The Startup Ideas Podcast - This App Hit 2M Users with Creators Who Had 0 Followers (Here's How)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I had heard stories of people making millions of dollars a year getting creators to create short form content on TikTok and Instagram. But I didn't know how they were doing it. I had Cody Schneider come and teach us how to actually make this happen. He shared all the tools you need to use, how to manage it, why creators with zero followers are better than creators with 100,000 followers. If you stick to the end of this episode, you will understand how to make. make the most of TikTok, Instagram Reels, short form, everything in between, specifically valuable for people who want to build a mobile app, e-commerce, you name it, enjoy the episode, and like for the algorithm and comment for myself. Cody, by the end of this episode, what are people going to take out of it?

Starting point is 00:00:59 Totally. You're going to walk away from this understanding how for-you-page content has change the relationships between brands and influencers or creators. What's the difference between an influencer and a creator? And then how to basically execute on influencer or sorry, on creator marketing. And actually like measure the ROI and like why it makes sense to do this in comparison to just going and doing like paid ads on a channel. And today we're going to talk about short form specifically, right? Because we've talked about long form on the pod together.

Starting point is 00:01:31 But today we're going to talk about short form, right? Today we're going to talk about short form, how it fits into your marketing strategy, and how this can be used for the apps that you're building with that you're vibe coding and what types of companies that this works well for? And what types of companies this doesn't work well for? Cool. Let's get into it. I will say I am somewhat skeptical of short form versus long form.

Starting point is 00:01:54 I'm just, I mean, as you know, I love. You're biased, though, baby. You're biased. I know. So I hope that by the end of this, I'm going to be. Mr. Shortform. So let's see. I think it can work again. There's certain types of companies that this is best for. This is best for like social app or sorry like B to C applications. Right. So like mobile apps. This is best for like products that have one killer feature that they're doing. So think about like something like an incogny, right? Where it's like data brokers are selling your emails.

Starting point is 00:02:29 right, like something like that. This company like, you know, basically blocks the cell of your data, like that, that type of thing where it's like simple. It's way better. What this isn't good for is something where there's like a learning curve and that needs to have like more of a, you know, a long form like kind of upskill on how to use the product if that makes sense. So yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:55 But cool. To start, let's just talk about like creators versus influencer marketing. I talked to so many boomers and Gen X that are like followers, man. Like they don't have anything. Why are we working with them? And it kills me because that's not how the internet works anymore whatsoever. So social has evolved. TikTok changed everything.

Starting point is 00:03:13 It basically took it from a who you follow and your social graph is how you get served content to what you're interested in. It's going to understand you better than yourself. And it's basically just going to give you this like, you know, unlimited drip feed of brain rot that's going to keep you on platform as much as possible. So why do they do this? And that is the answer is because it keeps you on platform longer than when it's just social graph content.

Starting point is 00:03:40 So people can say, yeah, I missed the old Instagram where it's like I just would see my friends post. Newsflash, they are there to make money. They need to make. The only way they make money is by selling your attention. And to keep your attention the best right now is by basically showing you content from from this for you page algorithm that is most likely to keep you present, most likely to keep you on this. And all of them are doing this now, right? Like if you look at Twitter, if you look at Instagram

Starting point is 00:04:10 Reels, if you look at LinkedIn, if you look at YouTube, they're all for you page content where there's this discovery mechanism that's in it. So as a as a as like a brands that's thinking about this as a marketing channel, you need to focus on really like the creative creators are the value that exists. Like somebody that understands your niche and how to get like views and traction within the category that you're in is going is the most valuable part of this. I don't really care and influence like and we can just break down the numbers, right, Greg? So like, but say I go and like this influencer has, we'll say, 100,000 followers, right? And here's this creator.

