The B2B Podcast Index
How I Grew This: Real Stories of Digital Growth

The Viral Growth Blueprint: How Nic Weber Turned Creators Into a Scalable Acquisition Engine

How I Grew This: Real Stories of Digital Growth · 2026-06-04 · 41 min

Substance score

51 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density10 / 20
Originality9 / 20
Guest Caliber12 / 20
Specificity & Evidence11 / 20
Conversational Craft9 / 20

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

10 / 20

There are a handful of genuinely useful practitioner ideas—CPM-aligned creator compensation, the viral bell curve, and the intent-signal argument for TikTok-driven installs—but they're diluted by lengthy detours about Jon Hamm memes, Starbucks secret menus, and Kim Kardashian's fridge. The ideas-per-minute ratio is modest at best.

if you leave TikTok, the most addictive social media platform in the world, if you leave TikTok to go download something, the signal that you're going to be a good user is so much higher than you. Like leaving an infinite scroll feed with an ad on Instagram
we literally watched his views on noise chart exactly with him then getting a thousand downloads a day. And that a thousand downloads a day in his category was costing him about like 98 cents per download

Originality

9 / 20

The CPM-alignment framing for creator compensation is a genuinely useful reframe over flat influencer fees, and the 'deprogrammed from hot people' observation is interesting, but the interest-graph-kills-social-graph point and the general virality formula are well-circulated ideas in growth marketing circles.

I firmly believe that everything in short form is already an ad
your brand identity is actually what happens when you go into TikTok and search the name of your app

Guest Caliber

12 / 20

Weber is a legitimate practitioner who has grappled with real unit economics (LTV under a dollar, 2M downloads, raised capital) and built a live two-sided marketplace, not a career thought-leader. However, he is early-stage and not a recognised operator at notable scale outside his own platform.

we built our first consumer app, raise money, 2 million downloads. LTV to CAC was always a difficulty for us
we only grow using our own platform. So we don't spend on Programmatic anywhere

Specificity & Evidence

11 / 20

There are several concrete numbers that ground the episode (8-cent effective CPMs, $150 for 20,000 installs, 98-cent CPI, top-5 App Store ranking), but a meaningful share of the supporting evidence relies on unnamed apps and anecdotal stories that cannot be verified or stress-tested.

one of those slideshows did 300 and drove 20,000 installs for us for $150
we have brands on the platform doing like 8 cent effective CPMs because their stuff just ends up going viral

Conversational Craft

9 / 20

The hosts ask reasonable clarifying questions and occasionally reframe the guest's points interestingly, but they never challenge a claim, probe failure rates, or ask why competitors haven't replicated this—leaving every assertion unchallenged in what amounts to a friendly product walkthrough.

are you saying that TikTok and Facebook are ad platforms, so you're to either pay them to be a good ad platform or you can use them being a good ad platform by just having good content
How do you bridge the gap? If like, let's say my model is ltv, I have to get an LTV or the user or purchase downstream, how do I bridge that back to paying a CPM

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker A77%
  • Speaker C12%
  • Speaker B11%

Filler words

like127so112right78kind of17actually15you know10I mean10sort of6basically6literally5obviously4anyway1

Episode notes

What if you could turn creator content into your most cost-effective acquisition channel? In this episode of How I Grew This, Amanda and Adam sit down with Nic Weber, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Noise, to explore why creator-powered marketing outperforms traditional ads, how to build viral campaigns at scale, and the strategies that transform unknown creators into growth engines for your brand. Whether you're a mobile app founder struggling with user acquisition costs or a marketer looking to unlock authentic engagement, this conversation reveals actionable frameworks on relatability, need, and novelty—plus real examples of brands achieving pennies-on-the-dollar CPMs. Tune in to discover how to leverage 950,000+ creators and tap into the future of performance marketing.

