This is just a copy paste of my post here on reddit. I’ve been very short on time but will provide more unique content soon (like, tomorrow).

Intro

I wanted to shill a SaaS with social media because I wanted to avoid paid ads. (I’ve done dropshipping where it’s ad-intensive and just prefer to do bootstrap organic until I get more viral).

I picked Tik Tok to shill my SaaS despite the normal crowd because:

  1. Short form videos seems to have a lot of exposure right now. The algos are pushing it hard, and anything I push on Tik Tok, I can also syndicate on YT shorts.
  2. I use Tik Tok extensively for social media and have completely uninstalled Instagram (too hard to use because I am dumb lol) for a while now.

Results Thus Far

I made 30 videos and was very stuck getting past the 1K view mark the first 29 videos. It was very discouraging. On the 30th video, my metrics are:

  • 45K views
  • 4470 “likes”
  • 72 comments (including my responses)
  • 75 shares
  • 1774 favorites
  • Total play time 279H
  • Average watch time 22.3s
  • Watched full video: 10.44%
  • New followers: 867

My followers up until the 29th video was about 70, so this one video alone did 710+ new followers.

+$96 MRR, so it’s not a crazy result at all. But my insight is for these types of videos, I should expect +$0.34 MRR per hour of playtime.

This is low and preliminary because I only have one semi-successful video which is not a sample size at all. But it’s something to hypothesize about and pay attention to at least.

It gets me thinking though: a truly viral video with 4M views can do +9600MRR(justoneoneplatform,withoutsyndicatingittootherplatforms).Thatishardtocomeby,butIalsodon′tmindgrindingout100semi−successfulvideostohit+9600 MRR. Very viral videos also get marginally diminishing returns is likely, but you get my point. 1 video can create significant cash flow. So if you treat each well-put video as a ‘slot pull,’ making 1000 videos over a few years is likely to yield decent results.

Discussion is simplified not to include churn. With churn, the metrics can be significantly lower.

Strategy / Stack

Some like and some hate Alex Hormozi, but one of the things he said that I resonated with is that ‘the tribe always rewards the person that gives away / contributes the most’ or something like that. So I decided to make a Tik Tok where:

  • I show people how to use my SaaS
  • Show people how I made money using my SaaS in a 20-day experiment (freelance writing side hustle).
  • Gave them a free guide on how to get started freelance writing, with strong hints they should use my SaaS.

Preliminary Analysis Of What Metrics To Optimize For

Note my watched full video is an appalling 10%. The other 29 videos were up to 50% from retention editing. But none of them broke 1k.

The only outlier I can see here is the like-to-view ratio. This was the only video that is close to 10% (highest prior to this one was 8%). Here’s my observation of the lifecycle of this video:

  1. Was about 9.x% and went up to 4K views.
  2. Went up to 20K views and the ratio converged to 10%.
  3. Went up to 35K views and went OVER 10% (so 20-35K view bracket liked it more than 10%).
  4. Went to 45K views and like-ratio slowed down drastically when like-ratio dropped below 10%.

So it seems like retention editing / % watched isn’t really cared as much by the Tik Tok algorithm than like-ratio.

But what is a “like” on Tik Tok? If you don’t use Tik Tok, I need to explain this to you. A “like” in Tik Tok isn’t like a “like” in FB/Insta. A “like” in Tik Tok saves the video into a user’s favorites; I often ‘like’ videos in Tik Tok that I find useful as a future reference and something I feel like I need to rewatch / would be useful later on.

So a “like” in Tik Tok isn’t a useless vanity metric, it means users are wanting to save the information for later use in a lot of cases.

Then what’s Tik Tok’s “favorites” do? I have no clue TBH. I don’t really use it.

Thus, in the future I want to make videos where I won’t hyper-focus on retention editing (as I did in the first 29 videos) and focus more on clarity and focus on a succinct / attention-catching script on something I can say or do or report (like this post) that benefits them without asking them anything directly in return.

Why Don’t You…

  • Use SEO + backlinks to drive traffic?
  • Do press releases?
  • Cold email?
  • Message people on forums?
  • Post on forums?
  • Use LinkedIn?
  • Do influencer marketing?
  • Use paid ads?
  • [Other unsolicited advice that is a promotion of your marketing services]?

I have full time work + juggling multiple SaaS projects so time is limited. I am focused on what I think to be the single highest leverage activity for my time, over the long term. I will get to trying all the different marketing strategies, but those experiments will be done over the course of months, if not years. And everything above will be done as a supplement to videos for brand building (where long-form videos on YouTube which I will also incorporate is also a form of SEO), not replace it.

Why videos? It’s hard to write for. Annoying to edit. And time-consuming.

For a simple reason: I like watching videos over watching ads / reading blog posts, so my audience might too.