🇨🇦 🇵🇭 | Head of Growth @thestatusai | prev founder @fitdropapp (acquired) | make your app go viral @ https://xitter.cf/t.co/zmhz83Heyh
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Joined December 2019
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hey tech twitter, I’m Ethan - 23 from 🇨🇦
> head of growth @thestatusai, 3,000,000+ users, running all marketing from UGC to paid ads, influencers, etc. scaled to tens of millions in revenue in <6 months
> bootstrapped of the largest fashion consumer social apps in the last decade @fitdropapp to over 400k+ users by posting 3 tiktok videos everyday for a year straight
> I also run a marketing agency vyral-labs.com with 150+ creators doing UGC for brands like @ecosia
send me a dm if you ever wanna chat growth and consumer ❤️
Etan retweeted
@thestatusai has scaled to tens of millions in annualized revenue. Working with @inworld, we cut our AI costs by about 95% while maintaining or improving content quality.
When you build consumer AI, you want people to be obsessed with your app. Then you have to afford that obsession.
Our users spend an average of over an hour and a half a day on Status. They’re building relationships with characters, creating stories, and getting absorbed in these worlds. Every interaction needs to feel worth coming back for.
Inworld’s team got into the details with us: which models to use, how to structure prompts, and how to test whether the content was actually funny and engaging. They’ve been hands-on and fast, and we’ve kept working together to improve performance and lower costs.
That gave our team more room to keep shipping. More features, more things for players to do, and a business that could support the experience we wanted to build.
There’s so much opportunity in consumer AI when you understand what people enjoy. Making the economics work gives you room to keep finding more of it.
Read more on how we scaled with Inworld: inworld.ai/customers/status
will be in NYC next week during app week! Dm me if you want to meet up :) would love to chat all things growth / ugc / consumer apps!
if you are building in consumer, you need to design a product that is inherently viral and can build real estate in a users mind. You have 3 seconds to stop someone from scrolling, users send links to invite their friends, send screenshots of cool things in your app.
All of this needs to be optimized to build rent inside the brain of your user and the average consumer
.@alexandr_wang says modern product marketing is now all driven by the screenshot:
“To have a modern consumer product, it has to work on the screenshot. The screenshot has to fly, either through group chats or word of mouth or online.”
“Having Jolly in the screenshot immediately communicates this is a Muse screenshot.”
very difficult role to hire and maintain - I think the best growth operators are people who have ACTUALLY posted themselves. Whether it be doing ugc videos, being a content creator.
You need both taste x actual operational knowledge of scaling marketing of a business
i refuse to hire growth people who have never made content themselves
I used opus 5.5 the other day to generate hundreds of static ads for @thestatusai - this is the first time i am actually impressed by AI for marketing
the biggest UGC hack no one is doing is localization 🌍
UGC is so early in most countries outside of North America. If you localize your videos - they go viral 10x easier.
Especially in T1 countries in Europe - huge arbitrage no one is playing
A German content creator making videos in German go viral so easily
doing this for @ecosia rn
If anyone is running growth in consumer ai (ideally ai chatbots / gaming products) would love to connect 🙏
3 stages of Mobile app marketing 📲
$0-$1M ARR: 1 simple content format, organic UGC / small paid ads budget
$1M - $10M ARR: 1-3 content formats, paid ads begin to scale higher than UGC, influencers, expanding to 2+ marketing channels (e.g tiktok & meta)
$10M - $100M ARR+: dozens of content formats, paid ads are now #1, organic growth through plg, 5+ channels (influencers, tiktok, meta, snap, applovin etc)
I used to think this was true - but you realize quickly that if you want to move fast and grow steadily - you need to invest in paid.
Organic is spikey, not always consistent, and takes so much more time.
If you want to grow fast - you need to unlock every marketing channel and scale as quick as possible, and 9 times out of 10, paid media is the most effective.
I'll die on this hill...
There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing $5 to $10 million in revenue.
Learn how to create demand organically through content, partnerships, and outreach first. That's enough to take you to that 5-10M mark. Then once that engine is running, layer ads on top.
If you do it the other way around you risk getting eaten up by rising ad costs before your margins can absorb it.
Etan retweeted
I‘m selling my old app for below market rate because my new app is doing way better:
- $200k ARR
- $220k total revenue
- 170k downloads
- 8 months old
Taking offers at low to mid 6 figures, send me a DM if you‘re interested
Full stats on TrustMRT: trustmrr.com/startup/facekit
Quickest way to figure out if your UGC hook will go viral: if a video hits 5k views
if it does - focus on that hook and iterate!
Make slight adjustments to the hook, the way it’s filmed, facial expressions, background, etc.
These slight changes can make it go viral! 5k views indicates the general concept is good
for my first app @fitdropapp (400k+ users) I would post 3x TikTok videos a day for a year. Of just me crashing out in my dorm room 😭🙏 alll before ugc existed
All of these companies are building generational products and have great PLG (product led growth). Using paid ads to seed users = more fuel for the fire ⛽️
SF forgot paid ads exist while every $0→$100M AI startup runs them on steroids:
> Cursor - 1,100 active ads / 6,400 tested🤯
> Wispr Flow - 820 / 3,300
> Emergent -410 / 7,000
> Replit - 110 / 5,500
> Base44 - 560 / 2,100
> HeyGen -400 / 1,700
> Viktor - 620 / 1,300
> Lovable - 300 / 990
> Gamma - 110 / 350
> Framer - 710 / 2500
> Superhuman & Grammarly - 71 / 1800
(Data from Meta Ads Library)
Ads are cool again!
If you find a winning ad format / hook - you need to scale it quick.
Instead of getting your creators to make brand new videos with the same hook- you can just apply AI ad mutations, and change small things like the background, clothes, actor, and it make winning variations of your ads 10x easier.
🤝 Paid partnership
Breaking down a winning ad for @thestatusai
1. Make it obvious that you are playing an app / game. So users have the intent to download it
2. Pick a niche for targeting. Targeting happens via the creative - when you mention something e.g for us we mentioned the anime MHA, it will go to those people
3. Make a relatable scenario. We picked a character in the niche that is widely known, and made a scenario that is something funny / shows off the value prop of the product - integrated into what the audience knows and can do with our product.
This video did great on organic as a result, and even better on paid 💰
