I spent the last few months going deep

into over 100 AI [music] apps generating

millions of dollars in monthly recurring

revenue. And the thing that surprised me

the most from my research, [music] the

apps crushing it didn't necessarily have

the best product, or the highest quality

code, or [music] the most features. The

best apps are winning because of their

marketing approach, and they all follow

one general method which I'll be

breaking [music] down piece by piece in

this video. And the best part about this

system, it can be implemented [music]

into any app. And it's the exact same

system that I used to scale my previous

app Puff Count [music] to 45K in monthly

recurring revenue, and my latest app

Posted to over 1.3 million dollars in

sales. [music] So, I am living proof

that this marketing system works, and

there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

We're going to take what the most

profitable app companies in the world

[music] are doing and replicate that for

our own products. So, stick around, get

your notebooks, take out your crayons,

let's get into it. Okay, here it is.

This is the blueprint [music] for how

the top 100 apps in the world are doing

marketing, and yes, [music] we did

actually study over 100 apps. We put

together this entire market research

document tracking some of the most

popular apps in the world. We have their

name, their subtitle, the link to the

app, the category, their monthly

revenue, and the individual marketing

links from their organic pieces of

content, from their paid ads. We have

the amount of views here, and this

entire document is going to be available

for you to download in the description.

So, yes, we did actually study 100 apps,

and let's break down how we got there.

First, we're going to cover the

approach, then we're going to get in how

to do market research and how you can

find viral concepts in your niche, how

you can scale this with creators or UGC

content influencers, how you can then

optimize your funnel and your marketing

so you can ultimately spend more and get

a better return on that ad spend, and of

course, how to scale with paid ads. So,

let's start here at the top. How did we

conduct this market research so you can

do it for yourself? Of course, the first

place you absolutely need to go is to

Sensor Tower. You should be looking up

other apps in your niche. Sensor Tower

will tell you exactly how many downloads

and how much revenue they have driven in

the last month. So, you should really

only be learning from apps in your space

that are actually making money. Don't

learn from any apps that are doing less

than 50K per month in revenue. There's

nothing to learn from them. Next, once

we validate that these apps in our space

are making money, we're going to find

out what they're doing for marketing,

and that's going to be in the market

research section here in a second. But

ultimately, the general formula is

they're all creating short-form content

organically first, then they're testing

on paid ads, and then they are rinsing

and repeating. They're optimizing their

funnel, their paid ads, everything to

get more return from their marketing

spend.

And they're all using a ton a ton of

content creators. Some are using AI,

some are using UGC creators, some are

using influencers. We're going to dive

into all this in a second. But before we

do, there is one thing that you

definitely need to understand, and after

studying hundreds of these apps making

millions of dollars per month, they have

a very strong conversion mechanism in

their app. Because the one thing you

need to understand, the more money these

apps make per user, the more that they

can spend on content and ads.

And this is why you're not winning, and

all the most popular companies in the

world, the best apps in the world, are

able to drive so many installs. It's

because they can spend more on paid ads

because they're getting more from each

user. The more money you earn per user,

the more you can spend on paid ads. So,

you need to think of your entire app

like a funnel, and if you've watched any

videos on the channel before, you're

going to know this. Your entire app is a

funnel. The content in your ads need to

be optimized. Your App Store listing

needs to be attractive. It needs to have

a high conversion rate,

which will lead to more downloads. Your

onboarding funnel needs to be optimized.

You need to have positive friction in

your onboarding, and then of course, you

need to be AB testing your paywall. I

have dropped videos on every step of

this process from App Store listing to

onboarding to paywall, etc. Check out

the other videos on my channel, but as a

general rule of thumb, you need to

understand that your funnel, your

conversion rate in your app, must be

optimized or you will never be able to

market like the biggest companies in the

world. Again, these companies are able

to spend more money than you

because they convert users at a higher

percentage than you. So, if you

understand that and you work on

optimizing your funnel, everything that

we're going to talk about in this video

is going to be so much easier because

you will have more money to spend on

your marketing. Okay, let's jump into

part one, which is market research. The

most important part of being successful

in marketing, especially in the

beginning, is doing market research. You

should never pay a creator, you should

never make a piece of content, you

should never pay an influencer before

you understand what already works in

your niche. So, identify your niche.

