0:00 Hey guys, I'm Benji. I'm Gabriel. We're two New York City college students who just built two apps that got 30k users. In this video, we'll explain to you exactly how we went about marketing step by step with pretty much zero funding. And we'll walk you through how you can then apply this to your own products where whether it's web apps, mobile apps, or anything that you're planning to build. Let's get into the video. The reason why we chose the software space is because the marginal cost of production is pretty much zero and the profit margins are extremely high. Usually 95% and above. Like for example, if you have an app that is generating 1K month in monthly reoccurring revenue assuming no churn rate and also new no new users which is like very conservative approach of calculating an app app's revenue projection then you know a lifespan of an app is usually 5 to 7 years. let's just say 5 years like
0:45 worst case scenario you're going to generate 70k in total revenue or total profit even like cuz revenue is pretty much equals profit in the software space and which is like if you think think about it if you can build an app in like 3 weeks and market it correctly I think it's a great deal so hence why you know and if you do this just over and over again we had a friend that built 48 apps that are generating like millions of dollars in passive income for him so yeah but the important thing is the marketing especially these days where development is really easy marketing is becoming more and more important day by day. You can have you can build the nicest app in the world, but if you do not want to distribute it, you might as well not have built it at all. Exactly. All right, so let's talk about the lowest cost marketing strategy and that is organic marketing. So that's any marketing that doesn't require any expense and marketing that you're doing yourself without hiring anyone else to do. And if you're building a mobile app,
1:31 that will usually take the form of posting on social media, Instagram, Tik Tok, or on online forums like Reddit, uh things like that. These are honestly the three main and best channels to do it with. And yeah, so whenever it comes to organic content, you have to take the approach of like quantity over not quantity over quality, but quantity is the most important approach because of the way algorithms work. If you want to give your content a fair chance to blow up, you have first of all to make content that actually can blow up, but also you have to post it. You have there has to be enough volume to where it has the opportunity to actually blow up. And the great thing about uh social media, particularly the Tik Tok, is that you do have a minimum guaranteed amount of views. So, let's say if you have 10 different accounts where you post three times a day, you post three times a day on one account. You have 250 views guaranteed for each post, unless you're like Shadowbanner or or something like that, which you shouldn't be. So, three
2:18 posts, 250 views plus 250 views plus 250 views, that's 750 views on 10 different different 10 different accounts. That's 7.5,000 views every single day. And that's assuming that none of your posts outperform or actually do better than the norm. And the norm is the low like 250 views is the lowest number you will ever get. And that's the great thing, right? Cuz you can literally you can get the same exposure that you would get by going viral by not going viral at all with just the quantity approach. And this is obviously timeconuming and it is a lot harder. But if you're starting out and have no money, this is actually the best way to start and scale from, you know, from 0 to one. If you're trying to get to from zero to 1kr, organic content is definitely the way to go. And it does work, right? It just takes it takes time. You have to experiment with many different formats. I'll give you an example. There's a Pillar competitor called the dog app, which is obviously
3:04 it's not as good as pillar, but I will give them credit in terms of their organic uh content strategy. They kept experimenting with different formats. If you look at their Instagram account, they basically started with random motivational videos and then just kept iterating until they found a format that actually stuck and got uh you know start blew up consistently. So when they're getting content, it's really about patience, but also you have to think of it as it does compound compound, right? So the more content you post, the more exposure uh your product gets. And usually organic content is also a great way to experiment what you should actually spend money on. So what a lot of companies do is take the organic content to experiment with different formats. Whatever outperforms the norm, you then decide to put backing into whether it's sending it to theme pages to post or put in like paid ads on it basically. So what do we do for pillar? We basically have uh 10 to 15 organic
3:50 accounts because uh we're creating content. We had a lot of people that were willing to help us out and run these accounts and none of these actually like went crazy, right? Like I think the largest one had maybe like 100 200 followers, but it doesn't matter cuz every time they posted it was 300 views, 400 views, you know, times times 10 different accounts, times 20 different accounts is 8,000 views guaranteed every single day. And it does compound that. And that's really how we went from zero to one camera for pillar. How we went from zero to our first uh 2,000 2,000 app users. So organic content is really hard to do and it does suck the con constant process of like experimenting with your analytics and trying to just iterate until something picks up. But if you do have a long-term vision and understand the long-term benefit of just constantly experimenting and also, you know, saving money in the in the moment for a long-term benefit, then organic content is the way to go. Now, this is more on the technical side. If you're
