Content Marketing Playbooks
How founders use content to grow — the formats that drove signups, the distribution that gave each piece a second life, and the cadence that kept it sustainable for a tiny team.
193 tactics · page 3 of 7
“Step five would be to make something cool for these big ass brands. How it works is that you find the most viral brands people talk about right now. Every month, every couple of months people have something new to talk about, and your idea is to spend as much time to make the highest quality of work for this trending brand name to then make it go viral.”
Pick Whatever Brand The Internet Is Currently Obsessed With And Ship Your Best Free Work For Them
Mark's repeatable launch tactic is to identify whichever brand the internet is currently obsessed with, then pour maximum effort into a single high-quality piece of free work for that brand. Riding existing attention is what made his posts go viral instead of trying to manufacture demand from scratch.
“there is a proven framework to follow and that framework is hook problem solution or call to action obviously the hook is the most important part you need to capture that attention in the first 3 seconds”
Structure Every Short-Form Video As Hook, Problem, Solution, Call-To-Action
Steven structures every short-form video around hook, problem, solution, and call to action, with the hook owning the first three seconds. He layers sound, motion, and visual elements into the opening so the algorithm and the viewer commit before they can scroll.
“these were my two highest converting videos in terms of installs and sales on PuffCount so I pinned those to the top of my profile and you'll see these are very different styles of video again these follow our proven framework of hook storyline solution i pinned these videos on my profile because they drove the highest amount of conversions your profile itself will become its own funnel”
Pin Your Two Highest-Converting Videos So Your Profile Becomes A Funnel
Steven treats his TikTok profile itself as a funnel by pinning the two videos with the highest install and sales conversion rates. Every visitor lands on proven hook-storyline-solution content first, turning profile traffic from viral clips into app installs.
“I use my own products I help people with their campaigns I create like the best content ever I push the content into a community from there I get insights from people who complain about specific things I improve the product I restart using the product but with the improvements making success stories about it with new templates Etc and so on and so forth and this is a gross group we've used to really like Skyrocket the gross”
Run A Closed Growth Loop: Dogfood, Content, Community, Ship
Guillaume's growth engine wasn't a funnel, it was a loop: use product, help users, publish content, push to community, harvest complaints, ship improvements, repeat. Each turn produced new templates and success stories that fueled the next round of content.
“within days I came up with the idea for starter story a platform where you could see how regular people like you and me built businesses that changed their lives exactly how they found their ideas exactly how they launched and exactly how they got customers”
Position The Product On A Specific Reader Promise, Not A Generic Category
Pat positioned Starter Story around a specific reader promise: see exactly how regular people found ideas, launched, and got customers. That clarity of audience and content angle is what made it the product only he could build.
“we've had a lot of major celebrities kind of talk about our product organically Ashley Graham a lot of professional baseball players Steve Aoki is actually a huge neuro user Joe Rogan big fan of neuro he talks about it organically none of that's paid Andrew Schultz a lot of people just have been picking up nuro”
Compound Unpaid Celebrity Mentions Into A Top-10 TikTok Shop Brand
Ryan attributes Neuro's scale to unpaid, organic mentions from celebrities like Joe Rogan, Steve Aoki, and Ashley Graham. His team then repurposes those clips into TikTok content, compounding the initial mention into a top-10 TikTok Shop brand.
“not leading with hey this is my app go download it but actually maybe even answering something like a question online that your app answers i would almost take something like from a rooted lesson so let's say there's somebody makes a post saying that you know they had this like horrible experience with anxiety on a run today then I could like kind of share like why that might have happened and why you know it's normal it's okay and whatnot”
Drop The Download Pitch — Answer The Exact Question Your App Solves Online
Anya's social playbook is to reply to public anxiety posts with a genuinely useful explanation lifted from a Rooted lesson, instead of dropping a download link. The content does double duty: it helps a real person in the moment and quietly positions Rooted as the source of the expertise.
