Behind the Scenes of How "Yar Song" Took Us to #1 on the App Store

Alarmy Hits #1 in the Korean App Store Category

About two months ago, Alarmy hit #1 in the Lifestyle category on the Korean App Store. Because Alarmy has a high proportion of users in their teens and twenties, we usually see a huge spike in organic installs around the back-to-school season in March. But this time, we saw an exceptionally steep increase in installs during June—which is normally considered our off-season.

Looking at the metrics makes this shift even more apparent. Not only did we experience an install spike comparable to the March back-to-school season in Korea, but the trend held strong, surpassing 100,000 weekly inbound users. Over the same period, major metrics across the board drew a J-curve—inbound traffic from Google search increased, and traffic to the ringtone page on Alarmy's homepage surged. At the center of it all was Alarmy's original video alarm, "Yar Song."

What Exactly Is "Yar Song"?

Before I explain Yar Song, I should probably briefly introduce Alarmy's "video alarm" feature. When you think of a typical alarm, you imagine a ringtone sounding off at a set time. However, Alarmy offers a "video alarm" feature that lets you set a video to play when the alarm goes off.

While users can set their own favorite videos as alarms, they can also choose from original video alarms provided by Alarmy. Just like Netflix's original content, we provide our users with video alarm content produced entirely in-house.

Currently, Alarmy features over 100 original video alarms. "Yar Song" is one of these original pieces of content produced directly by Alarmy. We covered a song that was already going viral on social media, rewrote the lyrics to fit waking up, and paired it with a cute duck character animation. Once we released it, it started getting a much bigger response than we ever expected.

Just How Viral Did Yar Song Go in Korea?

So, just how viral did "Yar Song" get in Korea? Within a week of its release, the original content posted on Alarmy's official Instagram account (@alarmy_official_kr) alone surpassed 10 million views, while influencer and UGC content featuring Yar Song racked up over 20 million views. It's no exaggeration to say that pretty much every piece of content uploaded with Yar Song blew up in Korea.

What was actually even more meaningful was that users started endlessly churning out secondary and tertiary content covering "Yar Song." Hundreds of cover videos poured in, leading to a "true viral" moment where users were voluntarily creating content.

On top of that (and we are so incredibly grateful for this..), Young K uploaded a cover of it directly to his own social media, which briefly pushed Yar Song up to #5 on Instagram's trending audio.

At this point, you might be thinking, "Didn't Yar Song just catch a good wave with the algorithm and get lucky?"

Sure, I think luck played a part. But I don't think it blew up purely by accident just because we got lucky. Behind creating a massive video alarm like this was an endless iteration and production process built up by the entire team. So, let me spill the behind-the-scenes details on how Alarmy's original video alarms are actually made.

How We Make Video Alarms That Pop Off

1) Finding References

The very first step in making a video alarm is finding references. Every week, the marketing team gets together to ideate on video alarm content. During this time, we gather references based on videos or audio tracks that are currently going viral, and the team sets priorities.

2) Producing the Video Alarm (Audio + Visuals)

Once an appropriate reference is chosen, we produce the alarm track using that audio. We rewrite the lyrics to fit a wake-up theme (e.g., wake up, go to school, etc.), and then use Suno to generate the audio. To get the quality we want, we produce an average of 20 tracks, sometimes churning out more than 50.

Once the audio is ready, we use AI to create the visuals to match the alarm track. Here too, we build the visuals using content that has already gotten a strong reaction from people as our reference.

For example, a video alarm called "Aren't you waking up, Yoda?" was made using visuals of a cute character or animal knocking on the screen as a reference, like the one below. By combining the melody of the classic nursery rhyme 'Old MacDonald' with the visual of a cat smacking the screen, it has now become one of the most popular video alarms in Korea.

3) Syncing with the Product Team Weekly

It would be great if producing the video alarm and adding it to the product was the end of it! But actually, that's just the beginning. Every week, the marketing team syncs with the product team (the Engage squad) to check user reactions to the newly added video alarms.