4:36 trying to actually go with the organic content strategy, this is something that people don't talk about enough, but it's actually a really big issue for, you know, mobile app founders is actually getting shadowbanned or their accounts getting taken down. Uh, because if you create 10 different accounts with this very similar name, posting very similar content, you know, it'll be easily detected as spam. Uh something that you need to make sure to keep in mind is to warm up each of these accounts. So as you're building the product, start creating these accounts already and give it two or three days to warm up. And by warm up, it doesn't mean you just leave the account there. It means you like you use it as a real user so that Tik Tok knows that you are a real person and not an actual bot. So give it like two or three days before you start posting anything and just act like a real user does. And the reason I mention this is because if you do try to do what I just told you not to do, which is create like 10 different accounts the same day and start posting on them, you will get banned. You will not be able to actually post on any of them. your videos will get zero views because you will be shot of man. So make sure be very careful of
5:22 that. Something that is really important for marketing that is actually part of the development process is to make sure to build first of all a UI that is really sharable and features that can go viral very very easily. So for example for pillar there were two things. It was the way we displayed the different pillar scores where it's almost like uh each one was its own stock right? So it's very easy to understand if I were to put a picture of it on social media and the radar graph uh as well where it's really easy to tell like where what areas you're lacking in what areas you're doing well in. And our strategy was basically those those were the two most successful formats. We take those screenshots, we put text over it and something either funny or like that people can relate to. And then we just you know we experiment with different structures until it go blows up basically. And after our, you know, after the 100 formats that we played around with, that was what actually stuck and what actually went viral consistently. Another thing you need to
6:08 keep in mind with organic content, but that also will go into anything that's paid. So, partnerships with team pages, things like that, is you always want to make sure that you're not directly selling to users because no one actually likes being sold to. So, you want to make sure that you're entertaining people first and then the sale is like in is done in a very tasteful way, but in a tasteful way, but it also does have to be there. A mistake we made for pillar is we sometimes had posts blew up that barely mentioned the app and those had maybe you know millions of views but converted to maybe like 10 paying users which is not good at all and yeah definitely try to avoid that. So you have to figure out a formula where uh your post your post is not salesy to where it can go viral but also salesy enough to where it can convert. The other side of organic marketing that you can do is related to posting on forums like Reddit and they see just relevant communities related to your product. And this is very it's going to look very different compared to social media and
6:53 to compare it to Instagram and Tik Tok because here you can't really take the quantity approach or be as effective with it. Uh obviously you do want to you know put out some certain amount of quantity but it's better to have quality over quantity in this case specifically when it comes to Reddit. You want to take a lot of time to craft a post that you know will go viral. Uh but the biggest issue with Reddit is that no one again just like social media likes being s sold to but it's times 100. So with Reddit anytime you try to sell anything it has to be very very very wellcraftrafted. So, what I usually recommend is whenever you're trying to make a post to sell, I don't know, your productivity app, your habit tracking app, your your budgeting app, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're telling a story. And then the cell should probably not even be in the content you produce, but it should be in the community interactions. So, what has worked the best for Pillar for posts that got millions of views on Reddit was basically telling a story about someone's self-improvement journey, then
7:39 using the comments to basically drive traffic to the app. And you'd be surprised how well that worked for us. Okay, so if you're just starting out, you also want to make sure that once you get into the paid marketing, so let's say you've done organic for a little bit, you know, for go viral and you basically hit like a static point, right? You're, you know, you get you have 1kr users aren't growing by that much. It's like 1% every day and you want exponential growth and that's when you should probably step into paid marketing because you'll have the funds from the paying users already to spend on that. And because ideally you want to be conservative with the money that you spend and not just dump a bunch of money and take huge risks on the marketing side. Uh the best way to do this to scale with paid marketing is through team pages because it first of all it allows for very controlled spending and it actually gives gives you a lot of exposure for every dollar that you spend. So whatever niche you're in, you have to find Instagram team pages that post your content and get obviously a lot of views. But ideally you want to