Full transcript

41 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Everyone's now going, AI, AI, AI, AI. And the problem with AI is it doesn't have the ability to be human. Right. The driver behind the seat is still really important right now, especially in the social space. And believe me, I have tried. Like, we have examples of AI videos that have done 20 million views, but you still have to have the person sitting behind the wheel dictating how it should go, why it's going to work. Welcome to How I Grew this, where we dive into the world of digital marketing and connect with leaders in the space about how they're scaling, evolving, and growing. Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Grew this. Really excited about our guest today. We have Nick Weber, co founder and chief product officer of Noise. It's a really cool company doing something pretty neat. Turning creator content into a scalable acquisition channel. Really excited to dig in a little bit deeper. He has a cool background building growth systems across gaming, viral media, now creator powered marketing. So, Nick, welcome. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Amanda, Adam, pleasure. Glad we could get connected. Hopefully you guys can hear me. Okay. Oh, you're coming in smooth as butter. I want to start with your background. You mentioned that you have a rich history in consumer apps and gaming and everything, so kind of talk us through the journey a little bit. Yeah. So I actually went to school for graphic design, if you can believe that. I think that there's a lot of people in the creatives industry that end up in consumer in one way or the other. My teachers didn't know what to do with me. I was building apps and websites when everyone else was building, like business cards and whatever else graduated there and ended up very luckily getting introduced to a company here in St. Louis who was really big in the publishing space specifically for articles back in the 2013, 2014, 2015 era of the Internet, especially Facebook marketing specifically from there. Yeah, I kind of went to one of the subsidiaries that they acquired and ran a lot of products over there. It was a consumer experience company called 4C. They did something like 6 billion survey impressions a month. Really interesting stories out of there. And then obviously started kind of doing my own founder journey. Right. Started building apps, started building games specifically. Worked with Vudu. We were a Vudu publisher for about two or three years, something like that, in 2018. And then, yeah, that kind of got us to look in the game space, built our first consumer app, raise money, 2 million downloads. LTV to CAC was always a difficulty for us. All the other metrics except LTV looked great. And then what ended up happening was in order for us to acquire users really cheaply because our LTV was so low, our LTV was like under a dollar for what we were doing. We could not grow it for a bunch of reasons that I can get into. But in order to actually acquire users at cost effective numbers for us, we had to be really scrappy in growth hacking. How we got there. We did three main growth hacks, two of which I will not talk about because they still work and we're still using them today. The third, third one was so effective that we actually sold the consumer app and started a brand new company which is now called Noise. And the thing that was so effective for us was this social marketing space where we match creators with brands and content and sort of feed them exactly how they can go viral with it and it converts and yeah, I mean, we'll get into it a little bit more, I'm sure. I want to read this back to you because I looked at your website and it took me probably three passes to really recognize the brilliance of it. Basically, if I'm a brand, I come on your website and I say, hey, I want to pay a dollar cpm, Here are my criteria. And then you have an army of creators that will record videos and then basically try to go viral on the different platforms. And as a brand, I pay that cpm. Yeah, and the cool part is your flat cpm, your effective CPM could be far lower. I mean, we have brands on the platform doing like 8 cent effective CPMs because their stuff just ends up going viral. And so yeah, I mean that's why we built a whole company around is because you can't beat that number anywhere. When it goes viral, does the brand pay for that? Like so If I pay 8 cents CPM, you know, let's say a dollar CPM, the creator records it and then it goes viral, the brand pays for it. Or the shares, they get the effective shares down the road, right? So the brand pays for it, but you set a cap on how much you want to pay per video. Like we have videos that have done over 50 million views on a single video, right? And if you're paying a dollar cpm for that, congrats, the creator can go buy a house in Cabo, right? Yeah, but like, obviously that's just not sustainable. Mostly because there's a bell curve of effectiveness on views both on a singular post and both on like the cumulative posts. The cumulative post effect is what people just call trends, right? Where if the activity rate or in this case like downloads, right, let's Say it's downloads. My downloads per view