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How this Chrome Extension Acquired 150k+ Users with TikTok

This week, I'm speaking with Sam, a growth marketer at Tactiq (they just launched 2.0 of the product on Product Hunt and are currently #4), a Chrome extension that transcribes Google Meets and creates notes. Learn how they used TikTok influencers and spent only $1820 to acquire 150k+ users.

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hi, I’m Sam! I’m a growth marketer by trade and I’m working on growing Tactiq.io, a freemium Chrome (and Edge!) extension that transcribes Google Meets and Zoom Web calls then creates notes for you. In the last year, we’ve been able to grow Tactiq 20x YoY, scaling to 180,000+ users, with users at organizations like Salesforce, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, and Shopify.

I know you've recently used TikTok to get more users for Tactiq. What were the results?

Tiktok has been crazy for us. With TikTok, we acquired 150,000+ new users for our chrome extension by spending $1820 USD working with creators to create TikToks promoting Tactiq.io. We reached out to 320 creators via Instagram and email. 16 of them agreed to work with us, and together they posted 22 TikToks. This worked out to average about $83 USD per post.

These 22 videos generated: 7,363,561 TikTok impressions, 920,426 likes on TikTok, and over 150,000 new users (our tracking wasn't 100% accurate). We even had a few videos that blew up with millions of views, creating 10’s of thousands in new sign-ups for less than the cost of an expensive dinner.

Which TikTok videos worked the best? Why do you think they worked?

We found that persona-centric videos outperformed generic work/task-focused by >10x on views, likes, and view-to-installs. Even from the same creator! Our best-performing video styles were straightforward use-cases for specific personas (e.g. Product Designers). They were often framed as problem-solution “Too many product meetings? Try Tactiq” or “Hate taking notes? Try Tactiq” (example 1, example 2).

I think these performed well because they speak to a specific person/identity and problem, which resonated with the audiences who could relate and thus understood how Tactiq benefited them. If you try TikTok, it’s worth keeping this in mind when briefing creators.

What are some of the lessons you've learned that may be useful to founders looking to grow their SaaS businesses?

If you choose to go down the TikTok path, personalize your creator (influencer) cold outreach. We reached out to 280 creators with a generic template, leading to 10 collaborations. Then we reached out to another 40 creators with a (1-2 sentence) personalized message, and 6 more agreed to work with us. It only took 2-3 minutes more effort per outreach.

The key is treating creators like people. Explain your product use case for their audience (ie. how Tactiq helps Product people take notes in customer interviews), reference their work (saw your #productdesign videos), and make an offer explaining how you will compensate them for their work. Also Pro tip: creator response rate was 3x higher via their listed email vs. direct messaging on other social channels (Instagram etc).

To find influencers, we searched TikTok via relevant hashtags, sought out influencers between 10k - 200k followers, and cross-checked engagement on their last 20 videos. Some creators had big followings, but their views had dropped off.

Tiktok can be a wildly successful acquisition channel for SaaS businesses if your audience skews younger or you can find niche creators that align with your product. But we learnt that you have to analyse your campaigns in aggregate. Many collaborations only get a few thousand views. That’s ok because all it takes is 1 video out of 20 to go viral with millions of views for Tiktok to be worth your effort.

Where can we learn more about you?

The best way is to follow my work at Tactiq! We’re launching 2.0 of the product on ProductHunt 30th/September - feel free to follow along here and show us some love. Also, feel free to AMA here or on our Product Hunt thread. Cheers!

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  1. 7

    Props to @braintools for doing this interview. It's not every day you see a SaaS product grow through a novel acquisition channel like TikTok. Give them some <3 on PH if you liked the information he shared.

    1. 1

      Cheers @zerotousers for featuring us. Cool to talk about unique new channels and approaches, and share what's working :)

  2. 4

    Nice interview! Sam, what's your primary target audience? Is it students?

    1. 4

      Initially it was students, but we also targeted Product Designers, Marketers and HR people with Tiktok as our product can be used by anyone who takes notes in Google Meets/online meetings :)

      1. 2

        Woah, nice. Have you measured the "career-graphics" of the people who came through TikTok? What % do you think were product designers/hr/marketers vs. students?

        1. 1

          Haven't put a % on it, but heavily skews student because our most successful videos were student oriented. If we had more videos serving non-student personas, the % would reflect that. We're in the process of finding a balance - the virality and word-of-mouth created by viral student videos + the value of more business-persona targeted videos.

  3. 4

    Congrats, Sam! Did you get all users using only these 2 TikTok videos?

