There are three ways to do a solo or bootstrapped founder IG/TikTok viral account:
Informational
Demo
Founder-story
Informational
My favorite one. It’s about generating educational / informational content within your niche.
Founders sleep on this one a lot. It’s the strategy that ripples long-term while also being effective short-term.
A great example is the Oasis Water app (38M views):
By growing such an account, you essentially create a “media” page within your vertical.
Using your own product as a background asset in the video content, you naturally create an authentic acquisition machine.
The solution is nested with the problem.
Oasis’ founder averages 30K views per video and has multiple viral hits. He’s making tens of thousands of $ a month from this. Solo.
In most cases, you’re building a product you already have expertise in so it’s rather effortless to turn your domain knowledge into your own little media machine.
Demo
The faceless demo format is a great way to get into short form video content.
If you have a “disruptive” (or just different enough) app, film your phone giving a tutorial or showcasing the app/website with catchy hooks and story lines.
Repeat this daily with slight tweaks, study retention rates to improve hooks and edits. Eventually, you will crack the code for viral demo videos.
Dump Phone shows how it’s done:
His best videos did 10K+ bookmarks, and netted him thousands of downloads.
It’s accessible and it’s faceless. Give it a try.
Founder-story
The last one, is the explanatory format.
“I built an app…” format works on both IG and TikTok.
The founder of this fit-check app nailed it, repeatedly:
Use long text overlays to tell why you built the product: like “X and Y had a baby.” or story tell why and how you’re building the app.
It’s optimal for social or Gen Z-focused apps (also works for other types of apps).
In the case above, he’s doing 7-second videos with a long story text over himself frantically moving around.
One “talking head” variation by Josh Rozin, where he pitches his new app, following the same “X and Y had a baby” narrative than above:
One more edited variation by Miquel, where he built an account showcasing his team building the app live. With this strategy, he got 1M+ downloads and #1 in Spain:
Post daily, or multiple times a day, tweak, and let the algorithm do its thing.