will continue to pick up until it hits a peak where the algorithm is serving my stuff directly to the right audience and then it'll start to taper. And that's exactly how trends work too. Where it's like, what was a Jon Hamm meme? Right. I loved that one because everyone knew it. It was everywhere. Like him in the club. Yes. So the Jon Hamm meme is a perfect example of this is like instead of it being downloads is the action, it's your social equity is the thing that's climbing until it hits a peak and then it falls off. Why would it fall off? If you're getting attention, why would it then curve and go back down? It's the same as ad fatigue. Right? So you refresh your Facebook ads every single. You know that time keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Right. But Facebook ads fatigue, because people see it enough and then they recognize that they're not surprised by it. They don't get the dopamine anymore or, you know, whatever they're hunting for. And the social space works exactly the same. So that's what also makes it fascinating is because there's always going to be a new trend. And when you discover that you can actually create these trends, which is significantly easier than I think people believe, creating these trends allows you to really have a finger on the dial to control exactly what you want those outcomes to be. Okay. So I just want to make sure we're real clear on like what exactly the platform does, because it's a little different. So it's a platform where a brand goes on, lets people record, they put a cap cpm and then the army of creators go out and record the video. That's correct. And just to expand on that a little bit more, we are like a two sided marketplace, right. Where we actually have a SaaS platform. We have a SaaS platform for the brands where you manage and track all of your creators and spend. And we have what we call sort of playbooks is how we position all the content up that you're talking about. If you can describe how to pitch your app, you can make a playbook right of step one, name it. Step two, describe the thing that's the problem. Step three, describe how it solves your problem. And then that gets sent to the creators in our consumer app. And there's 950,000 of them now. 950,000 creators growing every day. Are people that sign up already creators all the time or some people just like, maybe I'll give this a go. Yeah, no, both actually. So some of our best creators, and we can get into this too, I like to say the social graph is completely dead, right? Where your follower count used to matter so much and then TikTok came around, right? But now with TikTok, it's irrelevant. Interest graph is the king. And so not only is it the king, but I don't know, could it be supplanted by something else in the future? Possibly. But there's a reason why people are quite literally addicted to scrolling is because it's the best format for just constantly being fed media. So much so that Instagram copied it, LinkedIn copied it, YouTube copied it, Twitter is copying it as well. Like, everyone is just going interest graph. And so when you do interest graph, you don't need followers, which means these creators who are just interested in being creators and might not have any experience with it can come on our platform. We'll teach you exactly what needs to be done. That's upskilling inside of the app. And then boom, there you go. Like, we have so many cases of people who come to us and say, oh, I've never had a post go over a thousand views and then they hit 2 million views in a viral post us a month later. So this is what I wanted to get into earlier. Like, how much are you leaning on the creator to do their own thing and bring something to the table to be able to go viral versus, like the psychology that you've somehow tapped into with this growth hacking where you literally like tee them up to do it? What's the balance? It really depends on what it is, right? It depends on both the brand, it depends on the creator's knowledge, it depends on a bunch of factors, but I like to think of it as kind of like 50, 50. The benefit of having real people do this is obviously paying real people is good, right? We have amazing stories of stay at home moms. It's crazy. Stay at home moms are absolutely going nuts and they're killing it. Where I can list off like five people that I personally know in our community who are going to Disney for their entire family because of the earnings that they have on noise. And that's a powerful demographic, something to feel good about for sure. I won't share some of the more personal ones, but there are some stories that have made us tear up for sure. It's really great to be able to do that, but they're really important because everyone's now going, AI, AI, AI, AI. And the problem with AI is it doesn't have the ability to be human. Right. The driver behind the seat is still really important right now, especially in the social space. And believe me, I have tried. Like, we have examples of AI videos that have done 20 million views, but you still have to have the person sitting behind the wheel dictating how it should go, why it's going to work, why it relates to the audience, like all these kinds of things. And so having a couple thousand