they start to uh have tunnel vision on views but I think that there's a really important distinction there that just because your video gets you know a million 2 million views if you don't have the right kind of content with like a good CTA that won't necessarily translate to like app downloads right and I think that that's that's probably a frustration that a lot of people have to hurdle first because if you've never made any content before and you're just getting started you have

33:14 to have that whole bridge of like learning how to make the content and learning how to you know hack attention and then actually you know create something that is sustains attention beyond just the first second but then how do you how can you shape the content to actually like generate that sort of curiosity or intrigue right those are two very different things one shortcut to that is like if you know uh if you know somewhat of the current meta of what types of content do get views and convert you can specifically look out for that type of content and then iterate on that so for example like if you know that phone inh hand content converts well for apps you can just find like phone screen and then find

34:00 videos that actually show a phone screen on the video um so that's another thing that uh another use case for for this tool but like just scrolling Tik Tok as well like if you ever find videos that are like uh that that that sell an app or that have a phone on on the screen or you know um are exist in the format that you want to um replicate then uh should save those in bookmarks absolutely yeah and and I think that that's something that's like really interesting right is like um I think people can kind of tend to like overthink it but there is something like inherently just like interesting about literally showcasing the app like upfront right like some some of these

34:45 videos end up doing really really well um I think that you know you can kind of focus it and shape it to be a little bit more interesting like for for example Cali's um marketing techniques right they're only showing it for like a second or two but if you're just starting out I think that this is like a reasonable way to get started and see you know how you um how you can at least start to get better at like the skill of creating content and obviously this is like a really good tool that you can use to be like okay here's what a lot of other apps are doing you know and here's their videos and it's actually working really well right this is like a great way to actually get started with that yeah definitely absolutely okay so let's let's take it a step back um something that is really interesting about Consumer Club is outside of just like focusing on like distribution metas and

35:31 strategies um you're actually hosting events for people right so I think I saw this morning you tweeted um that you love meeting founders in New York City it looks like you hosted a founder dinner um with just like a really impressive group of attendees i'm just reading off of your Twitter and you say a 400k MR study app a dating app with over 300,000 downloads from Tik Tok organic with zero spent on ads someone posting 15 UGC vids per day um yeah like would love to hear a little bit more um about one the events that you're hosting with Consumer Club and then two specifically this like what are you know some of the most interesting tidbits that you pulled from this dinner or things that you think might just be worth sharing in general yeah yeah um yeah this was interesting so this this this last one blew my mind a lot cuz

36:18 I've always thought that you you can only post three videos per day like it's it's sort of like this meta like common knowledge if you're in the space that you you can't post more than three times a day on an account or else you're probably going to get shadowbanned by Tik Tok um but the way that this guy does it is basically he just has five accounts per phone and still posts three times per day so it's it ends up being 15 videos per day but across five different accounts um but then each person who has a phone can now do it can now do 15 per day so like per uh like for for the whole operation it's 15

37:03 times however many people he has that's crazy scale yeah so this is the guy that um Alex tweeted about who's like Alex came to the dinner as well but they he was saying how um he actually flew to the Phil like this founder flew to the Philippines gave iPhones with US SIM cards to his creators and then uh train them on how to warm up the accounts you know the posting times make sure you don't like post 15 all on the same account make sure you like spread it out in this way right so this is just very like yeah the he he just kind of like understood all the different pieces and then just executed it like really really well that's yeah that's crazy dedication so and just for those who don't know

37:50 like within consumer club and I I would say just like this part of Twitter in general people are like sharing insights about like you know metas for distribution and one of those things that we we mentioned earlier is like you know there seems to be a correlation between posting a lot you know posting more than three or three to five times a day and then not getting any views on the subsequent videos after and so this guy really just took things into his own hands got a bunch of phones with USM cards so he could ensure that he was reaching a US audience right and then basically took this upon himself to go scale the operation which is crazy um yeah so I I guess I would love to hear a little bit more about um some of the other interesting things that you found from um these consumer events i know that you hosted a consumer event in LA um there's as you as you see here the

