Growth Newsletter #154

Jenny Hoyos is 18 and has 1,029,345,221 views on her YouTube videos—averaging about 10M views per Short.

She's watched nearly every top creators' Shorts to reverse engineer the structure of a viral YouTube Short. Here's what she's landed on:

Here's an example she gives of the first three parts:

Note: The word illegally is quite hyperbolic, so tailor this to your audience's sophistication.

And here's an example from her video $5 Mother's Day Gift:

This format can be applied to other kinds of short-form video. Whether it's a reel, TikTok, an ad for Instagram, or a promo video.

Check out the the whole interview!

59% of people feel UGC (user-generated content) is the most authentic, and can be six times more influential in swaying purchase decisions.

No company encourages and promotes UGC better than Barkbox.

If you share a photo on Instagram of your pup being cute (particularly if it includes a barkbox product or logo) and tag @bark, your photo may be shared by the Barkbox account with more than 473k followers. Example:

This works so well because:

• People are a bit nuts about their pups.
• They want excuses to share photos of them.
• They would love to see their pup go viral.
• People often create Instagram accounts just for their dog, and everyone loves the dopamine of a bunch of likes and new followers.

This gives Barkbox a constant source of authentic organic content and ad creatives.

Another company that does this is online furniture store Article.

They encourage people to post photos of their homes featuring their Article furniture. They then embed these photos into the product pages. This is smart because:

1. It's built-in social proof.
2. It shows the product in homes to help people imagine what it will look like in theirs.
3. It gives people inspiration on how they can mix and match other pieces of Article furniture together
4. It's helped Article grow it's Instagram account to 1M followers.

Someone with a small audience has to WOW you to get you to hit Follow.

Someone with a huge audience can post a platitude and you’ll say, "damn, that's so TRUE," and you'll likely hit Follow without much thought.

Social proof is a powerful motivator, and the lack of it is a powerful demotivator. This is particularly true on social media where your audience size is public.

That's why growth is so hard at first: No one wants to be the first one to a party.

You need to reach certain psychological thresholds to be taken seriously:

1. 1,000: This is where people go: “okay, they're not completely new.”
2. 5,000: “Not a complete nobody.”
3. 10,000. “Hmm, maybe they do have something to say.”
4. 50,000. “Oh okay, this is a creator on the rise.”
5. 100,000. “They're legit.”
6. 500,000 or even 1M+. “How do I not already know this person?”

Here are some scrappy ways to reach those thresholds:

• Get every friend you have to follow you if you're <100. 
• Follow and DM people who engage with your posts to thank them or start a conversation. They'll often follow.
• Meaningfully comment on other people's posts who are at a similar stage. Start a convo. Then eventually follow them/send a connection request and DM them.
• Comment on other people's comments big creator's posts. Again, start a convo and follow/connection request + DM.
• Leverage relationships you have with people with large audiences than you. See if they'd be willing to engage with some of your posts or to tag you in one of their own.
• If on LinkedIn, use tools like WeConnect or Lemlist to automate 20-30 connection requests per day with people in your target audience and who share communities with you (went to the same university or live in same city).

These are hacky. But that's sadly what you gotta do early on.

And I highly recommend going through our free Hook Vault—we compiled 400 of the top hooks from the top 100 creators on Twitter (based on Readwise's data).

Learning how to hook people is critical.