What niche are you in? Are you in

fitness? Are you in dating? Are you in

cooking? What niche are you in? And then

we're going to do research to understand

what's going viral, the themes, the

hooks, the storylines, what is working

organically in our niche, and how can we

replicate that content for our own

product.

There's a couple different ways you can

do this. Number one, of course, you can

go to Viral Ads Library. And on Viral

Ads Library, there is a database of all

the most popular content, organic and

paid, for some of the most popular apps

in the world. You filter by niche here,

you can go to finance products, finance

apps, and you can look at their most

popular content. This is a great

resource that you should be looking at.

But more importantly, we need to search

organically in our niche. So, of course,

we're just going to go on TikTok, or we

can go on Instagram, or we're going to

type in keywords related to our niche.

I was consulting an app founder recently

who's building a dating tips app, and

all you have to do to find the most

viral content for that niche is type in

dating tips. Boom, here we go. The most

viral content on TikTok right here.

426,000 likes, 300,000 likes, 115,000

likes, 50,000 likes, 94,000 likes.

And the craziest part is all this

content is so straightforward. Any

founder could do this, any creator could

do this, any influencer can do this.

It's literally just a story time. This

is a golden content niche because a

majority of this content is pretty low

effort. It's just talk face talking to

camera, and all of this content you can

easily plug a product in here as a tip.

Three things to never tell your man,

three tips to get a man, three tips to

do dating XYZ. Plug in your product.

This is how you do market research. And

make sure you stay organized when you're

doing market research. Yes, you should

be liking the content, and you should be

saving it on your phone, but I like to

put them all into a spreadsheet.

I like to save the URL. How many likes

did the video get? Views, plays,

comments, reshares, etc. You can even

download the transcripts of each video

and save it all here as market research.

Stay organized, do market research,

understand the core themes, and you will

succeed. ads as well. TikTok actually

has an amazing TikTok Ads Library where

they will show you the top ads for any

niche. We can go here to the TikTok Top

Ads Dashboard. We can go United States,

and then we can go into apps. We can

further filter by categories here. These

are going to be the most successful ads

for apps in terms of app installs on

TikTok in the last 30 days. We can go

last 180, and boom, here are the highest

performing formats. Of course, you got

to log in to see more, but here are some

of the top performing formats for

different apps. And of course, on the

Facebook Ads Library, you can go here

and you can type in any app in the

world, and you can see all of their

active ads.

This is a very positive signal. If your

competitors have a lot of ads running,

very positive signal. And on top of

that, you can see them all right here.

You can see what types of ads they're

running. You can see if they're running

short-form, and you can use this as

further market research. So, when you're

doing your market research, use all of

these tactics. Look them up on Sensor

Tower, make sure that they're making a

decent amount of money, look them up

organically on TikTok, on Instagram,

look at their Facebook Ads, look at

their TikTok Ads.

And only then should you start creating

content. The market research phase is

the most important phase in this entire

process. If you just start creating

content, if you just start hiring

creators, if you start hiring

influencers with no plan and no concept

of what type of content is working in

your niche, you will fail. You do not

need to reinvent the wheel. Take the

most viral concepts from within your

niche on social media and recreate those

while plugging your product. It's that

simple. Don't make it hard on yourself.

Let's move on to phase two, which is

scaling with creators. Okay, moving on

to scaling with UGC creators and

influencers. One of the fastest ways to

grow your app is, of course, to partner

with massive influencers. You can reach

out to them, and you can pay them to

post about your product. Let's go back

to the dating example here. We can

scroll through, and we can find one of

these influencers like Tash 9 p.m. who

has 52,000 followers in the exact niche

we're going for. Or we could reach out

to this girl, Annabelle Guessan, for our

dating app, let's say, and we could have

her post content for our product. But

the problem with that is, scaling with

influencers is not cheap. And again, why

it's so very important that you have a

strong funnel, a strong conversion

mechanism, if you're going to pay one of

these influencers thousands of dollars,

you need to make sure that you're going

to get a return on that spend. So, you

can scale with influencers. It's one of

the fastest ways to get off of the

ground, but you don't have to start

there.