Starting point is 00:04:54 And I'm not even, they don't even have, they have zero followers. So I start working with them. right? But I'm going to break down like why this works. So the influencers say I go and I pay them, you know, they're going to charge me, whatever. We'll say two grand for a post, right, or something ridiculous. And the idea traditionally is that like, oh, I would be tapping into the trust of their audience. People like, and all of our data supports this. People do not make purchasing decisions largely off of like influencers. They make them off of creators that are consistently talking about these things. Influencers only work if you're at like a

Starting point is 00:05:32 massive scale, like you're like a Kim Kardashian or something like that. But there's a reason that they're going and making their own products to sell to their audiences that they cultivate because they know how valuable the audience is, right, like for those brand deals. So the breakdown here, say I pay them 2000. In contrast, and we'll say that the post, that's for like one post. And, you know, it's a one out of 10 that a post gas and some virality. right. Like we know you play this game like with YouTube like or in all the other content that you do. Out of all, you know, out of all the content that I publish, one of them will outperform. It'll be the outlier to the rest of them. And so if I'm only getting one at bat and I know that it's one out of 10, right?

Starting point is 00:06:17 There's only a 10% chance that that thing actually like is an outlier from a content standpoint. And so maybe this thing gets, you know, and this is not like unrealistic, only 30,000. views, right? In contrast, if I go work with a creator and the payment for that creator, right, so we're going to just like break this down. So the followers is 10,000, cost is 2,000. And post views is 30,000. In contrast, if I work with a creator, and I pay them $900 a month to do a post per day. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era. of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup.

Starting point is 00:07:05 And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data. friends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building?

Starting point is 00:07:38 And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that, you know, take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat gvety for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. On TikTok, Instagram, YouTube short, so across all the channels. And I know that 10% of those 30 posts, right, so 30 times 0.1, are going to just outperform the rest of them.

Starting point is 00:08:15 It's a greater likelihood that I get a better return on that $900 than I get on this 2000. And the only reason that this works is because it's for you page content, right it's because the algorithm is just going to show content that's most likely to keep the person on the platform they don't care where it's coming from because that's how a creator with zero followers right can actually like do this and as a brand this is like what people do this is what you should be doing is you go find creators within your niche that are already posting content in your category you reach out to them and you're like hey i'll pay you 900 a month to post a video per day across all the

Starting point is 00:08:55 channels, they're going to create a brand new account, right? So imagine it's like at example company like Allie, right? And like whoever the creator's like name is. And they're, what you're going to see is they're going to figure out a format that outperforms the rest. And then they double down on that format over and over and over again, basically remixing it. And from this, what ends up happening is I'll go like one of these videos will pop and say one of those videos goes and it gets me 100,000 views, right? So when we break down the CPM, which is the cost per thousand views, this is this old marketing metric, right? The cost per thousand views ends up being way cheaper for the creator-led marketing than it does for the influencer-led

Starting point is 00:09:46 marketing, even though the influencer has more followers. And so this is the arbitrage that exists between creators and the influencers. The other thing we have to be a lot of the influencers. The other thing we to think about here, though, is if I just took that same money, that 900, and I took that to Facebook, and I paid that $900, right? The average CPM on Facebook is about $6, depending on which category you're in. So of that 900, right, I would only get 150,000 impressions. Okay? So as long as the creator has a couple of these that hit, and we'll say maybe an aggregate, they do 500,000 impressions, right? So I'm paying $900 for $500,000 impressions. So the cost per thousand impressions is going to be $1.80. So we'll say $2. Right. So I'm getting a CPM by working with these

Starting point is 00:10:42 creators. I'm getting a CPM that's cheaper than what I could pay on Facebook. And this is the real like arbitrage that's here. This is why people are like obsessed over this, are doing this. etc like you know you go down the list and the the other piece of this is you don't work with just one creator you work with like five to 10 of them and there's this compound learning effect that happens so if I have a video going a video day going out from five you know 10 different creators that means that I have 10 different videos that are dropping and of those 10 videos one is going to hit one is going to be an outlier like it's like just you know based on the math I take that learning and I share that with all my other creators and then it creates this growth flywheel

Starting point is 00:11:25 where there's like more surface area for learning on this like of like what content types are most likely going to create basically reach for the for the product and so that's kind of the like theory behind it now we'll get into the actual like pro like application but before we do that questions I can try to answer I mean I would love to see some examples of like have you seen this work yes like is it just theory or or does it that does it work? A hundred percent it works. And it's just like, again, like we've talked about this in other videos. Like you're looking for marketing arbitrage. Like if I can pay, say again, like we'll do TikTok, right? Like if the TikTok CPM is $8 to get in front of people,

