Founder Playbook · Starter Story
6 tactics from Nicole
My Two Apps Make $150K/Month Each
Watch the full episode“you need to think of the design of the app as part of your distribution so you need to design the app in a way that's innately viral for social media and when that does happen you can just start testing viral formats on social media once you find a winning strategy you can just double down and scale”
Design the app to be innately viral on social before you ship it
Treat distribution as a design constraint, not a post-launch tactic. Before shipping a consumer app, ask: which scans, results, or outcome screens are share-worthy on a 9:16 TikTok? Build those moments in deliberately (before/afters, color analysis cards, swipe results, scan reveals). If the screen recording isn't inherently compelling, no UGC creator system downstream will rescue it. Distribution-by-design beats distribution-by-marketing.
“my co-founder was in HFZ and they had other founders building consumer apps one of them was UMAX it's a looks maxing app for guys and we loosely got inspired by it and we wanted to build a glowup app for women and makeup and we realized that there's no apps like that existing on the app store yet”
Clone a proven consumer-app playbook into an adjacent underserved audience
Don't invent a brand-new consumer-app category. Find an app with proven paying customers and a working content playbook, then port the mechanic to an adjacent audience that the App Store hasn't served yet. UMAX (looks-maxing for guys) → Glam Up (glow-up for women). Sprout pivoted from beauty into college-student jobs specifically because that audience had higher purchasing power. Pick the mechanic, swap the audience, ship.
“we hard paywall all of our apps when it comes to our business models we do a weekly or monthly subscription for these two apps”
Hard paywall every consumer app — weekly + monthly options on first open
Skip free tiers and generous trials on viral consumer apps. The user came in hyped from a TikTok scroll — capture that intent immediately by gating the core scan, result, or feature behind a hard paywall on first open. Offer both weekly (low-commit impulse) and monthly (more value perceived) so the buy decision happens at the peak of curiosity, not after a 7-day cooldown. Hard paywall is what monetizes the ~$1+ CAC TikTok install.
“try all of these maybe around 2 3 weeks at a time and every time you try a new strategy really milk the hell out of it for example if you are doing faceless content you can try slideshows you can try videos you can try different ways that you can do the slideshows... and just keep iterating and keep testing until you find one”
Run one viral format hard for 2-3 weeks before pivoting to another
Pick one format — faceless slideshows, talking head, reaction, Reddit, AI UGC — and run it hard for 2-3 weeks before judging it. Inside that window, vary the CTA, the hook, slideshow length, frame structure, and timing exhaustively rather than jumping channels at the first plateau. Most format failures aren't the format — they're premature pivots before exhausting the variants. Only graduate to the next format after you've actually milked the current one.
“this is the creator course that I have built for Sprout more than 50% of the creators that go through this course go viral within the first two weeks and this is completely tailored to our app first we have a type form and then I do a bunch of videos and modules to train our creators... we always have a quiz at the end of each module just to quality check on the creators”
Productize UGC creator onboarding into a course — 50% go viral in 2 weeks
Don't treat UGC creators as freelancers you brief once. Build an actual course: Typeform application → video modules covering your content bank, hooks, formats, scripts → quizzes at the end of each module to gate completion. Encode everything you know about what works on your app into a repeatable curriculum. Nicole's Sprout course gets >50% of creators viral within 2 weeks — the productized training is what turns one virality run into a system.
“step number one is sourcing whatever you do you need to try to find the creators that fit your content strategy... step two it's onboarding... third step is the management... step four is once you're big enough it's time for you to systemize and optimize even more for example you can start a referral system for all of your UGC creators you can have dashboards to analyze the growth”
Scale UGC with the sourcing → onboarding → management → systematize loop
Once you've found a viral format that works, scale to 200+ active creators via a 4-stage loop: (1) sourcing — inbound application forms in UGC group chats + outbound VAs DMing micro-influencers; (2) onboarding — interview vibe-check + the productized course; (3) management — Discord group or top-creators-promoted-to-managers + biweekly feedback calls; (4) systematize — referral systems for creators, dashboards for analytics. This is what separates a viral moment from a $150K/mo consumer app.