☠️ We experienced the Tiktok hug of death...
We launched a post on Tiktok this morning with the help of an influencer (30K followers). Even for her page, the post promoting Outdone was getting crazy good engagement. 1K likes, 10K+ views in under an hour!
Well, this drove more users to our site in a single hour than we'd ever had in a single day. And low and behold, the site began to crash.
Users were commenting that they were getting stuck in our gift recommendation flow and that nothing was loading. Suddenly engagement started to slow down dramatically on the post — share rates were dropping and concurrent users on our site fell off a cliff.
It seems like this is a rite of passage for every consumer app/site, so we hope this is a sign of good things to come. But let this serve as a reminder to pressure test your site as much as you can before a big marketing push!
People are sleeping on TikTok, it is by far the easiest platform to reach people. The conversion rate might not be that high but that does not matter if you reach tens of thousands of people with every video.
If you don't want to pay for influencers you can also create showcasing videos of your product yourself. I created Keyframes Studio to help you create TikTok videos of your computer screen. TikTok is really a low-hanging fruit now, with low effort you can reach more people than on any other channel.
Hey Daniel! Not sure if you're active on Product Hunt, but we just launched V2 over there. We'd be stoked if you showed some support! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone-v2
Wow, this product looks great. I'm definitely going to try it out.
And yeah, I totally agree. Tiktok has the largest upside of any social platform in terms of reach. Too many businesses are dragging their feet to get on there thinking it's just a platform for kids.
Super interesting, Jon!
How did you find the influencer you started working with?
It was relatively easy! We just began by searching relevant hashtags for our business to see if any influencers regularly posted using them.
In this case, #giftsforboyfriends and #giftsforhim were two hashtags that the influencer we partnered with was frequently using.
Then, to get into contact with her, we reached out through Instagram DMs because tiktok doesn’t allow you to message people you don’t follow.
Interesting approach with hashtags, thank you for the inspiration, really appreciate it!
No problem. Best of luck!
Hey Phillip! If you're active on Product Hunt, we'd be super stoked if you showed us some support. We just launched Outdone V2!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone-v2
I’ve tried to understand tiktok marketing but I fail every time. Does anyone have a good link or tutorials for how it works?
Hey @chill_chilling we just launched on Product Hunt! We'd be super grateful if you showed us some support!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone-v2
Sure thing! This playbook from Demand Curve is great and covers a bunch of different sub-topics — paid ads, working with influencers, etc.
https://www.demandcurve.com/playbooks/how-to-advertise-on-tiktok
Nice. How did you find the influencer to work with?
@joshdance answered this below in more detail, but I just searched hashtags relevant to our business.
Tiktok has a surprisingly strong search engine that made it possible for me to find a great fit in an influencer partner in just a few minutes of searching.
Great problem to have! :) Site has good timing for the holiday season.
Thanks again for the kind words @mark_b1234 We just officially launched on Product Hunt! We'd be super grateful for some support!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone-v2
Haha yup. Despite how annoying the issue was in the moment, I’d take that over nobody trying our site for sure 😅
I had the same problem 2 weeks ago with my app. One of our premium users happened to be a social media influencer but we didn’t know! She started to make series of stories and videos about our app!! We still didnt know!! And suddenly every thing crashed !! Luckily we were using Firebase free plan and I immediately bought the blaze a plan pay as you go and it saved my day !!
Good luck with your website looks great!! And yes its a very good sign that people are using your site unil it explodes 😅
Haha glad to know we’re in good company!
That’s awesome for you. So she did that all organically?? Would love to hear what the app is that you’re working on.
Yes she did it organically and that pumped our MRR by 50% lol!!
We help Arabic speaking new parents to put their babies to sleep longer hours during day & night!
We are a team of 3 me ( non technical listening to indie hackers podcast) my wife ( sleep consultant) and 1 developer ( employee) .
We just hit 1k MRR, yesterday!!
App:ChildRoo.
That’s such an awesome milestone. Congratulations!
I think you owe that influencer a gift! 😅
Congratulations man! And thanks for the details in the comments on finding influencers working with them, etc.
Hey Sophia! We just launched the new version on Product Hunt! We'd be super grateful for any support you're willing to throw our way. :)
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone-v2
@Outdone_Jon Already upvoted! Congrats on the launch man!
Thanks so much, Sophia!
@sophia_oneal thank you! And of course — happy to share!!