How I Grow Viral Apps to 1M+ Downloads (just copy me)

Today I talked to Yev, who I believe is

one of the best growth hackers I've met

in a while. He's currently the head of

growth at an edtech app called Sizzle.

And before that, he got into some really

interesting stuff with YouTube shorts

getting billions of views for faceless

channels. And in this video, we just go

really deep into the tactics and

strategies of how to build a growth

engine. And also, he gives some pretty

interesting takes on how to balance

organic and paid marketing for mobile

apps. So, by the end of this interview,

we're going to know exactly how to build

a growth system that is scalable and

balance a lot of these interesting

tactics. So, yeah, Sizzle AI has been

growing super fast. Can you give us the

20 second version of what does the app

do and who it's for? Yeah, Sizzle AI,

it's a learning app started over a year

ago before all the hype of a lot of

learning apps, study apps, and there's

actually learning science behind it. So

I think we find this balance of not just

revenue and growth but actual learning

happening for anyone that wants to learn

like student and prep but any type of

learning topic and it's it's tailored to

the learner. That's awesome. So by the

time we finish this episode what kind of

playbook or insight will people be

walking away with? On the growth side

I'm focused on finding these tipping

points. So, anytime you hear a growth

hack, most of the time it won't work.

But what I'm trying to do is find these

lowhanging fruits in all areas of the

business on marketing, growth, product,

and you realize there's tipping points,

meaning these thresholds of low hanging

fruit you do, and then at some point a

growth hack like pops viral. So, it's

going to be this takeaway like where do

you shift attention in your strategy to

find these moments where you're getting

close to conversion actually increasing,

dropouts decreasing. So, it's these

tipping points that I'm looking for. So

before Sizzle even started getting some

serious traction, what were your first

signs that you saw that this probably

has some potential? This is when you're

looking at particular pathways of the

user journey. There's a lot of noise out

there, but certain ones are highly

converting or lower drop off. So you

know you're on to something because your

product actually solves the problem, but

then the product is like never good

enough. You need kind of like the growth

and virality and kind of amplifying

what's working. But it's seeing these

moments of hundreds of journeys of the

user taking, but some of them are

actually having the lower drop off. So

you know you're on to something there.

How'd you get like the first thousand

users? Are there any weird hacks or do

things that don't scale type of tactics

that you did initially? This is hard to

recommend, but I'm doing everything on

the growth side. Our founder is ex

Facebook VP of AI kind of just doing

announcement help. So it's not something

where I can give a growth hack of like

starting exactly from scratch, but

that's that's where connections and PR

start coming in. Gotcha. Okay. What has

been the biggest thing that you really

think has made Sizzle grow at its

fastest peak rate? One of the growth

levers is within this area of

identifying every step of the funnel and

seeing where the drop offs are the

biggest and addressing those. So it's

that clarity of identifying from the top

of the funnel from the whether it's

organic content or paid into the app and

then using the app you have to see where

the drop off is the highest. So as soon

as we shifted focus knowing on there's

over 50% drop off here when we improve

that we see these 2x to 3x growth

moments as opposed to there's like these

moments of within the product you're

trying to optimize ad features but it's

just these 10% improvements. I I think

you're asking for like growth

strategies. Like we'll get to those. And

it's actually not that. That's like very

experimentive on types of ads to run,

types of organic content, kind of doing

things on meta side versus Tik Tok that

have these big growth levers for scale.

But I would say it's on the conversion

side. It's actually finding where your

biggest drop offs are and solving them.

And all of a sudden you just 2x 3x how

many people make it to the next stage.

So we could go deeper into like those

moments within the payw wall, within the

onboarding. So I would say it's those

it's identifying where you have the

biggest drop off and focusing in on that

like every team member is thinking about

what to optimize within that from

different perspective of of their

expertise of really dialing in that

area. That's where you see just the

biggest growth levers which you can like

accomplish within a week as opposed to

like a monthly quarterly goal where

you're making incremental improvements

over time. Yeah, I love the scientific

approach to growth just like being super

analytical about every single step of

the funnel like where can we optimize

this? I think we should go super deep

into that. Maybe first, could you just

tell us like what's the breakdown of

organic versus paid? Do you do a lot of

organic stuff? And like I think

everyone's trying to go viral on TikTok

right now. Maybe you could talk a little

bit about the organic side and what you

guys do there. Yeah, it's definitely a

balance. So, it's kind of like there's

this tricky moment of wanting the answer

if it's organic or paid. But what I

found out is knowing when to switch

across the two and knowing how to

leverage each one. So that is the

advantage where I would say like the

paid is easier to pull levers because

you're like add budget and then you kind

of see growth or not. So that's kind of

an easier one and now or unorganic

there's a lot more things to test just a

lot more of how you're approaching the

influencers the creatives which platform

you're doing it on. So what I found is

when you get traction in organic certain

posts or certain creators most of the

time you then go on to try to replicate

that more but what I found is kind of

taking a step back and it's kind of like

this tipping point is now knowing which

ones to amplify with ads. So it's

finding this balance. So it's actually

doing both like we can get kind of into

the percentages of each and it's more on

the ad side because we're using it to

optimize parts of the funnel. So it's

not just paid ads to grow. It's like

this very strategic insertion of a ad to

find what headline works the best and

then we put it in a particular part of

the app. So it's leveraging ads in

different ways. And actually it'll be

interesting to break down on how paid

ads are used versus on organic there's

the virality but that's to actually have

stronger distribution across different

creators and kind of more like an engine

of content being created and actually

getting installs and purchases. That's

the goal of organic. But then in paid it

kind of has different levers within

that. One of them is to amplify the

organic to test organic more. And

sometimes you kind of have organic

content that it doesn't go viral like it

just gets like hundreds or views or

maybe just like on the low thousands of

views and you think it's not working

compared to the ones that have like

hundreds of thousands or millions of

views. But there's like these wild cards

where just like something in the

algorithm like you put it on TikTok and

it just like doesn't go viral, but it

may have been like the timing or just

something that you posted wrong, but we

always kind of have the ignition with

paid ads to give it bigger of a lift to

see if it actually converts or not. So,

it's finding those moments knowing how

to amplify organic with paid. I would