Peter Okwara

how to get your app a viral tiktok, from 69,674 videos we posted last year: 209 of them (0.3%) drove 64.6% of our 755M views. virality is a numbers game you can rig. here's how we find the winners fast and squeeze them dry: before you post 1. one brand new account per creator per app. 2. days 1-3, don't post. scroll the niche 1-2 hours, watch 10+ videos to the end, like 20-30, leave 3-5 real comments, follow 5-10 accounts. 3. days 3-4, post one broad video ("realizing how much money i spent last month"). then 1 campaign video a day, aiming for 200+ views in the first 24 hours. 4. 9 out of 10 "shadowbans" aren't real. it's a cold account, a flagged keyword, a duplicate edit or a bad hook. you can reuse footage but can't reuse the cut. research 5. find your star feature, the 1-2 things the app is built around. your real competitor is whoever markets that feature. ex: parrot's is swiping, so tiktok is on its list. 6. save viral videos in 3 buckets: your niche, your star-feature competitors, viral ugc in general. only organically viral ones, no ad spend behind them. 7. 9 times out of 10 you can tweak a viral general ugc format to fit your app. formats 8. run all 4: wall of text, talking head, slideshow, hook + demo. 9. talking heads take longer to pop, then convert more because the viewer trusts the person. they get flagged as ads way less too. 10. slideshows are the easiest product placement. people swipe to the end, so the app slide almost always gets seen. 11. hook + demo: take your best wall of text, cut it to a 3-second hook, show the app at the end. 12. read the comments on your wall of text videos. they double as a free focus group. hooks 13. open on a problem your audience has lived, felt in that exact spot. 14. the best ones split the room. jenni ai pulled a 3.6M-view video by pulling in people who use ai for essays and people who judge them for it. 15. skip shock bait. the comments fill up with the bait and the video gets pushed to people who came for the hook instead of the problem. 16. cta at the end. 17. on a 60s video, under 25% average watch time and tiktok stops pushing it. kill or keep 18. 10-15 videos per account across every format. comments or 5-10k views = keep going. can't clear 1k views on any account = kill it. 19. every video over 10k views gets 4 questions: which pain point hit, did it reach the right audience, did more product context hurt reach, how do we combine its virality with another video's buying intent. 20. retention tells you what gets views. saves and comments tell you what converts. 21. match view spikes to attribution spikes over the next 72 hours. a video from a month ago can come back and crush. 22. a format is repeatable once it clears 100k views 5 times. after that, expect about 10-15% of videos at similar quality to go viral. scaling winners 23. repost a winner until it stops working. make 3 iterations on the same concept: hook, wording, visual. 24. put the app name on screen and in the first words of the caption. one of our 7M+ view videos led to 2x that in replies. 25. at 50k views it goes in the bounty channel. creators comment from their personal accounts ("dude same, that's why i use [app]") and we pay out on comments that get likes. 26. then a creator films a reply to the top "wait what app is that?" comment. comment likes are our earliest signal that downloads are coming. 27. every video over 20k views adds the brand as a collaborator on instagram. 28. views but no site visits = fix the ugc. site visits but no conversions = fix onboarding and the product. most importantly: do not quit at week 3!!