“I wanted to be like Dropbox you know Dropbox you create it and then it says oh you want to have 5 GB more space you know share share the link with a friend have them sign up and I thought how can I integrate this into my own app it's called product le growth and I just made sure every single link that people share my logo is on it and not only is my logo just like a picture it's it has the name stage timer.io in the logo it's like literally written there and it's a name easy enough to remember that people often just see it even tell us oh I saw it on an event”
Bake Your Full Domain Into The Logo On Every Shared Artifact
About a third of Lucas's customers come from word of mouth because he engineered every shareable artifact to carry his brand. His logo appears on every shared link, and crucially the logo itself contains the full domain 'stagetimer.io' as readable text, so even passive viewers at events remember the name and look it up later.
“For Google basically we create content on our website that is useful for our users or our target users and some of this gets on Google and ranks organically and some of it it doesn't rank so we run ads for it. So basically it's the same content that is useful for both purposes. Obviously we prefer it if the pages show up for the organic Google searches but sometimes it's not possible, that's when we run ads on it.”
Same Article Serves Twice: Rank What You Can, Run Ads On What You Cannot
Mickey collapses SEO and Google Ads into a single content pipeline: every article doubles as an ad landing page. If a piece ranks organically, great; if it doesn't, the same asset becomes a paid search destination. One unit of work, two acquisition channels, and shared learning between them.
“If you reach out to a content creator and their email is at sunsetagency.com or something — any agency sounding, you're too late. Those agencies exist to eliminate the alpha that you are trying to create. If they have a Gmail in their bio and they have 5-10K followers, good engagement, that's a really nice sweet spot.”
Hire content creators, not influencers — Gmail in the bio beats agency.com
Zack's tactical screen for creators: look at the bio email. Agency emails mean the creator's pricing and earnings are already optimized against you. Gmail addresses on 5-10K-follower accounts with strong engagement are undermonetized, high-output, and willing to actually create — the real growth alpha.
“If you frame your product as a novel toy people are going to treat it like a toy. They do not want to pay for that thing. But if you frame it as a solution to a problem then people are much more willing to pay — it attracts a higher willingness-to-pay customer. One of our videos got 41 million views, 4.5 million likes — but didn't convert.”
Frame the product as a problem-solution — a 41M-view "toy" video flopped on conversion
Their PDF-to-brain-rot experiment (PDF audio over Minecraft parkour) hit 41M views and 4.5M likes but converted terribly because viewers treated it as entertainment. Viral views are vanity when the framing positions the product as a toy; frame as a solution to a real pain (e.g. 'never miss a key detail') for conversion.
“One of the best things that we did, we just asked our customers how would you describe Coconote, and a great majority of them — it was shocking how consistent this was — they use Coconote to never miss a key detail. And that is exactly what we put in the first App Store preview screen.”
Mirror customer language — "never miss a key detail" became the App Store hook
Zack stopped writing positioning copy from inside the building and asked users to describe Coconote in their own words. The phrase 'never miss a key detail' came back so consistently it became the first App Store screenshot headline — letting the market write the marketing.
“I made a new account, I made a video with zero followers and I got 50,000 views on the first video. I was living in San Francisco at the time and I just started talking about SF culture. But people in the app space are doing this too.”
Zero-follower account hit 50K views on first video about local culture
Choi tested the algorithm with a brand-new account and pulled 50K views on his first post by riffing on San Francisco culture. The takeaway: content quality plus a clear niche signal beat follower count, and app founders are exploiting the same opening to seed product attention from scratch.
“As much as I would love to say that talking about our features is the better performer — it's not. Talking about a discount, our audience is very price sensitive, so that is a message we lean pretty heavily into.”
Discount messaging out-converts feature messaging — even when you wish it didn't
After extensive copy testing, Lose It! found discount/savings framing consistently beats feature-benefit framing for their price-sensitive audience. The honest founder lesson: your beautiful feature copy is probably losing to a price tag. Build the features, but don't expect users to convert because of them.
“As long as you're not doing shady things, you don't have to worry that much. Make content that people click on and find useful — it will work. The ones I did that were intentionally SEO smart didn't do that well. The ones that were just really good posts and contained good content still generate traffic for us.”