38:37 consumer tech cabal um yeah would love to hear a little bit more about um some interesting things that you've gleaned from like the founders in this um in this area yeah yeah LA was fun um Nikita Beer showed up to our LA mixer we hosted it at this uh mansion at the Wombo House and it was um yeah Nikita showed up like some of the people who are in this like sort of consumer social but actually pretty monetized space so like the NGL founders came and yeah it was it was really interesting to hear from them too cuz they like they've been in this for a long time like they were like some of the founders were uh they did Zoom University I don't know if anyone remembers like the Facebook group Zoom University like back in 2020 and they

39:23 kind of like it I don't know how they did that but maybe it was just keyword they're like the first Facebook group to like hop onto the like Zoom University concepts but they built a they built a a mobile app out of the concept of Zoom University and like a video I think it was like a video streaming thing but then they moved on to do NGL and then now Hunter is doing bags um but yeah I mean these people they're also just very hacky mindset like I mean they're like some of these apps are making millions millions a year just cash flowing but they're like yeah they they definitely have like the distribution um mindset i mean for NGL it was you know the the high schools like seeding high schools with the influencer accounts and stuff i think it just comes

40:09 down to like understanding human nature because I think one thing with the high school accounts is like the main psychology principle behind that was you if you're if you're a kid in high school and you get followed by a private account and it has the name of your high school plus the app name like let's say it's NGL uh whatever high school and then the logo of the account is like your high school's logo plus like the app or whatever like you're going to be pretty interested it's it's almost like alumni networks you know like if you see someone else that went to your same college there's just it immediate like trust um or you know someone who also worked at the same company as you

40:56 there's just this like tribal like feeling that you get so they followed Mass you know everyone in the high school um with these accounts and then they got a lot of follow backs and then the first post that they post on that account is going to have all these eyeballs of like the kids in that school right so it you know gets a boost so it's uh yeah like stuff like that right they just have like this insight into hm if we tried this I bet this would be very powerful likely right and then you're referring to like NGL this is the same kind of like genre of like questionnaire app that like Nikita Beer obviously has like done two times over um like this distribution method where um they basically like

41:41 primed all these high school students right to get ready to like download the app and then they launched it at once um which is crazy i mean I I guess the other thing that uh a lot of people I think would be curious to know is like um I think that there's this notion that like oh no are things like is this like drop shipping like will will there be saturation like are you know can you try like one idea multiple times over and over um you know I'd be curious to to hear your perspective on that just because I've seen a lot of apps that are almost identical that still fare really well and to the extent where they're even copying the others like exact distribution method and channel like almost like pixel for pixel like copied on TikTok would love to hear a little bit more about that yeah uh yeah I think

42:28 there will be copycats and that's just that's just like that's just the game like but I do think that innovation is happening so fast like AI innovation is happening so fast like a new model comes out like every month it seems like and I think that'll enable like a 100 new rappers every time a new model comes out there's going to be like a hundred new apps that just attack slightly different markets there might be like you know one you know some of these like food scanning apps like you could probably do a verticalized um Cai that makes a tenth of the revenue but that's still $2 million a month i think last time I saw they're making

43:14 like Well yeah they're they're making 2 million a month so a tenth of that was like 200k what if you made Cal AI but only for like vegans right like it specializes in like a a special like a certain niche um so you can you can attack different audiences or you could just be a first mover into whatever new model that comes out like Tolen is this app that launched they're member of consumer club yeah um they launched a couple weeks ago and they hit number one uh they're number two in um in the app store and they're just this like AI companion app that talks to you and it like I'm sure they have some interesting special like AI thing in the background

43:59 but from what I can see like anyone could make something like somewhat similar to this um using the new the newest voice models from Open AI or or Anthropic or claude or whatever like Deep Seek like you uh and then just reskin it like this one it's like cartoons like not everyone's going to want to download this they hit number one but you know some other people might want a completely faceless voice model app you know that doesn't have like a character attached or maybe like some one for an older audience you know there's there's just so many different audiences that you can tackle with each new um yeah different audiences different products um with each new like tech innovation that comes totally yeah and that's that's super interesting because it's like it kind of hearkens back to what you were

44:45 describing earlier right which is where I guess it kind of goes against conventional product building in the sense where it's like you almost start with distribution in mind right like you start with that like viral Tik Tok moment or you start with like what that's going to look like and then build outward from that and you know like you've worked in tech like you understand sort of like what the traditional like product uh building model is um and so I' I'd love to hear a little bit more about like it's it's kind of crazy that you could sort of start with what is what does the Tik Tok video look like and then build outward from that right like to think like say you're going to do the uh the vegan cali and your your edge there is literally just targeting vegans right and you accept that you know you're not going to hit $2 million a month but like even if

