The Viral App Idea Framework That Got Her 1M Users

0:00This episode is sponsored by App Charge. The DTC platform trusted by the world's leading mobile game publishers like triple.and sigh play. For a long time, game studios selling in-game items had only one option, iOS or Android building systems at a 30% fee. DTC is the alternative and today, its table stakes across the industry. App Charge makes it simple, a branded web store, payment links, and a full merchant of record service that handles taxes, compliance, and global payments end to end. The result? Studios keep up to 95% of every sale. Learn more at appcharge.com. That once again is appcharge.com. Here's a number that completely stopped me. 92% of all iOS e-commerce ads spend now goes to

1:08remarketing. Yes, remarketing, not acquisition, but re-engagement. The playbook has completely flipped. Apps flyer just released their state of e-commerce app marketing report for 2016 and its full of data like this. Platform trends, conversion benchmarks, fraud signals, market by market breakdowns. If you're planning your Q4 budgets, this is required reading. It's free. Grab it at the link in the description. So when it comes to finding and validating ideas, I think a lot of the time to meet to observe the market. Interestingly, I've never had an idea come to me. I would use this. This is such a good problem to solve, so I'm going to make it. It was never that. It was almost like, I just look at the market, I come up with a good niche that I want to attack. That's how the idea comes from.

2:16When it comes to pivoting, I think pivoting is so important because when you first have an idea, especially if you're an early founder, you don't really know how resonating the idea would be, but that niche can be very, very good for you. So you just kind of always have to pivot around and in order to find the viral feature that you want to build for your app. For a glam op, I remember we pivoted a lot when it comes to just what the app is about and the main features for it for my second app as well. We did a lot of it. Nicole, I know you said in the past, when you're designing an app, you almost want viral features embedded in that product. Is there a framework that you like to go through and be like, this can go viral? How do you come up with these types of features that can go viral? Yeah, to be honest, I didn't use to do this, but I think if I were to start over, I would totally do it like this. But go on, take a talk at Instagram first, find a niche where

3:22it's not too saturated, but you can see a lot of people passionate about the niche. For example, cooking, let's say, there are a lot of cooking videos. There are not a lot of cooking apps. And like, if you see any cooking apps out there doing anywhere between 50 to 100 kmr, then it's probably a good niche to follow. I know a lot of people, they want to compete in really saturated markets, like health and fitness and stuff like that. For me, I would usually stay away from it, just because you can't really come up with super cool ideas if you keep doing that. For me, I usually come up with viral niches and strategies by just researching either what's already in the niche that's going viral, maybe a certain hog, maybe a certain keyword, or researching apps, not necessarily in the same niche, but with the same target audiences, and what they're doing for content, and what they're doing to go viral. Was there a feature in Glammup that you were like, okay, do you come up with like five different

4:25features that you think could go viral? Because obviously you're not going to be 100% right? Or do you, and then what is that one feature in Glammup that you're like, hey, this helped it really go viral? Yeah, we usually will have a few features to test. We always have a spidey sense of what works and what not. When it comes to Glammup, I have to dig back into memory length because I don't even remember how the first version looked like. It was brown. It was like really, it was just, it looked really bad, but I remember the first feature was probably you scan your face and we give you certain like tutorials or it's very text-based, and we realized that doesn't really work on social media and like I've literally tried for like three, four months at that point doing influencers or faceless account doing being my own UGC creator, read and marketing discord, I've tried everything. And then we realized making a more visual, so you can scan your face and you can see the before and

5:32after of how you would look like with certain makeup vlogs. That works really well for TikTok, so we just started going really viral with it. The good thing is if a feature doesn't go viral and you've already tried different variations and a bunch of different methods to make it go viral, if it's not going viral, your answer really quickly. And once you do find a viral feature, usually it will work like 10 times better. You wouldn't know within the first week if it works. Have you ever tested a feature before building it? Tested it to see if it will go viral before you build it? Oh yeah, for sure. For my new apps now, I would say most mostly, that's what I would do. I would, so for the newest app we work with probably like active 800 creators. It's in stealth. I don't want to talk about it, but yeah, but a lot of the times, because we have the distribution system set in place, a lot of the times if we want to experiment with a new feature, we will build it out in Figma or our own content creation portal first. Have people do it? If it goes viral, then we can put

6:37it into the app instead of wasting time building it out and knowing that's not knowing if it's going to work. How do you how do you test new app ideas on TikTok and Instagram without having a distribution network? You can test ideas out. I wouldn't test like 100 ideas out at the same time because it's very confusing to your mind. I think instead of looking at distribution, there's so much more to having an app as well. I will usually, instead of posting on TikTok or Instagram on day one, my day one is probably more focused on researching the entire niche, the entire market, the competitor apps. It's a lot of work that you need to put in if you don't want to waste time posting about several different app ideas. So yeah, just a lot of research, a lot of understanding the industry. Most of the apps I've built, I don't really understand the industry when I just built it. So it takes time to learn about it to be a student as well. Yeah. What's day two? Day two is probably Figma. I usually go on Figma and draw my ideas down a little bit.

7:44And when it comes to Figma, it's not really the onboarding flow. I will talk about the onboarding flow. It's actually very important. I learned a lot from your YouTube channel too when I go into onboarding. But more like the screen that I want going viral on social media, like I will try to make that maybe different variations. Think about how that will be. Research other apps in the niche, maybe taking some lessons from them, some design components, or even apps that have nothing to do with my niche. I will research a lot about it.