Don't overthink SEO — make stuff worth clicking
Counter-intuitive lesson from RevenueCat's blog: posts engineered for keyword optimization underperformed posts written purely to be useful and shareable. Quality of read and dwell time still win the long game — stop fixating on keyword density and just write something worth clicking through to.
“If you are shipping new features and experiences that you know people churned because you didn't have them, you can reach out to those people and let them know: hey, you asked, we listened.”
Open win-back copy with "you asked, we listened"
Map cancellation-survey reasons directly to shipped features. When a feature lands that fixes a specific churn reason, the win-back email opens with an explicit 'you asked, we listened' callback. The copy works because it's only sent to the segment that actually asked — generic 'we miss you' messaging gets ignored.
“Hey, there's 20 other people studying this, or tens of thousands of students are using us for their algebra and we know you were taking algebra — and then hitting them with, that next test you're going to score way better because so many other people use Quizlet. The social proof is big.”
Hyper-local social proof beats generic "millions of users" copy
Caroline's strongest win-back lever is social proof scoped to the user's exact course or school, not vague platform-wide stats. Naming the cohort ('20 other people in your class', 'students at your school') makes the FOMO concrete and the message feel personally relevant rather than blasted to a list.
“Giving people control builds trust. There's a lot of talk about subscription fatigue and 'oh, another subscription' — putting them at the center and making them feel like they have control is one of the better ways to build trust and make them feel more comfortable with the subscription.”
Frame pause and flexibility as the MESSAGE, not just the mechanic
The copy around pause, monthly plans, and shorter durations is itself a retention tool. Positioning the offer as 'we respect that you don't need this every month' counters subscription-fatigue objections more effectively than a discount — and it's what makes users willing to re-engage later instead of avoiding the brand entirely.
“We have a big editorial arm that writes not just about surf conditions and what's happening there, but we write a lot about news and other topics as well. Everything on the platform is really content.”
Twin content engines — utility (spot reports) + editorial (news and stories)
Surfline runs two parallel content engines: utility content (per-spot surf reports and forecasts that drive SEO and habit-building) and editorial content (news, stories, gear reviews that build brand affinity within the surf community). Each serves a different need but they feed the same retained free audience.
“If you've done that review mining and gone through all those reviews and kept a nice log of the reviews — yes you can speed it all up with AI but I really believe strongly in also just spending a few hours just completely immersing yourself in the language. You'll have this extra benefit on top of that with the messaging for the copy side of it where suddenly your language becomes more human.”
Read reviews end-to-end yourself — AI summaries strip the linguistic osmosis
AI can tag and cluster reviews 10x faster, but skipping the manual read costs you the unconscious absorption of customer phrasing. Future ad copy, landing pages, and push notifications will sound like a marketer wrote them instead of a user. Spend a few hours actually reading reviews end-to-end before letting AI summarize.
“Outbrain and Taboola — that's a platform where I spent a lot of time on. It's a performance channel and everyone uses the performance channel, but especially in some markets where the competition is not so high, since you pay for CPC you have so many impressions that it actually becomes stronger than TV.”
Outbrain/Taboola are CPC performance — but in low-competition markets they're cheap TV
Most apps run Outbrain/Taboola as bottom-of-funnel performance, but in low-competition markets the cheap CPCs deliver TV-scale impressions. A startup can build mass recognition without a million-dollar TV budget — the same channel doubles as both performance and brand if you read the impression math.
“A big step forward for Bolt and Lovable was when they both took Supabase and made that sort of the way that we do a backend for you... AI generated code works better in general the more you kind of keep it on the rails.”
Bolt and Lovable hardwired Supabase because constrained AI generates better code
Vibe-coding platforms picked a single backend not just for setup convenience but because narrowing the AI's choices produces working software more reliably. The content angle for tool makers: write for the canonical stack the AI is being told to use, not the universe of alternatives. Generic 'works with everything' content gets nowhere with LLMs.