45:32 you hit a tenth of that right like that would be that would be like life-changing for a lot of people um yeah so I'd be curious to hear like um you know from the people in consumer club do you feel like there's been this like shift towards starting with like the content like starting with the media starting with the distribution and working backwards from there yeah yeah i mean um yeah I think starting with the content like I I've heard people refer to it as like start with the channel so like if you think if you if you deeply study or you you at least like understand um the channel where consumer where your target customer is so let's say it's Tik Tok just knowing what the content is going to look like first

46:18 um yeah can definitely help cuz if you don't know what it's going to look like then you start with a product and then you you build it and then it's it comes time to market it and then you're like okay like what content should we do and then at that point it might be too late because like maybe there is no content that will ever resonate with the audience that you're trying to go after so I think it's just it's like a way to derisk um I think like tech building in general like I think the reason why people come at it from the opposite is because consumer tech has always been about winner take all like everyone wants to be the next Facebook so you just have to make a really great product it doesn't have to have like it doesn't have to resonate with a very specific audience on a specific channel you just

47:04 have to make a good product and then seed it to you know in Facebook's case it was just seed it to all the colleges and then everyone else will use it but with consumer products these days you don't have to beat Facebook to build you know just build a $10 million business or a $1 million business you can um you can start with distribution um attack it from almost like in a way that an ecom e-commerce founder would would do it so right um yeah there's definitely people I mean I've talked to consu some recent consumer club members uh they're anonymous because they're like they they have VC funding and they come and talk to me and they're like I actually don't really like my company

47:50 anymore cuz we're going after this like broad giant market and I'm seeing all these kids making $10 million AI rappers and I kind of would rather just like start with distribution think of a an idea that's Tik Tok viral because they're like they're they had this big idea and now it's time to market it and they've been grinding for like a year or two or like multiple years trying to get users right but then like they're seeing all these kids just doing like going viral on TikTok making millions like right now cash flow right and they're they're getting FOMO so totally it's kind of funny just seeing seeing like the shift in the way that people are thinking about building businesses absolutely yeah that that is

48:36 actually that is crazy i mean again all all due respect to to Zach and Blake for building Cali into the like whatever $25 million a year business it is but I I can imagine for VC backed founders who have been grinding for years and then just being literally undercut by like you know kids who like don't have that much experience but obviously have like the knowledge and the executional skills i can imagine that that would feel like you know sort of a a cut at the knees um so that's an interesting segue into into sort of this like I guess broader sort of like question of like saturation right because like as more and more people learn about the success that um you know some kids or or other people are having with sort of these like smaller businesses like the ability to get started right away the

49:23 ability to generate like meaningful revenue right within 30 60 days um I think there's sort of like the obvious question of like at what point does this run out and so what I'm what I really want to ask about is I think you had a tweet a few weeks ago where you said "Hey if you're an app founder and you want to know what's next for underpriced mass distribution just look at ecom." And you said like you know there are basically these trends that have occurred over the past you know four years and so in 2021 you said it was influencers right in 2022 it was like Tik Tok mass UGC this is kind of like that Oliver bracado like tabs chocolate sort of strategy right um in 2023 it was slides and and obviously you know a lot of these still work today um and then you have uh for 2024 Hey GenE was slides

50:09 behind and you say Flux avatars in 2025 so can you expand on this uh on the tweet a little bit and and describe some of these things yeah definitely yeah I mean um every time like someone sees that a format works then a bunch of marketers come in and copy it and then it saturates so then you have to find a new format that works better so you know with ecom there's this progression and all of these still work i mean even within ecom it's just like what is the what is the newest edge but influencers yeah like I mean even like if you talk to the biggest companies like the most like boomer companies they don't even know what influencer marketing is they've never even heard of it so we're still like very early like I in that tweet I said influencer was the old way but like for for most people it's still

50:57 the new way like we're on the cutting cutting edge of this so like yeah UGC mass UGC obviously still works slides still work um hey genen with slides I'm just referring to like instead of just the slides um that are like a pure carousel it's more like um you put the AI actor so now there's like you can AI generate um these faces like faces and they're fake people and then they can speak and emote and like on screen I can show you an example like then you put the you put the slides in the background 13 years as a Korean plastic surgeon yet no one so you can put the slide the same slides that you would normally put in a carousel you just put in the background