I always recommend every app founder

start posting content themselves. Even

if you don't want to be on camera, you

can do faceless content. You can hire

smaller creators. Do anything. Be

scrappy in the beginning, and one of the

best ways to do that is to hire creators

on a results-only basis.

Hire creators, and you only pay them

when you drive results. And of course,

you can do that through postedapp.com.

What you can do is launch a CPM

campaign, and you can choose exactly how

much you want to pay creators per piece

of content and you can set a CPM. You

can control your cost based on how many

views the creators are driving you.

What's cool about running CPMs on Posted

as well is you can track deeper app

analytics. For example, we're tracking

our first app opens here. So, we're able

to see how the views are affecting our

first opens in the product. We have all

these submissions coming in from

creators which we own. We own the video

and we own the Spark Ads code and we can

track all of the performance right here

in our dashboard. All of the creators

are of course following our brief and

we're getting views on autopilot this

way. But not only views, we're getting

content that we own for life. So, you

can reach out to influencers and

creators manually on TikTok, on

Instagram. You can send them an email,

you can DM them, or you can use Posted

and you can hire creators that way. But

at the end of the day, you need to find

which creators are performing the best

for you and build a team of consistent

creators. Again, whether influencers,

UGC creators, smaller creators, micro

influencers, whoever it is, you need to

put together a solid team. And you need

to work with them consistently. Once you

find a format and a creator who drives

installs and more importantly revenue

for you, hold on to them and keep

leveraging that content and keep

leveraging that format until it doesn't

work anymore. The best way to structure

deals and to build a team is to of

course pay them on a CPM basis and some

flat rate per piece of content. But not

every creator is going to accept this.

Some of the bigger creators, the

influencers especially, will work on

view guarantees, however. So, whatever

way you're working with creators, make

sure you protect yourself. Make sure

that you are only paying when the

creators are driving results. That could

be through a view guarantee type deal,

it could be through a CPM deal with a

flat rate, whatever way it makes sense

for you. You have to make sure you're on

top of your ROI and how much you're

spending on these creators. And once you

do get that content, once you start

posting content, once you get content

from other creators, leverage every

single channel at your disposal. Post

the videos on TikTok, also post them on

Instagram Reels, post some on YouTube

Shorts, post some on Facebook Reels to

maximize the reach from every single

piece of content. And a part of

maximizing every piece of content is

having your own social media profile and

making sure that that profile is

optimized along with each video that you

get from these creators. So, what do I

mean by optimizing your social media

profiles? Well, let's take a look at

Resumes' TikTok profile here. Resume is

doing $500,000 per month. They got

300,000 downloads last month. Here is

their TikTok profile and it is perfectly

optimized. They are taking all of their

creator content and simply reposting it

on their TikTok. And I bet you they're

doing the exact same on Instagram. They

have nice little playlist here showing

you exactly how to use the product and

then of course they have a clean, simple

bio redirecting people to download the

app and their App Store landing page.

I did the same thing on Puffcount. You

can look, it's almost the exact same.

This is how you optimize a profile and

how you build social proof around your

app's social media. What you'll also

notice, something that Resume isn't

doing that I think they should, is you

pin your top performing videos in terms

of downloads. These two videos drove the

most downloads for me at Puffcount. So,

of course I pinned them to the to the

top of my profile because whenever

someone visits my profile, these will be

the top two videos that they see and I

know there's a higher likelihood that

they will convert. And of course we have

the playlist here, short, simple bio

telling people to download Puffcount and

we have the link right here. And of

course, same thing on our latest company

Posted, same exact strategy. Simple link

in bio, top performing content right

here as pinned videos. Now, there's not

only profile optimization, there is also

content optimization. How can you

optimize each piece of content to

convert the most users? There's a couple

different things you need to keep in

mind.