8:25 think of each page each page like a stock, right? You want to think find undervalued pages. the pages maybe like a few thousand followers but that are getting consistently like 100,000 200,000 views which is for a page with just a few thousand followers is very very impressive and that's those are the kind of pages that you want to look for and you want to try to make harder ships where obviously you get the better end of the deal always or partnerships where you can basically estimate the amount of that you're going to get for each dollar that you spend and the approach that I would recommend is to always lowball uh when it comes to your offer because most these team pages if you ask for a price they're going to give you crazy price going to say like $200 for one reel and the reason they're doing that is either because someone was dumb enough to pay that in the asked. But either way, I will promise you that if you counter with like there have been cases where people said $300 for one reel, then we set $10 for one reel, they said deal. So, it's don't get fooled by whatever uh price they offer you. But yeah, think of it like a stock. So, you want to find
9:10 undervalued pages that will get you a lot of exposure for very very cheap prices. And it's really just about and the rest of the work is just about optimizing for the best deals. So, let's say you decide I have $200 to spend and I will spend on 20 theme pages. Just do the first round, spend whatever $10 each. And for the second round, for the next $200, you make sure you take out every bad partnership and try to make new partnerships that align with the the good ones that you just that you just did or just extend the the partnerships or extend the scope of the partnerships that went well. So, it's all it's all about like finding undervalued theme pages and then over optimizing for the best ones to make sure that you always uh return a profit for each dollar that you spend. Let's talk about creator marketing. So, you know, I I would say majority of the consumer app founders out there are still doing creative marketing and that that's definitely for a reason, right? The conversion rate on creatorled apps are usually higher
9:57 because of the fact that people buy into other people's narrative and just feels more down to earth and authentic if someone were to just be recommending the app to you instead of a theme page where you can't even understand maybe you know it's like a faceless thing right so there's more trust being established if you were to go with a creator so definitely uh that's one thing however I would say focus on US audience or UK English speaking country audience because of uh just one fact right purchasing power parody there's there's a reason why startups are bas in US is because there's more purchasing power. So definitely if you were to be spending money on creators, I would highly suggest spending money on creators that has majority US audience just so that you know their audience are optimized in a way where they're they're not only willing to download the app but also they're willing to pay. And there has been a lot of different playbooks out there teaching you how to partner with
10:42 creators with minimum funding. So there are two ways you can go about creator partnerships. First, you you simply pay for you, you know, three reels on the creator's main page, and maybe they're going to post it for every, you know, like one post every seven days, and you just do that for a month. They're going to charge a lot of money for that. You know, if you're talking about like a creator with at least 20K or 30K followers, they're usually going to charge 400 or 500, even 600, $700 per video. And that's definitely not the best uh way to use your money. And the reason why they price it at such a high point is because of the fact that, you know, if they're doing a promotion, they're likely just they're hitting their followers on Instagram sort of on the face, right? Because you're promoting an an app and you're sort of breaching that trust that people had on had on you when they followed you in the first place. They don't want to be sold to. So definitely uh when creators are evaluating evaluating the deal structure
11:28 and also like the deal volume and the price point, that is what they consider the most. So, how do you sort of create a sustainable marketing structure to work long-term with a creator and also at a relatively lower price point? Well, you establish a thing called a separate side account. So, essentially, you know, creators with, let's say, 50K followers on Instagram, they create a side account on Instagram that has zero followers and they post every single day on that side account purely for your app. So, it's kind of like, you know, creating an entire account solely for the purpose of marketing your app. And that actually works uh for you know apps like Turboarn or Chronology because of the fact that these creators has validated um algorithms. Basically Instagram favors these creators right so the side accounts they create is not the typical site account that a regular user with
12:14 300 followers create because of the fact that they have tremendous success on the platform already. The site account that you know they're going to be creating are usually going to get boosted on the Instagram algorithm. But also creators have followers because of a reason right? So, if they're the one managing it, of course, they're going to do a good job on it. And also, uh you can definitely it's it's a bargaining chip for you to lower the price on the deals because of the fact that they're not eating into their audience and they're simply just making a 15-second video on a daily basis for you. So, you can maybe get charged $10, $20 per video. And you know, that's actually a really good deal just having someone posting optimal content for you every single day. And if you really think about it, if it's like $10 per video, 30 videos is like $300 per month. Well, yeah, and they just do that with like 10 creators, you're