During this review, we prioritize marketing actions for video alarms that record an onboarding selection rate of 10% or higher—meaning they were highly chosen by users. It's a method of expanding content that has proven user traction inside the product into owned media or creator content.

In fact, when we created ad creatives using Kiwi Cat, which is one of the most selected video alarms in Japan, we saw it perform incredibly well across Japanese owned media. A natural flow was established where the product team and marketing team were organically connected, allowing us to verify user reactions and immediately translate them into marketing actions.

As this process repeats, we are now consistently producing popular content with such a high hit rate that video alarms exceeding a 10% selection rate per country are coming out every single week.

4) Marketing the Video Alarms

Once we find a breakout video alarm like this, we expand it across various marketing channels. Even with the same video alarm, people consume content differently depending on the channel, so we tweak our appeal slightly to fit the characteristics of each one.

On owned media, we showcase the video alarm itself as a standalone piece of content. We release original video alarms directly on Alarmy's official accounts, letting users consume them just like any other content. In the process, users who enjoy the video alarm share it or ask how to set it as their alarm, which naturally leads to app downloads.

In Paid ads, we intuitively show the actual experience of using the video alarm. We create creatives utilizing both the video alarm and our missions to quickly convey the feeling of, "With this alarm, I'd actually wake up." The setup grabs initial attention with the video alarm and transitions into the mission screen, seamlessly bridging the gap to an app download.

For influencer/UGC marketing, we showcase the fun, diverse situations that happen because of the video alarms. We spin them into relatable scenarios—like waking up together because of a boyfriend, girlfriend, or family member's alarm—or we exaggerate the features of the video alarm and mission that keep ringing until you finally turn them off.

This is how we pitch a single video alarm in multiple ways tailored to the traits of owned media, paid ads, and influencer/UGC channels. Whenever a new video alarm gets a great response, we pull it back into our marketing creatives and expand it by making a variety of content for each channel. You could say it's a structure where new marketing content continuously rolls out in sync with video alarm releases.

Truth Be Told, It Took a Year

All of this didn't happen overnight. In fact, these video alarms are the result of continuous experiments the whole team has been building up since last year. For about a year since the video alarm feature first launched, we went from video alarms using TTS (Adam's voice) to nursery rhymes, and finally to Yar Song. This was possible because the product provided solid functional support, and marketing literally kept trying "until it worked" to find the content that users would react to.

We held weekly ideation meetings, found new references through daily monitoring, created content based on them, checked user reactions, and iterated again and again. Even if one piece of content flopped, we didn't just stop there; we kept chaining it to the next hypothesis and the next attempt, week after week.

What was just as meaningful to us as the success of Yar Song was that the experiments and processes our whole team built together over the past year eventually paid off with real results. Along the way, Alarmy's video alarms evolved from a simple feature into Alarmy's very own original content and a legitimate brand asset.

What Happened After Yar Song

Some fun changes also happened after Yar Song went viral. We started getting flooded with partnership inquiries from brands and artists who wanted to create something together using video alarms. In fact, we're prepping several collaborations right now.

Alarmy's video alarm is the very first piece of content users interact with the moment they open their eyes for the day. It's a space with over 10 million daily impressions, and once set, it's content that users repeatedly encounter over quite a long period. If planned well, it can become a unique touchpoint that captures both branding and entertainment.

A brand's character could wake users up every morning, or you could make them start their day with the voice or music of their favorite artist. Given Alarmy's high percentage of global users (especially in North America), I think the ability to naturally expose a brand to millions of global users every day is a charm entirely unique to Alarmy's video alarms.

If you've read this far and thought, "Hey, maybe we could do something with Alarmy too?"—if you want to join us in making the first moments of the day more enjoyable, please reach out anytime!

We're waiting for brands to build the second and third Yar Songs together. (https://alar.my/partnership)