51:43 and then you put the green screen like AI actor in the foreground um and have them like you can use 11 Labs to narrate the voice um hey Jen I think does all of this for you um and yeah this I mean this is going crazy in the Wait this is this is crazy so just this is an AI generated person right yeah this is fake person that's cra like very few people unless you're like in this space like if you're just scrolling TikTok like you're not really going to recognize that right like yeah crazy crazy and and really the advantage of this is that you can just scale this in like an absurd way right is sort of like the main advantage like instead of you having to either hire someone or talk into your phone yourself

52:30 you can generate all of this with like all these different variations for like script and that sort of thing really quickly yeah yeah you can you I mean there's so many AI tools now that are doing it i mean hey genen is one of them arc ads like um there's a if you just Google search like AI avatar um or AI UGC actor um it's basically like the UGC actor uh format but then you just use AI to like make it faster and cheaper um so yeah and like people like I hear two complaints about this the one one complaint is like oh this is uh this looks like how like this like if you

53:15 listen to the voice like you can tell it's not a real person like link in my bio can't possibly share all of the secrets I learned how how are you going to like uh like people are not that dumb but like you look at the comments and like there's a call to action it's like oh comment this word people are literally just commenting the word like they're they're treating this as a as a normal person there's one comment here that says "This is AI crying emoji." The next one is like "OMG bro it took me a sec to notice like like so like the average person I think just can't tell anymore." I think it's like great and there there's some ethical concerns with this as well i I'm not going to go into that but you can uh use your own judgment for what like how you want to

54:01 do this but um yeah there yeah I don't know if you had more to say but I wanted to show you another another format as well yeah absolutely no that's that's really sick i would love would love to see the other format yeah um so there's also this other format um I I call it like faceless storytelling so instead of doing the AI generated face you just ignore the face completely and then you just use B- roll so you just do AI voice instead of face so eventually I could see a world where faces become not trustworthy less

54:49 trustworthy than voices in a way like right now like AI uh you know avatars are trustworthy because it's like oh it's a human saying this but then eventually once people catch on that oh anyone can just fake a face then eventually we might go back to voice where voices are more trusted than faces so this this video is telling a story about arowan smoothies and they're just using um b-roll of arowan smoothies um and the health benefits and stuff um and there's there's just an AI voice but the AI voice sounds really good

55:37 this adapt make mushroom like supplement thing um so this is another format of like using AI to massroduce content yeah that's crazy and I feel like a theme that we're like seeing with all of these is like there's some kind of trend and then there's like saturation cuz people copy that and then there's there's almost like an inversion of that right as like a way to get like back on the trend right like so for for instance in this case like all this is like very very bleeding edge but just as an example like that that what you just referenced right like faces becoming untrustworthy so then you're going back to voices right and it's like then the inversion on that would probably be using a face again in like sometimes so it's just it's interesting because I guess what what I've noticed and I'd be curious if this is your perspective too

56:23 is like it literally is a playground like there are some things that are are like slightly evergreen if you know how to like harm harness like the current zeitgeist of things you know like slides will probably be be around forever right it's just like how can you tweak it just like a little bit to like maintain that attention um so it's really funny because I I feel like a lot of people at least from Superwall's perspective you know they'll be like "Hey like what are some things that you're seeing with like successful companies when it comes to like marketing and that sort of thing?" And I I feel like I feel like there's no right answer like it is literally a playground like it's it's just it's up to whomever to like go experiment right and there's like no right like one way to skin the proverbial cat yeah no I I completely agree i think one thing that

57:08 people get scared of when I talk about or when like Tik Tok is brought up is like oh I don't want to be a part of this like inauthenticity where you're just like spamming content but like you said there's the inversion that happens and like if you you can follow the trend yeah but then you can also pave your own trends too like um you know once people get sick of one format there's there's a market for for authenticity like people do want authentic content whatever form that comes in whether it's like voices instead of faces or I mean one this is a YouTube example but I like to think about Sam Sulk so there's this like bodybuilder guy but like if you think

