Braxton Simmons

The 🐐

We don’t market my app like this anymore, but this is basically the exact playbook that got us started and helped us reach our first $100,000 month. Here’s what we did: Influencer marketing: We signed over 100 creators in our niche and had them consistently post about the app on TikTok and Instagram. At the beginning, a lot of these deals were cheap. If a smaller creator averaged around 1k to 5k views per video, we might pay around $100 for 8 posts. We only needed at least three users to convert to make money from the deal. The goal wasn’t to find one massive creator. It was to have an army of smaller creators constantly talking about the app. Affiliate deals: We gave creators a percentage of subscription sales through their personal codes. This made a huge difference because they weren’t just getting paid to post. They had an incentive to make the content perform and would often post more than we originally asked them to. Outreach message: The first message you send a creator matters a lot. The first line matters even more. If your message starts with “Hi, I made this app...” there’s a good chance they won’t even open it. We found it worked much better to lead with something like: “Paid promo/affiliate deal?” They immediately understand there is value for them. Then you can explain what the app is, why you think it fits their audience, and what the deal looks like. How to find 100+ creators: This part is boring, but it was probably one of the most important things we did. Search whatever your app is about on TikTok and Instagram and find creators already making content that aligns with your product. Then start messaging them. You should be sending 100+ messages a day. Eventually we hired people specifically for creator outreach. I had a team of 5 sending messages every day, and we were doing over 1,000 outreach messages a week across Instagram and TikTok. Most people won’t respond. That’s fine. You only need a small percentage to turn into strong partnerships. Apple Search Ads: We also used Apple Search Ads to capture people who were already searching for apps like ours. A simple way to start is to search your category in the App Store and look at the terms and apps that consistently show up. Those can give you ideas for keywords to test, along with relevant competitor names where permitted. We started around $40 a day and watched performance closely. Check the campaigns constantly. If a keyword is spending money and not producing good users, cut it. If something is working, increase the budget gradually. Free communities: We also spent time in Reddit groups and other communities where our target users already were. The important part is not showing up and spamming your app. Use those communities to understand what people want, what problems keep coming up, and what language they actually use. That helped both the product and the marketing. Be willing to test: At the beginning, we were constantly trying different creators, offers, messages, and channels. A lot of it didn’t work. But once something did work, we doubled down on it. This playbook eventually helped my app reach its first $100,000+ month. We don’t rely on this exact strategy anymore. The company, the market, and our marketing have changed a lot since then. But if I was launching another consumer app from zero, I’d still take a lot from this: Get in front of as many people in your niche as possible, make the value obvious to creators, track what actually works, and scale the winners. You do not need one viral creator. You need a repeatable system.