    1. 3

      There were 22 Tiktok videos all together

      1. 2

        Is it possible to link us to a few more? Found the 2 above to be pretty inspiring and will prob try this approach to our current product, which caters to uni students.

    1. 1

      Yeah lots of food for thought

  4. 3

    What % is your user base is on free vs paid plans?

  5. 3

    Well done Ksenia and team! :) - They deserve this success and have done a great job with the product. Great to see another Australian startup do well!

    1. 1

      Ksenia and the team are legends! I'm lucky to hitch a ride on their boat :)

  6. 3

    firstly, thanks for sharing the story, has given me lots of ideas and motivation💪💪💪

    secondly, sorry that this is off topic, but I have a debate with my friends around the phrase "I'm an X by trade". What do you mean when you say that? 😅

    1. 1

      Hahah I like both points. I mean it's what I have experience in. But working in a startup means wearing many different hats :)

      1. 2

        😊 yep fair enough. But honestly, first point is the one that matters - TikTok seems insane for a quick outsized boost in visibility, just as long as you can reach your target audience.

  7. 3

    Very interesting! Sam, how did you find the tiktok-profiles you contacted? Did you use a tool? Or just searched for relevant hashtags within tiktok? Thanks!

    1. 4

      Found them via searching for hashtags in related niches - eg. #studyhacks or #UX or #digitalmarketing, then compiled a list based of creators with 10-200k followers.

  8. 3

    Love interviews with specific data like this! What's the ratio between influencer followers/engagement you were looking for?

    1. 1

      Above 20% engagement of follower base on last 20 videos.

      TBH, we pay more attention to overall views of last 20 videos rather than ratio. If average is over 20-30k and we can see recent videos with vitality (200k+) then it's likely to perform well. But even then it's never a guarantee. Such is the game we play!

  9. 2

    Thanks for sharing, @Darko, that's super helpful! Could you share more details on how you approached compensation?

  10. 2

    @zerotousers enjoyed this piece and it actually inspired me to give it a go myself: https://www.patgw.com/p/tiktok-marketing-from-mime

    1. 1

      Epic write up Pat! Keen to see how it goes for you :)

      1. 1

        Thanks! Will keep you posted.

  11. 2

    Great one! Sam, may I ask how you tracked the performance (metrics) of the videos which were paid for, manually or using some tool?

  12. 2

    This was super helpful. Thanks for sharing this!

  13. 2

    It's been a great strategy!

    1. 1

      As TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform.

      Manually reaching out to micro influencers on TikTok, creating the relationships and building out that network is a underutilized strategy. Apart from the exposure to their audience you have incredibly valuable assets which can be used within the company.

      Search via hashtags that your ideal user persona would be interested in, and find micro influencers that look like they would be your ideal user, this creates instant rapport and social proof.

      Then reach out to them through their Instagram and offer them payment via PayPal with a link to your brief. Give them creative control, with guidelines of course, this way you're content is more likely to be evergreen.

      Upload this content into your own social media as well as repurposing the content they create into advertisement channels which is a great way to reduce CAC.

  14. 1

    Yeah, tiktok has really taken off. All the kids are using it these days. If you're in the mood to download TikTok videos, check out the TikTok downloader by InstaDP: https://instadp.link/en/tiktok-tools/video-downloader

  15. 1

    Hi and thanks for the info. I tried the same as described in this article. I just contacted 20 influencers and got 15 responses. Prices start at $750 per tiktok 1 minute video?!
    Did I miss something or have the prices skyrocketed in the last few months?

  16. 1

    @zerotousers Fantastic story, thanks for sharing! TikTok has also its own Creator Marketplace - was this of any use to find creators?

  17. 1

    This is amazing! What kind of price should I offer for a post on Tiktok when you outreach? Is there any rule of thumb?

  18. 0

    Well, in my daily routine, i use https://snaptik.tech/ for downloading TikTok videos without watermark for free.

  19. 0

    another useful tool that I use is https://ssstik.link - it's pretty straightforward to use and only requires a TikTok link.

  20. 0

    Big fan of TikTok. A site I use on a regular basis is https://snaptik.pro to download videos from TikTok. It's worth checking out.

  21. 0

    Wonderful post about marketing. As i belong to marketing background and now a day digital marketing has different plateforms and one of the best platform is tiktok and i use tiktok for marketing my products by paying to tiktokers. I also use one of the website https://snaptikapp.pro to download tiktok videos without watermark of tiktoker. Which allows me to design ads for further use.

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