How to Get 200k+ Views on TikTok as a New Startup
And you can do it with only 10 hours of work!
It’s tough trying to grow an online presence — particularly when you’re pre-revenue, or even pre-product. Luckily, TikTok provides an ideal opportunity for growing a following you can later leverage to show investors objective metrics of traction.
I’ll be drawing on my experience with Marlow, a startup I’ve co-founded.
We intend to launch in September, but have no product or revenue to speak of. In a week of using TikTok we’ve gained 1600 organic followers, 240k+ views, and 50k likes with content that has taken at most 10 hours to create.
Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned through the TikTok and general startup marketing process:
Solve a problem
If your company solves a problem, this entire process gets easier. True and important problems can create a sense of purpose in your videos. This is doubly useful if your problem is one a wide range of people face. With Marlow, we’re targeting menstruating women — a massive demographic, with a recurring, painful problem. Our job is way easier than the startup creating a better-tasting granola product.
But that isn’t quite true. A better-tasting granola product can find an issue. If you can make the production more environmentally friendly, you have a purpose: Granola that tastes good, and doesn’t kill the planet. For virtually any startup, you can usually find a motivating inspiration beyond making a slightly better widget.
Here’s one video we made discussing the menstrual product industry’s failure to listen to women — and a trend towards generic hashtags like #girlboss:
To date, this video has 55k views, and 18.6k likes. The ratio is important — a lot of TikToks have like to view ratios of below 10%. For the majority of our videos, we have ratios at around 30%. In other words, people don’t just watch our videos, they actively enjoy them.
Another important metrics: notice the amount of comments. In the comment sections of our videos we have entire dialogues going on that boost visibility on TikTok’s algorithm. These comments also give us material for video responses, and proof of traction to investors — we can prove people are passionate about these issues. This is particularly important if you don’t expect investors to truly get the problem. With the majority of VCs being men, we want to make sure we have proof that the deficiencies in existing menstrual products are real and important enough that people get excited about an alternative.
Identity Content Works
Because we’re a tampon company, the vast majority of customers will be women. Making women-focused content is therefore incredibly important to maintain engagement and show we aren’t out to simply maximize profit.
Making blog content that speaks to general women’s issues is important to hammer home that we are a lifestyle-type brand. Making a better widget isn’t good enough — you need to show that you can see beyond your specific problem to be solved.
We reuse blog content on TikTok for videos as well. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel — take what’s worked before and modify to fit the TikTok format. Another thing you want to be doing is cross-promoting your various social media channels. With TikTok, we direct users to our blog. On Instagram, we direct users to our TikTok. You can use TikTok to help build up the rest of your marketing ecosystem!
Digestible Educational Content Works
People like learning things. They also don’t necessarily want to spend 20 minutes reading a well-researched blog post. A series we have on our TikTok — Tampon Fun Facts — gives 5 second facts to consumers about the history of tampons. Here’s one video that went viral (90k views, 20k likes):
One last metric to look for: shares. Much like comments, shares are a better indicator of engagement than raw view or like totals. As of this writing, the video has 77 shares. People care enough about this issue to share with their friends! That’s how you grow follows, views, likes — really everything you care about on this platform.
Takeaway: Make videos that are quick, informative, and easily shared.
Comedy Works (but not too much)
Videos that are funny or entertaining can also drive views and traffic. Treat these videos like a loss-leader product— they may not 100% drive home the message you want, but will get you follows and boost the position of your more important videos on the site’s algorithm.
Here‘s an example of comedy content:
This drives at the messages we want to send, but isn’t a core video.
You should be looking at TikTok’s For You page to find trending audios, dances, and joke formats that can work well with your message.
I’d advise against making your content 100% comedic. We’ve found that our comedy videos are great drivers of new followers, but have significantly less shares, views, and likes than other more serious videos. These audio or joke-driven posts can fade into the background given how many other nearly-identical posts with the same format have been made.
Post regularly, and on a schedule
We post 2–3 videos daily. If you go too long without a new post, you lose out on an algorithmic edge. If one of your videos is trending, the others are more likely to be recommended. You need to continually post to ride the wave of each prior post trending upwards.
Spacing your posts out is also incredibly important. 4 videos posted in the space of 10 minutes with gain far less views than 4 videos posted every 6 hours throughout the day. You need to make sure you aren’t trying to push too many things through at once.
If you had a great hour of filming, you can leave all but one video in your drafts and save them to post hours later. You’ll get better results that way. Ideally, you should have a few videos in the drafts ready for posting at any given time. Building a backlog is important for the days when it gets too busy to create new content.
Analytics are useful
TikTok’s platform allows you to classify your account as a “business account”. With this, you can see analytics on all your videos and the account in general. Details include the geographic and gender distributions of followers, average watch times, and the percent of views that are coming from followers or via TikTok’s recommendation algorithm. All of this can be useful; With TikTok analytics you can see which groups your message resonates with most, and which tend to get recommended to strangers.
TikTok is Validating
Lots of startup founders can feel like they’re screaming into the void, begging to be heard. TikTok gives you proof your message is valuable to others. It’s incredibly motivating to wake up to 100+ notifications showing how many followers joined overnight. Use that energy. It can give you the boost you need to keep pitching, selling, and connecting with your consumers.
Get out there
TikTok is free. The absolute worst case scenario for your startup is your videos don’t take off. The upside potential is you go viral and have impressive metrics to show at your next pitch, and motivation for your entire team. I highly recommend you get started. Today. What have you got to lose?