13:01 spending like 3K for 10 accounts posting every single day. I think that's a really good deal. But also, uh let's get into the specifics of the deal structure, right? So, usually we do a base pay plus sort of incentive structure driven compensation structure. So, for example, base pay maybe on a monthly basis would give you $500 to post every single day on that side account and 50% off of affiliate sales, meaning that yes, you're going to get decent money by simply just filming a video, right? Which is like very simple to do, which is $500. It's a great side hustle. You can do it in one sitting and just schedule your post. So, it's a good deal on the creator's end, but also if the app grows and we actually make money off of their content, right, they're they're going to get, you know, like assured of that. So definitely the incentive is there. The incentives are aligned. They want to grow the app just
13:46 as much as you do because the more money you make, the more money they're going to make as well. Just set up the payout date at the end of each month. So they just have to send money at once. That is a system that you can establish with creators and that is what we've been using so far. Um we we're sort of focusing on theme pages mostly because of the fact that we did not have the financial ability to hire many creators. But right now, you know, we're we've gotten to a point where creators is also a possibility and is something that we're looking into for sure. So, a good case study to bring up here is TurboLearn. So, Turbol is one of the study tools out there, right? So, um they basically have 140K on Instagram and this is what they do. They hire a bunch of different ambassadors or quote unquote creators in the student niche. They have like 20 or 30 of them or even 40 of them and basically, you know, these site accounts are producing content every single day. They have the
14:32 link in bio to their app store and place your app purchase link but also they tag their product main account on their bio. So it's just like you know funneling all the views into their actual main account which is great. If you want to partners with these creators a few things to keep in mind. First is make sure that on a contract you you say there's a one-mon test period right like if their site account is not doing a good job you why would you pay them 6 months upfront? So do one month test drop first and then you can do like a longer contract. Second would be um make sure the payout date is clearly stated so that no one gets into any arguments. Third of all is you're going to have the ownership to those accounts in which they're creating for you, right? It's technically what you're paying them for. So, of course, you should own that account. So, even if you guys, you know, had an argument later on, you can use that account and
15:17 maybe just get another person to post on that account so that you don't lose the progress or the money that you paid the creator for. So, that's just a really good uh safety net for you to ensure that your money is not being wasted, but also you have a you know, you just have like that system in place. You just have that all those accounts in place that are just ready to push out more content for you to get more users. And also make sure to keep in mind that you want to have the ownership right of all the videos that they made so that you can also post their videos on your own account as well. So you can reuse videos uh maybe you know post on other theme pages and reuse it. But basically if they're making free content for you I mean not free you're paying for them for it but if they're making content for you of course you want to optimize it to the fullest extent possible. There's also another deal structure they can go for with like very large influencers. For example, right? If you're a developer with no money to market this, like you
16:03 quite literally don't have any money for this. You can go up to influencers and tell them, "Hey, I'm building this app." All you have to do is make sure you promote this app like x amount of times per week or per month and make sure they're big enough, right? Like you know it's going to work if they promote your app. Then you just tell them that, okay, I'll do a revenue split with you um on a maybe like a one-year cliff, two-year cliff, basically like a revenue sharing model where they get 50%, you get 50%. Well, that would be sort of putting your all your eggs in one basket, but also it has worked out for some people that we personally know of. But definitely, I would say a huge part of it is recognize that, you know, you're going to make money back on your app. And I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, have you have to be extremely conservative in, you know, in the approach that you're taking for marketing, but definitely realize that these are the optimal way to basically structure your deals and get the best possible outcomes as you can.
16:50 So, thank you guys for watching. We know that these are a bit different than what we usually do in terms of videos. Let us know if you like this or prefer the cinematic startup videos. Yeah. And if you need us to build your startup or and your your web apps, your apps for you, we can do it in another 20 days. So check out the link in description and we can or just DM us with any questions that you have.
