Airbuds 300 TikTok a day strategy to #2 on the AppStore

The Airbuds mobile app hit #2 in #music, ranking just behind Spotify. This is one of the trickiest categories in the App Store.

The widget app for best friends to share their music activity, and the @nikitabier-advised startup, has a secret TikTok strategy to get millions of users.

They post more than 300 videos a day on over 50 different accounts, generating millions of views.

Raising an Army of Ambassadors

Airbuds hired dozens of students and regular people to post multiple times a day on new TikTok accounts. I found more than 50 active accounts. They must have had hundreds since they started.

They usually post 2 to 4 videos a day on average, with some posting 10 to 20 videos daily.

If you multiply by the number of accounts they post on every day, it adds up to hundreds of thousands to millions of views every day. And that’s if no video hits the jackpot. But they have at least 5 to 10 videos doing over 100,000 views every single day.

It’s fully organic. They don’t run any ad schemes.

The best accounts have up to 17% of the videos beating the account’s median view count by 10x, and 8% going crazy viral. The worst ones don’t have a single viral video.

It doesn’t matter—they managed to engineer virality through mass lo-fi (low production value) content production.

Accounts are branded “firstName.airbuds.” Here are a few for you to check:

https://www.tiktok.com/@nathan.airbuds

https://www.tiktok.com/@claire.airbuds

https://www.tiktok.com/@arah.airbuds

https://www.tiktok.com/@riah.airbuds

https://www.tiktok.com/@luna.airbuds

https://www.tiktok.com/@joeh.airbuds

Dead Simple Content, Well Executed

It’s dead simple content, but well-oiled, well-executed, and at drastic scale.

It features the character doing random life stuff, dancing, or just lip-syncing with a text overlay hook. It’s a one-shot, no-to-low editing video.

The overlay hook and storylines range widely, none are really similar.

• “What the Airbuds reactions are starting to feel like”
• “How I press the block button when someone sends a mean reaction on Airbuds”
• “Me dodging the question because my favorite Taylor song is a very unpopular opinion”

You get the gist.

Crazy Results with Simple Content

This account is posting 7 videos a day like the ones in the image. In the past 4 days, he got 5 videos outperforming the median and 2 doing 100k views.

This is bananas for videos that take on average 10 minutes to shoot, edit, and post.

It’s extremely low-friction content to produce. They hire youngsters and students, so they likely don’t have to pay them a large amount of money per video or as a flat monthly rate.

There are more micro-strategies within the main strategy, like the content’s length and pre-made hooks that they know work and distribute to their army of content creators.

How to Execute Such a Strategy

It’s a mass recruitment campaign, where you have a single employee at your company focused on handling the recruitment. You go to schools and universities to find potential candidates. Or, if you have an app running with users, you can recruit them directly within the app through an “ambassador” program.

You then test them to ensure they produce this simple content, and whether they are reliable, can deliver, and more importantly, can come up with interesting hooks/storylines.

You have them post videos. Test for consistency, and you somehow engineer a system where payment is unlocked after videos are posted, or you pay on a weekly basis.

After a while, you ditch the ones that aren’t working (i.e., didn’t produce a single viral video).

And you repeat.

You don’t have to start this strategy with 50 creators. You can start with 1 or 2. You can hire someone you know, a neighbor’s university student, or someone that wants to make a few bucks.

Short-form content is about experimentation. That’s the key to success.