You need to be sneaky with your call to

actions. Your videos cannot feel like a

sales pitch. You should not be selling

the features in your app or how your app

works or where to find your app. You

should be selling the outcome. You

should also engage with your audience

whenever possible, respond to comments,

go back and forth with people in the

comments boost engagement. And whenever

you can, make videos with replies to

comments. If your video is going viral,

reply to one of those comments with

another video. I'm I'm going to show you

exactly what I mean. Here at Puffcount,

our video with 8.4 million views was

actually a reply to a comment. We

replied to this comment that got a ton

of upvotes. We took apart a vape and

then of course a sneaky call to action.

Didn't say how Puffcount works, didn't

explain the features, didn't explain

why, where to download it. No, no, no.

We just said it, this app helps you

quit. That's it. Sneaky, quick call to

action. Let's take another example of

this from CalA that did $2 million last

month.

Here is one of their marketing videos.

Check this out. This guy working out,

jacked, eating a healthy meal and then

boom, sneaky little call to action.

>> [music]

>> Not saying the name of the app, not

saying how it works, why it works, why

you should download it. Nope. He's just

portraying his lifestyle that everybody

wants, a fit, healthy lifestyle, and

product placement in the video itself.

That's it. Sneaky call to actions

selling the outcome, not the features.

Always engage with the audience and when

you can, if you see a video going viral,

make videos with replies to those

comments. Once you have done part one

through three and you've optimized your

profile and you have at least 20 pieces

of high quality content, now we are

ready to scale on paid ads. And this is

what really is going to skyrocket your

app's growth. Because instead of relying

on the algorithm and hoping people will

swipe out of TikTok to go search your

app on the App Store and you have to

rank number one on the App Store, all

this all this other sort of stuff. No,

just run paid ads and you have a call to

action in the video itself. Don't sleep

on paid ads. Paid ads are the most

powerful way to grow your app. And if

you want a detailed breakdown of exactly

how to run effective paid ad campaigns

for your app, I dropped a full video for

that. I'll put it in the description

somewhere. A full paid ads deep dive.

But ultimately, what you need to

understand is you should be uploading

your highest performers from the organic

content that we just got and you should

be uploading those to the paid ads

dashboard. On top of that, when you're

building your campaigns, you should be

optimizing for money events. Just

optimizing for a click, just optimizing

for an install is not enough. You should

be optimizing for free trials, free

trial starts, or subscription

conversions if possible. You should be

optimizing for those events because

those are your money events. Anything

before that could just be window

shoppers. The two most important metrics

you need to know when scaling paid ads

are your customer acquisition cost and

your customer's lifetime value. As long

as your customer acquisition cost, the

amount of money that it takes for you to

acquire a paying subscriber, is less

than your customer's lifetime value, you

are making money. And then it's simply a

matter of how much money can I spend on

ads and can I maintain this positive

ratio? One of the best ways to find out

where your LTV is is to go on

RevenueCat. And RevenueCat will show you

your realized LTV per install. As you

can see here it was for Puffcount, our

average LTV per install was about a

dollar, a dollar 20, sometimes a dollar

50 at its max. So, as long as we can get

installs for less than a dollar 20 or a

dollar 50, which we were, you can scale

profitably. And the way we were able to

get there and get our customer

acquisition cost, our cost per install

below a dollar 20 or a dollar 50, was by

testing creatives. We tested in mass.

And then once we found winners, we rinse

and repeat this entire formula. This

will never stop, you'll always be

testing new content, optimizing your

app's funnel to increase the LTV. And

ultimately, you have to fall in love

with the process of marketing your app.

If you have questions about marketing

your app, scaling your app, running paid

ads, absolutely anything, drop me a DM

on steven.builds

and I will get back to you there. I host

a weekly call with app founders where we

chat about absolutely everything from

ideation to development to onboarding to

paywalls to marketing to scaling. We are

all sharing tips and tricks together and

scaling our apps together. So, if you

want me to add you to that weekly

founders call, again, shoot me a DM on

Instagram and I will get back to you

there. If you watched the video this

far, you probably enjoyed so I'd

appreciate a like and subscribe to the

channel because I'll be dropping more

sauce just like this all the time. I'll

catch you on the next one. Peace.