Starting point is 00:12:08 but I can get in front of them for $2, right, by doing creator-led marketing, like that's a better allocation of the budget, the limited resources that I have, right? That's the whole game that we're playing here. Now, the challenge is finding the creators that are like most likely to do this, but, or sorry, most likely to actually create people to go and sign up for the product. But the, we can like show an example of like one. So my friend runs this company. It's called like Focus Tree. And this is like literally their exact strategy is they find these creators and that are in like, I don't know what you would call it like self. Like they basically use. This is like an app where it's like you turn it on when you're studying and it like it's like a it's like

Starting point is 00:12:53 a don't use your phone type of app right like a like a productivity app. So this is their exact strategy. I know Lauren has like scaled from like zero to it's like two million users or something like that. Now I don't know since the last time I talked to him like where it's at. But this is how this can be used. And again, it's all you're looking for is these outlier videos and then sharing that with your entire team, right? So this is just one of the like thousands of TikTok, or sorry, the hundred of hundreds of TikTok usernames that are basically in this creator like ecosystem that he's using. So why does this work? The product is included within the content. You're getting it at a cheaper cost than if you were paying TikTok directly for those ads. And then you also have this learning

Starting point is 00:13:42 mechanism where it's basically these creators are using the learnings from everybody. else to go and create more content. The best performers, you take those, you turn those into paid ads as well. It basically turns into like a UGC content form for your company. So you find the winners, pull those output, put ads, spend behind them. If they work organically, they're also going to work in a paid setting. Also, organic always works better than paid. Just like think about it, right?

Starting point is 00:14:10 You know, people don't love to buy things from a paid ad. they'd much prefer to buy it from, you know, content that feels organic. And that's what this feels like. I think like an old analogy to this strategy is like, you know, buying meta ads is almost like you're buying a billboard in a busy town square. And you're hoping that people are going to look up at the billboard and then they're going to convert. Versus what this is is like you're almost giving out flyers, value ad flyers around here's like, And here's like the 10, you know, the 10 highest rated restaurants in this area. And like one of them is your restaurant.

Starting point is 00:14:56 And it's like, oh, thanks for this like value ad information, friend. Totally. Totally. And this is actually the best performing ads, right? Is when it feels like it's native content on the platform. And so like we more and more like I'm trying to make the ads look like they were edited on an iPhone. Right. They were like recorded on an iPhone, dropped into Capcut and then like edited in Capcut on an iPhone or edited it literally in the Instagram app on the iPhone, right?

Starting point is 00:15:24 Recorded on an iPhone 5S. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that that's like uncomfortable to a lot of brands, right, to use media like that because they're like, oh, we want to do this like super sexy like, you know, like shooting it with like a red camera. And it's like, we don't need to do that, right? Like literally we can hire some like 20 year old creator that's just trying to like pay for school. And this is how these creators function, right? It's like they'll have brand deals with multiple companies.

Starting point is 00:15:53 So say they're working with five different companies. They're making five grand a month while they're going to college. They have to post five videos a day. That's nothing for them. That's the whole angle here. This is like why they do this. So how do we? Okay.

Starting point is 00:16:07 First of all, I've never thought of thought of this sort of the, delineation between creators and influencers. I haven't really thought much about this strategy. I'm bought in. I want to do it. How do I do it? Yeah, totally. So the process here is find, first off, you need to find people that are talking about the content that your category is in. So say you're trying to like sell something to people that are like vibe coding. We'll do like lovable as an example. So like here's a great example of lovable doing a strategy like this, right? Wow. Like, dot AI coding underscore dev.

Starting point is 00:16:45 Dot app. Like, they're 100%. They at least tested this. And so, but this is probably a different strategy where it's like an in-house team is doing this or if they're like paying a clipper or whatever, right? But we can get into the clipper versus creator thing. I don't think clippers is real. I think all the data is absolutely fucking fake.

