Enter the Viral Squad

A squad dedicated to explosive user acquisition

I've taken charge of the Viral Squad starting this new year. It's a squad dedicated to letting the world know about Alarmy. This cross-functional team looks at app installs as our ultimate target metric, managing related leading indicators to get there.

Up until last year, we grew the product based on solid product retention and a decent volume of organic inflow. However, our calculations showed that to achieve a 10x leap, we needed to make bolder moves at the user acquisition stage. Thus, we formed our first squad completely focused on user acquisition. (And somehow, I ended up as the PO...)

The world needs to know us.

How can we increase user inflow 'explosively'?

"Performance marketing," which drives installs through a few targeted media channels while matching ROAS, can secure a stable number of installs. But that install volume falls drastically short of hitting our target DAU.

I analyzed the acquisition characteristics of already successful global app services (with over 10 million DAU). I found one common trait. Although it's based on estimates from ASO solutions, the volume and proportion of installs generated by users directly searching the app service's "name" (= brand keyword) were overwhelmingly large.

When I compared this to the "Alarmy" install volume, ours was dismally small. It simply meant that our app name wasn't that well known in those countries.

So, we set the Viral Squad's primary goal: letting the world know about Alarmy. I figured that if Alarmy were seamlessly woven into and sprinkled across the daily video content people consume (Reels, Shorts, TikTok, etc.), our brand awareness would rise. In short, I realized we needed to discover the kind of content that blows up in views and gets exposed to a massive number of potential users.

I also had a strong conviction that creating viral hit content would lead to an explosive short-term boost in install volume. We've actually experienced moments in certain countries where we unintentionally went viral, our installs skyrocketed, and the baseline average installs in that country took a massive step up. Just recently in late January, this happened in Uzbekistan, and the impact has been spreading to neighboring countries like Ukraine and Poland.

We need content that blows up.

I didn't know the foolproof winning formula yet, but I clearly knew we needed "viral hit content."

So we started running growth iterations with the goal of discovering at least five pieces of content that cross the 1 million views mark. It's a growth loop of posting hypothesis-driven content in collaboration with micro-influencers, analyzing the results, and stacking up the lessons learned.

It sounds simple in theory, but since we had never done it before, we faced a lot of challenges. Which country, which platform (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), and which selling point should we highlight? And in terms of actual operations, should we source it directly through seeding or collaborate with a specialized agency? Once we dove in, there were just too many moving parts we had to figure out and optimize ourselves. Unlike the product, the marketing side also had a much broader area that we simply couldn't control.

Somehow, while making various attempts, January came to an end, and we still haven't discovered that 1-million-view content. (As of writing this post: February 8, 2025)

Nevertheless, we've gained a lot of high-quality lessons through these iterations.

"To blow past 1 million views, this is what we need to do..!"

It was even better because these were mostly practical lessons we could apply right away.
I'll follow up and share those lessons in my next post.