creators all post your idea and getting validation really quickly as to whether or not this idea is going to hit, and then getting just the static of everyone's doing their own variations of it, you will naturally have a viral video fall out of it if you have the right ingredients that kind of like mix into that pot. I like to say that there's definitely a formula to like, virality here. And the way that I like to describe it is like, number one, you find an existing piece of content that has already gone viral. We like to say you're not smarter than the Internet, so don't try to be. Find something that has gone viral in your niche that's related to you, that you can sort of pivot, copy that thing that went viral and iterate on it a bunch. And again, that's where real people are really important because they'll have their own concepts of what would work well as a hook or the text that they can change or whatever else on it. Eventually one of those iterations will go viral, and then you just scale that iteration to the moon. Right. Then take everybody say, hey, guys, this works. And you're incentivized to keep posting this as well, because you're getting paid a lot more because this is doing 500,000 views a video instead of 500. So the brand's doing that. The person who's running the ad is basically using this army of creators to try out something and then when it works to re pivot them. It's not like, go figure it out on your own and get back to me. Exactly. Interesting. And you guys are kind of your own best success story. Right. Because I got to imagine you're almost million creators are coming in from your own tactics. Yeah. So we only grow using our own platform. So we don't spend on Programmatic anywhere. We only spend on our own app. And you're ranking pretty well. Yeah, I think our Highest was number five, which it's pretty wild being right next to DoorDash driver and above. Like, we were right by Kindle's downloads. We were above FedEx and Zoom, which channels this category business. So you're at five. What do you sit at? Normally? We're in the 30s. You're in the 30s of business and you're driving your own growth and you guys raise money. We did raise money, yes. But we haven't used really any of that to grow. It's just all in the platform. So you're getting a positive spend on your ad spend that you're using your own platform for. So you are your biggest growth. Our Flywheel's pretty cool, for sure. But I will also say that we have many brands on the platform who have experienced, you'd have to see the numbers to believe them, kind of scenarios. I won't drop a name here, but we had an app who came to us and this is his first time building an app. It was very much a vibe coded copy of a very popular format that exists out there. And he came to noise and we saw zero installs. In his installs. He turned noise on just doing slideshows with us. He wasn't even doing creators recording themselves yet. And we literally watched his views on noise chart exactly with him then getting a thousand downloads a day. And that a thousand downloads a day in his category was costing him about like 98 cents per download. And it's a really competitive category. So under a dollar install. And what is slideshows? You said not creators. Slideshows. Yeah. So we have two different formats. Right. So if you're on TikTok, you have the ones that you swipe, like the slideshows, right, where they're just images. And then we have the other side where it's creators recording themselves, which is people are calling that like ugc talking heads or whatever you want to call it. And they're only running slideshows. Slideshows are extremely effective, especially if you get a massive blast of them. You do not need to go viral in order for those to convert either. You just compound the effect of those being out there. So you mentioned that sometimes it's perhaps like the founder of an app that comes directly to you. But who are you working with at most brands? Who's driving this strategy within them? So we try not to work with folks. We definitely want to be very much like how the performance marketing platforms work, where you know what your outcomes are. I know Adam mentioned like, I want to set $CPMs, like, yep, go ahead and set those $CPMs. If that's like the metric you guys know that you need in order to spend profitably. And what we want are People who understand I need to put this amount of money in the machine to get this amount of installs out and then monetize them through my strategy to be positive. Right. Or even if I'm just looking to grow or if I want to burn, have it be like not as cost effective. And so the best people that we work with are the ones who are not afraid to spend like five to $10,000 a month to like try it out. Which when you're looking at average ad budgets, it's like nothing. It's nothing. And so if we have founders who come to us and they want to spend a hundred dollars, see how it works. I always advise to them, like, hey guys, you're better off taking our free resources and recording yourself because you're going to see a much more instant ROI on that. $100 is like getting started. You need at least a couple weeks to feel it out. Same concepts as advertising, surely where it needs to learn, like it