Starting point is 00:17:04 But we can go down that rabbit hole if you want. So the angle here, though, is basically you're trying to. to find people that are talking about this, like, your category. And the only way to do this really effectively is just like going to TikTok and like scrolling and watching videos that are like the brain rot videos that are in your category. If you watch enough of them, you're going to get siloed into this like space. And then you're going to start seeing these recurring faces, these recurring creators on the platform. You go and reach out to them via DM or sometimes they have like emails in their bios and

Starting point is 00:17:39 ask them, you know, hey, I want to work with you, you know, 30 videos per, I want to basically hire you on a cost per video basis, you know, video per day for 900. And then that's, that's the reach out process. Same play here is like, I'm basically like going to work with a bunch of them. I'm going to find the best performers. And then those best performers, I keep them on a retainer. I get rid of the worst and then I restart my cycle, right? So I'm just trying to add, like, add up as many of these creators as I can to find the, the, the best people. And there's only so many per category. So like it really depends on like how sophisticated the spaces.

Starting point is 00:18:15 Like again, if you're talking about like some type of vibe coding app or like say you build an application that's for like people that do real estate investing. So you like there's going to be like probably way more people talking about real estate that you can use. And you know, these smaller categories, it just depends. But that's the whole strategy here. It's like you're trying to find the best people that are already making content in this place. Then they go and they make an entirely new account.

Starting point is 00:18:39 So a fresh account. And then they're starting from zero. They're starting from zero followers. But they can go. And because, again, this for you page content, they can get this reach like they never could previously. And when this is like executed well, right? You again, like get this at a cheaper cost than what you're seeing in these other places.

Starting point is 00:18:59 So that's how you find the creators. You reach out to them. It's a super manual process. We talked about this on another episode. There's this application called Stormy AI, which helps with that actual like identification of these people. So Stormy works is you can basically like go and search for creators by each category. So like TikTok or Instagram or like YouTube, right?

Starting point is 00:19:23 And put in the category that you're in, it's going to find those people and then you can DM directly through this. Why Stormy is really great is it handles the whole reach out process as well and negotiation on the pricing. which is amazing because it's like that's the massive time suck. But that's kind of the strategy here is basically to like go and find these people, these individuals. With all this said, like here's the negatives of this, right? The management of the creators is a pain. So that's like one piece.

Starting point is 00:19:58 So how people typically combat that is they go and they hire like whoever their best performer is, they make them a manager of all the other creators. So they're still having to do their videos per day, but they pay them more basically to manage the entire team. And they're making sure the entire team is actually delivering on what they're saying. And then the other piece is when they see a winner and outlier from the entire team, they share that with the rest of the team. So how do you actually track that? What are the tools to do this? Stormy is for the reach out.

Starting point is 00:20:27 To actually track the success of this campaign, you can use something like shortamize, which is basically your creators submit their videos. and then it tracks the amount of views, engagements, et cetera, from what you're doing. You can also use a viral app. It's short-a-is and viral app are similar in kind of how they function. But it's basically tracking the success of your campaigns that you're running, right? And then the other tools that are really valuable for this is basically like we're trying to find outliers, right? We're trying to find the videos that are performing better in a category than like other ones. And to do that, there's tools out there that you can basically use to go and find these like Outlier Winners.

Starting point is 00:21:15 One of them is called Virulow. I don't know how to pronounce it. But it basically aggregates, scrapes and aggregates all of these TikToks and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and make some search of So you can find outliers within the category that you're in. And then you're like, oh, this worked previously. Let's hand this off to my creator team and let them remix that for our brand. And then another one that does this as well is called Sandcastles AI. And it also is basically like this research tool that helps you find those types of viral shorts.

Starting point is 00:21:51 So that's kind of the stack that you're using. It's like manual reach out or some type of like AI agent like Stormy. You get them into like it's literally just. just like in a Discord server is how a lot of people or like a WhatsApp group is how a lot of people manage these. And then you're doing the tracking with a tool, again, like viral app or viral. Dot app or shortamise. And then helping them find those viral outliers by using one of these like discovery tools. That's the whole playbook here. It's really simple. It's just like one of these things that gets like hard to execute logistically. And that's like why a lot of people stay away

Starting point is 00:22:32 from this. And why like a lot of brands have trouble doing this. Because hiring somebody that understands what I just described is like impossible. Like it's like they're also like probably a 22 year old that's just coming out of school. That's hell of flaky. And like, you know, just they're, they're going to be rogue. Like they're going to be kind of difficult to work with. And so it's, it's figuring out like, like, how do I work with that person and make this make sense. So yeah, Questions I can try to answer about that. There's going to be some pain. There's going to be some pain managing some of these creators.

