Short-form marketing game

Hello,

I haven’t sent any e-mails to my newsletter in a while so you might be wondering who the hell is that. I was busy with other stuff so this newsletter was slightly neglected, but hey, I never promised to write regularly.

Nonetheless, I just wanted to share with you my take on the TikTok & Instagram mobile promo game, since many people keep asking me about it and I want to save this post on my blog page. I posted this on X a while ago, so some of you might have read it already.

Here are my conclusions and notes on how to approach a short-form marketing game:

• You can take two paths: either you keep creating content on your own and see what sticks, then you rinse and repeat, or you play the influencer game and reach out to hundreds of them and pay for their promotion. You can also combine both.

• It's a numbers game; guys who have success with it are relentless in posting and DMing. They work hard.

• Not every app has the potential to go viral; apps that solve existing, boring issues with a "wow effect" (mostly by adding AI features) have the highest chance of going viral.

• Now is a great time to produce those apps; we live in an X-hackers bubble, and most people are unaware of all the AI features popping up weekly. There is a lot of money to be made, but personally, I dislike apps that focus solely on generating revenue without producing any value (AI often hallucinates, and the results can be very inaccurate or even dangerous).

• TikTok/IG is a Gen-Z game; they spend the most time there, so inherently, apps that address their issues have the highest chance of going viral.

• What are those? Young people care more about their looks than older ones, either due to lower self-esteem or simply because they're looking for a partner (dating). That's why apps like Umax (look improvement), Cal AI (calorie tracking—weight loss or gain), and RizzGPT (help with dating) grew like crazy. It helps that their creators are Gen-Z themselves so they understand those issues first-hand.

• I think it's like this new marketing channel that pops up every few years and it's cheaper and more efficient than all the others because it's not saturated yet.

• My take is that everyone celebrates high revenue and big download numbers (short-term), but what's more important is the long-term game. The universal truth is that if you generate high enough traffic and convert it, you will make money, which has a place here for many apps. But another universal truth about B2C is that it has naturally high churn, so the question is if those apps will be able to survive long-term once the traffic goes down and more competition shows up.

Here is a link to my Short-form knowledge base where I gather links and tweets for my own research purposes: