how do you Market a viral app this video is about the most important principles and methods for marketing a viral app my name is Blake Anderson in just over one year I built three mobile applications that have each generated millions in downloads and millions in profit those apps are Riz GPT umax and Cal AI I will be using these apps as examples during this five-part series which is brought to you by Apex our mission at Apex is to produce High quality tools and content designed to improve your health success and purpose in life let's first Define viral marketing and explain why it's important viral marketing seeks to minimize the amount of friction from your launch to millions of users we will be focusing on single player utility apps apps that solve a problem and don't require some complex backend marketing is where most apps fall flat you can build an amazing product but if you don't know how to attract the attention of your target user users nobody will get to use it the first half of this video will be about principles that should shape how you think about marketing and the second half will be about methods how to actually Market your app our Three core principles are stop studying start doing understand human psychology and Rapid iteration our Three core methods are internal ugc influencer Partnerships and platform ads principle number one stop studying start start doing this principle applies to far more than just marketing if you spend more time watching videos about marketing like this then actually doing it you won't get anywhere I see too many Founders stuck in analysis paralysis endless research and studying and devising the perfect launch strategy that they don't spend enough time actually doing the thing no amount of research can replace Real World Experience create content talk to influencers set up meta and Tik Tok ad campaigns the best marketers I know didn't learn from courses I have never purchased a course on marketing in my entire life try fail succeed analyze what worked and what didn't work this cycle of action and reflection is how you improve in any domain not just marketing 80% of your time should be spent doing whereas 20% of your time should be spent studying and reflecting and when you do study focus on studying actual case studies rather than just Theory some common excuses that I hear are I need to learn more first you'll learn by doing I don't want to waste money you can create free content yourself I don't know any creators start dming them the truth is your first attempts will almost certainly fail I know that mine did that's okay that doesn't mean that you need to study more it means that you need to keep failing and keep getting those shots up until you eventually figure out how to make it work principle number two understand human psychology in its most primitive form marketing is understanding how people think and what motivates them and figuring out how to leverage that to capture their attention the most successful apps often tap into core human desires sexual attraction social status self-improvement and entertainment R gbt went viral because it tapped into people's desire to be charismatic with members of the opposite sex UMX went viral because it validates how attractive people think they are Cal AI went viral because it helps people achieve their fitness goals your marketing should focus on the emotional benefit and problem that it solves for the user not just its features don't tell me what your app does tell me how it will make my life better principle number three rapid iteration the real key for success is rapidly iterating and optimizing for learning until you figure out your skill scalable strategies let's use umax content hooks as an example in the early days I came up with a list of hooks one was POV you use the umax app to glow up here a Creator would show a side by side of their face ratings before and after glowing up so it would go from a 55 rating to a 95 rating another was here are the best haircuts for your face shape creators would scan their face and show their recommended haircut in the umax app we tested five to 10 different hookes across our own accounts as well as influencers that we worked with we figured out which ones perform best double down on those and this enabled us to scale to over $600,000 in monthly Revenue within 3 months I'm pretty good at marketing and content now but even I can't come up with a hope that works every time don't get emotionally attached to any single marketing angle allow the data to guide you there's a famous story about two pottery classes that perfectly illustrates this example a professor was curious what makes a great Potter he devised a test the first class took the entire semester to make the single best pot they could the second class was told they would be graded purely on the number of pots that they produced interestingly enough the second class didn't just make more pots they made better pots too they learned through trial and error rapidly iterating on their approach to pot making the first class moved extremely slow focused on not messing up the one pot that they had when you're marketing a new product you have un limited pots make more learn faster method number one internal ugc internal ugc or user generated content is the most profitable way to Market your app though it is also the least scalable without a doubt though it's the best place to start with little to no Capital internal ugc is content created and posted to company-owned accounts for Riz GPT we had tens of accounts named getor RZ GPT or Riz gpor app and so on this all started with our main account now named plug AI which my co-founders Alex and Evan ran we started off creating video demos of the app very quickly shifted to Riz slides show content within the first month of this transition we generated nearly 50 million views on this account alone as we figured out winning strategies we hired teams of ugc creators to run accounts for us as it often goes with ugc four of these five accounts flopped but one ended up producing a 20xt turn to very clearly outline the process here's how you get started with ugc first study viral Hooks and content in your apps Niche second begin creating content yourself and figuring out what works third use what you have learned to hire ugc creators to make their own accounts and scale the process for you you can then retain the creators that do well and replace the ones that method number two influencer Partnerships influencer Partnerships are the next most profitable way to scale your apps marketing and it is very scalable but it's very difficult to do right if you want to get good at influencer Partnerships you should probably study psychology and statistics I can speak on influencer Partnerships for hours and I will in future videos but here is the core information for this video to help you get started first you need to find the right influence influencers if you've listened to my other videos at this point you should have a very strong understanding of the content and influencers in your apps Niche well I dm' 10 influencers and nobody responded you need to DM hundreds once you work with them ask them to refer you to other creators that they know second you should pay influencers based on average view count so if their posts get 100,000 views on average you might pay them between $100 to $11,000 depending on the niche that you are operating in it's usually a lot cheaper to get them on a contract where they post four times per month for example rather than just doing oneoff videos you need to analyze their comment section if Their audience is engaged and largely American it's a good sign that their videos will convert well for you if it's full of random bot accounts commenting the fire Emoji it's not going to convert finally you need to develop an intuitive understanding of the niche and different creators and how well they convert direct attribution is currently next to impossible for organic social media advertising to solve this you must closely monitor your app's conversion dashboard as well as the influencers post in real time and assess how well the views are converting to downloads and purchases method number three platform ads platform ads are the most scalable method of app marketing marketing they are also least profitable as a percentage of Revenue and require the most upfront Capital to get started for that reason I would not recommend prioritizing this strategy if you are a new app developer platform ads are most commonly done through meta T Tock Google and apple search first compile a mass number of creatives this should include a mix of videos and images as well as different content styles to reflect every different angle that you can Market your app second you install the necessary sdks for attribution and third you run campaigns first starting with small budgets to figure out what the winning creatives and AD strategies are and then you scale it up from there platform ads generally work best with apps that have a high LTV or customer lifetime value apps that make a lot of money per user conversely apps with a low LTV generally work better through organic marketing this is why I recommend ugc and influ or Partnerships for people getting started hopefully the content in this video will help you market and scale your app to millions in profit if you have any questions leave comments below and make sure to subscribe to stay up to date for the final part of this series building a viral app in 2025 thanks for watching