57:53 about Mr beast it's like oh this is the current meta of YouTube you know like crazy thumbnail crazy title like crazy faces in the in the thumbnails like spending tons of money on all the videos and then you have like Sam Sulk and he's just this like bodybuilder guy i mean he's he's an impressive bodybuilder but his videos are like 40 50 minutes long and then there's just these really long take cuts of him just like talking really slowly the camera right and then him just doing exercises like kind of narrating it he has a mic he just has this like calming voice and it's like 50 minutes long and like I don't know who watches this but it minimal stripped

58:38 back like antithes like very big contrast like what M Mr beast is right it's just like you're you're literally watching a guy in the gym right like Yeah but he's blowing up that's a great example of inversion yeah yeah he's just blowing up on the YouTube algo i mean same with me right i I posted a Tik Tok on a brand new account and it got 50,000 views on the first on the first video and I'm like I'm kind of like Sam Sul a little bit like I I talk a little bit slowly i have sort of like a monotone voice but like I can still get views um just by like I I just literally I I did not retention edit the video at all like it was a three minute long video i was just rambling like kind of slowly but I had a decent hook and like it got the

59:24 views so I think like as long as you know kind of the fundamentals of like here's a piece of content that you kind of think people will be interested in um and then you just be yourself like you can still you can still do well algo totally i think that I think that's such a great like illumination of or or maybe like rebuttal of like I don't want to do like inauthentic spamming like it there are so many different ways that like work for anyone right it's just a matter of like getting out there and like trying it yourself like I think that that's the other really interesting thing is I don't know this might sound like ridiculous and it is but like so few people have literally just like picked up TikTok and like talked into their phone you know like like very few people have done that and and I feel like they've got caught up in the weeds of

1:00:10 like what's like the best thing to do and it's like you can you can actually just generate like hundreds of thousands of views just by just by picking up your phone which is kind of kind of crazy maybe maybe a an uncomfortable truth but a truth nonetheless yeah yeah that's the easiest way you just pick up the phone start start yapping just the practice of like of speaking into the phone you'll immediately start to modify like that video that I mentioned that got 50,000 views it was 2 minutes long but that video actually took me an hour to to finish not because I was like hyperediting anything but because I would talk and then I'd be like "Oh wait that's not that's not interesting like let me change the way I said that." And then I I kept doing I did that like 20

1:00:57 times for like the same like a few second clip um just just just like recording yourself with your phone it kind of like changes the way that you think about marketing because you imagine like someone else watching it um and it becomes a little bit more real totally totally no it it is it's like it's like a mask is like put on or something right it's like the stage stage presence you uh really comes out yeah she's funny um okay so I want to I want to take a step back and I want to go go back to uh something that you mentioned earlier which is like you know some VC backfounders have like seen the success that some of these like bootstrapped founders um have with some of these like basically just like smaller scale businesses um and I guess I'd just be

1:01:44 curious to see like from like a future outlook you know from from your perspective like where do you see like the next big wave of like consumer app success coming from like do you do you feel like it's going to be more driven by like the more scrappy kind of like younger like ecom style uh like growth hackers or you know kids or do you feel like do you feel like it's going to come you know do I guess do you feel like the venturebacked players are going to be able to like harness those growth strategies and like use their capital advantage to to really um surpass Yeah yeah i I want to give like somewhat of a balanced take here like I don't think like everyone loves to on VC founders because it's easy like they have money so it's like fun to make fun

1:02:30 of them but it's like like the capital advantage yes but a lot of times the VC founders have a lot of experience and network as well so they know kind of the game of business and they can use the capital to hire the best experts because they know how to identify the experts so these kids that are making a million dollars a year um well I don't know let's say they're making $100,000 a year but they're actually the best like Tik Tok growth hackers they just don't know how to build technology or like they don't have the experience to build a lasting business that Tik Tocker would get a lot of value from being employed by the VCbacked founder that has a ton of experience in the space because maybe that kid wants to become

1:03:16 you know an app founder someday so I think that the VC founders that actually are thoughtful about leveraging the current distribution channels like they they will win just as much as the as the scrappy kids and probably more because they have the capital and they have the experience um if you get funded off of pure narrative and you have no like actual experience or no like interest in following the current trends and like you know really understanding marketing as it is today then yeah I don't think they're going to make it and uh it's probably better to just be a scrappy kid like who actually knows the market um

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