Starting point is 00:23:02 But if you can suffer through the pain, there will be some gain, likely. If you could find the right creators, find the right formats, manage them appropriately, don't lose them, track all this stuff. And then also keep up to date with like what new formats are coming out. I think that you mentioned in the beginning, which is this is particularly, valuable for people in like consumer mobile mobile apps. I mean the example you used was a mobile I think a mobile app. This whole generation of like Cal AI, the quitter app, you know, the whole like app mafia gang, you know, these people making kids, you know, young people making millions of dollars a year through mobile apps, I think a big reason why is they understand this strategy and

Starting point is 00:23:51 they understand how to manage these people. So I'd be curious your thoughts on that. specifically. I think the thing that I think about with this is like it has to be an impulse purchase decision that can happen on a mobile device. So like this works for as well for like e-commerce products where it's like at a price point that's like say $29 or something like that. Right. I mean, that same strategy can be used for TikTok shop. You go find TikTok shop creators. You pay them on a per video basis and then also give them an affiliate commission of everything that they drive. But the reason this works is like if I can on my phone go and search this thing and start using it.

Starting point is 00:24:28 Like that, that, and there's no like transition to like a web application or anything like that, right? And there's no learning curve. Like it drops me into it and I'm like instantly, I understand like the value of this. Like that there's that killer feature instantly on my phone. Which again, could be a physical product that's being sent. That is where this like fits into the marketing sec. So that's one piece.

Starting point is 00:24:50 The other side though is that like if say you are a web application or like you're an AP AI provider, which is like a friend's company that's doing this that's like this is working for, which is hilarious. It builds top of funnel branded search, which creates this like discovery flywheel. And also like you're basically just creating more surface area. I talk about like digital gravity, right, which is like this like how do I create as much surface area for my brand within my category and like layer on all of these strategies. This is a thing that can be layered on for like a traditional like even like B to B or B to S&B type company because if you think about TikTok or like Instagram like they're touching so many people like they're their daily actives in the

Starting point is 00:25:35 US is insane right there's a hundred percent chance they're probably touching a certain percentage of your target customers so if you can create content that's going to be like naturally displayed in front of those people from across these count these accounts like you're going to own more more mental real estate within that category, right? Which is naturally going to increase branded search. And we see this, right? A video goes viral on TikTok or something like that. And branded search volume sees a spike.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Like, and how we're tracking that branded search volume is in Google search console. You can say, hey, can the query contains whatever my brand name is, right? So when you run these campaigns, what you'll see is that you will see like an increase in branded search. They see this in particular in e-com. It's actually wild. They like, they go, you do this. You go viral on TikTok. right and then the branded search on amazon increases like absolutely wild right like there's like a

Starting point is 00:26:28 lift in the in basically the branded search that's like directly like on a platform that's not even related and so that that is like this other piece of this it's it's hard to quantify like the value and the ROI there but if you're just like yo i'm just trying to have an entire industry know that I exist this is how this marketing strategy can be layered with something else like again And I'm talking about like you have to learn how to use the web application to actually like have it be valuable. This is like something that can be layered along with say like the YouTube creator strategy that we talked about previously that you're getting like that very top of funnel like kind

Starting point is 00:27:05 of like brand awareness. And then you have the very bottom funnel like, oh, I'm going to get these people to like convert. And I would layer. I would like, I would think about layering these things and starting. Okay, I start with the YouTube strategy and then I like layer on the creator strategy on top of that. I love it. Cody, thanks for once again spilling the sauce. You are a G. I appreciate you. I'll include where to find Cody and his company Graft in the show notes for people to go and follow.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Thanks again, Cody. And I'll see you next time. Happy to do it, G. Thanks for having me.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - This App Hit 2M Users with Creators Who Had 0 Followers (Here's How)

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