Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
5 tactics from Joseph Choi
3 TikTok growth secrets for virality (tl;dr)
Watch the full episode“If you have a million followers on TikTok that does give you a leg up for sure because I think I gave an estimate maybe 95% of the videos you watch on the for you page are brand new accounts that you've never seen before.”
95% of For You page videos come from accounts you've never seen
Followers offer a small boost, but ~95% of TikTok For You page watch time comes from accounts the viewer has never seen. That collapses the follower moat that ruled Instagram and Facebook — on TikTok you can reach an audience without first building one.
“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.
“There's this app called Breezy. She just makes founder-led content talking about the app itself, showing Figma screenshots, some beta screenshots, and then it's a waitlist. She made a video that was 15 seconds long just talking about the app and got I think 5,000 waitlist signups.”
Breezy got 5,000 waitlist signups from one 15-second Figma-screenshot video
Breezy, a social note-sharing app aimed at Gen Z, drove ~5,000 waitlist signups from one 15-second founder-led TikTok showing only Figma and beta screenshots. Use TikTok as instant product validation: if a video about the concept pulls views and signups, you have demand signal before writing code.
“There's all this existing ADHD content where people are saying 'Does anyone else get that feeling when you walk into a room and then you completely forget why you were there?' You just make a slight change in the call to action of those videos where you say 'Hey anyone else relate to this thing — by the way I use this app.'”
Hijack existing trend content (ADHD skits) and swap the CTA to plug your app
Don't invent net-new content formats. Identify the relatable-pain-point hooks already winning in your niche (Gen Z ADHD skits, talking-head reactions) and re-skin them with a soft app CTA at the end. By the time you mention the product, the algorithm has already given you 50-70% watch time, so the plug performs like a native infomercial.
“This might be a Gen Z trend but I think you know Gen Z cares a lot about mental health. They kind of describe ADHD more as a personality trait than an actual diagnosis. 42% of Gen Z have a diagnosed mental health condition.”
Gen Z treats ADHD as a personality trait — 42% have a diagnosed mental health condition
The reason ADHD-coded content works on TikTok: Gen Z frames mental health as identity, not medical diagnosis, and 42% report a diagnosed condition. App founders building habit-trackers, focus tools, or anything mental-health-adjacent should mirror that identity framing in creative — not clinical or self-improvement language.