“Every single video I have the app on screen showing the workouts that I'm actually doing. I'm not selling the app, I'm just using the app as my tool to achieve the results that I'm trying to show... the app is on the screen for 30% of the time.”
Don't sell the app — show it on screen ~30% of the video as your tool
Fares films himself training for the Masters World Championships using MySwimPro on-screen. The app is never pitched — it's the visible tool behind the result viewers are watching. Roughly 30% of videos carry a strong integration (60+ seconds with app on screen); 70% are pure value with at most a one-line CTA. Showcase beats sell.
“If someone's listening or watching and they take away anything from this content marketing, you have to do one of three things: you either have to educate people, you have to entertain them, or you inspire them... if you're amazing you can do multiple at the same time.”
Educate, entertain, or inspire — combine two to break through
Fares frames every social post against three viewer motivations: education, entertainment, or inspiration. Single-purpose content works, but the creators and brands that break through stack two. MySwimPro's own mix skews educational with light entertainment; the company channel runs inspirational 'gold medal moments' stories.
“This is really the only method of marketing that I know where you can actually do marketing to get more customers and you get paid to get more customers to do the marketing.”
Content marketing where the channel pays you to acquire customers
Past a viewership threshold, the funnel inverts: AdSense and brand-deal revenue from the YouTube channel fully funds two in-house video editors plus a five-person content team — independent of the app. Even if zero app subscribers came from a video, the content arm is ROI-positive on its own. The dual-economy unlocks scale most teams never reach.
“The passion that people have for certain brands goes them beyond just a purchase history. They wear t-shirts of the company, and you think about that — that's just a weird way to be a walking billboard for certain companies, but I see tons of people with Discord t-shirts and it's just part of their persona.”
Community is the retention moat — do users wear your t-shirt?
The community leg of the framework is the retention lever, and the diagnostic test is whether users would wear your t-shirt unprompted. If your app is 'just another app,' you lose at retention; if users adopt the brand into their persona, marketing budgets collapse because UGC and word-of-mouth feed the top of the funnel.
“Us in the industry labeling this TikTok strategy as organic is very misleading. Even though you could pay $5 for a single UGC video... the time invested to get to that point is significant. We recently built this UGC machine at Blue Throne. It took us like six months to get our first viral video, and that's not one person's time, that's multiple people across multiple disciplines.”
The 'organic TikTok' lie: 6 months and a cross-functional team to ship the first viral
Peleg pushes back hard on the framing that UGC/TikTok is free distribution. Even with cheap individual creator videos, the research, scripting, and iteration cost is real. Acquirers treat it as a marketing cost basis, not organic upside — founders pitching 'we grow organically on TikTok' get re-valued downward once the time and creator spend is unpacked.
“I would more look at your cost per successful creative that is beating the BAU ads performance and it doesn't matter if you test 20 versus 200”
Track cost per winning creative, not total creatives tested
The industry race to 500 or 700 creatives per month is a vanity metric. What matters is your success rate — how many creatives beat your baseline BAU performance — and the production cost per winner. A small batch with strong hypotheses and a high hit rate beats a firehose approach where the analysis quality degrades under volume pressure.
“let's have the same dog let's have a puppy let's have another breed let's have another animal so just to test and see if it's the animal or not”
Isolate one variable per creative phase — dog → breed → species → animal
Creative iteration should proceed in structured phases that isolate a single variable at a time rather than flooding a winning signal with hundreds of derivatives. By swapping one element per round — breed, species, count — you learn whether the category of element drives performance, not just one specific execution, before scaling production.
“if there is one concept with 15 variations and that is a particular the only one that has 15 variations compared other ones having just two and three you should be able to interpret that likely that creative performing well for them”
Meta ad library variation count signals competitor creative confidence
The Meta ad library reveals not just what competitors run, but how hard they are leaning into it. A concept scaled to 15 variations while others sit at 2–3 is a strong signal that concept is converting — use that as inspiration to adapt and test, filtered through your own audience data and past performance.