needs to iterate, it's exactly the same. What does your client profile look like? You were talking a lot about apps, including yourselves, but is that primarily who your target audience is? Is people growing their app presence? Yeah, predominantly apps. Interestingly, we've worked with Game studios, which that also was very effective too. And I mean, I could pull up like 50 examples of people in different industries doing this, like the D2C space, especially on Instagram. There are some folks in dropshipping specifically who are really ahead of the game. And this might be a little controversial, but I think that if you look at people in this space who are not doing apps specifically, who are really good at growth marketing and growth hacking, OnlyFans models and dropshipping guys are just absolutely way ahead of the game there. And you will find so many really fascinating examples of people doing this in like those spaces very cost effectively. And so if you're a CPG brand or a D2C brand or an app, or you're selling a service or whatever else, like if you're not making short form content, you are losing out on an insane ROI of like just impressions to whatever your action is. So how do you bridge the gap? If like, let's say my model is ltv, I have to get an LTV or the user or purchase downstream, how do I bridge that back to paying a CPM to my creator audience? Yeah, so usually what we're shooting for in like the effective range of my CPM to an action, when we're hitting sort of just in a normal spot, that feels good. It's like 1000 views is usually about a download. We have instances where if you have really good product or if you have really interesting novelty, or your timing is right, or your messaging is good, then that can turn into more like 4, 5, 6, 7 downloads, a thousand views. And it all depends on where you are in like that viral curve. If you're going viral and you're in that like 200,000 to 1 million view range, I mean, I'm sure you guys have seen pictures of the charts, but being on the flip side of that chart like multiple times ourselves now, just wild to just watch your installs just shoot up like a pole vaulter and then your new water level to be established. And that's when you're seeing like 10 downloads per thousand views or even higher than that, do you see a correlation or reverse correlation of virality and performance downstream? So I got to imagine that you have different LTVs for different users. You have some power creators, you have some people install it and never even record a video. Do you see the performance going down when you go viral? No. So I'll answer your question kind of two ways here. Number one is people will always ask me, hey, are the users that are downloading my app through this channel worse users for me? Right? And everyone's just used to, I'll put money in the Facebook machine and they're gonna send me to the exact person who's gonna download my app, right? And they do an amazing job of that. But on the flip side, TikTok and Instagram Reels and Shorts on YouTube do just as good of a job of sending you the exact content that you're going to watch, the same way that an ad network does, right? So all these are built for, oh, I love videos about people baking cookies, right? You're going to see all the perfect cookie content. So the actual person that's watching this content, whether it's viral or not, is going to be, based on the algorithm's intent, the perfect person to watch it. And so what we end up seeing is if you leave TikTok, the most addictive social media platform in the world, if you leave TikTok to go download something, the signal that you're going to be a good user is so much higher than you. Like leaving an infinite scroll feed with an ad on Instagram. Two things I want to highlight because, number one, are you saying that TikTok and Facebook are ad platforms, so you're to either pay them to be a good ad platform or you can use them being a good ad platform by just having good content. So you're basically cheating them out of their ad dollars in a good way. You're cheating them to put the content in place. That's amazing. That's the first part. The second part is then by them coming over, they're going to be inherently good users because that you've broken them out of their spell, which is really. That's a really good point. What's interesting is I firmly believe that everything in short form is already an ad, Right? So whether you're paying for it or whether it's showing up, I mean, I just read an article about Target doing an influencer campaign on some, like, legacy thing where they choose their influencers and pay them, you know, $5,000 a post and, you know, whatever. If Target wants to do that, that's fine. I think the Target is throwing their money away personally. But if that's what Target wants to do, that's okay. And this, hire a creator to promote my thing has been around forever, right? Especially during COVID This was massive. Everyone has been hijacking the feeds because they're so good at showing you exactly what you're going to engage with. Where it gets really powerful is TikTok is super smart about this. Now Instagram is copying them. You can spark code the things that are successful. Right. So what's really interesting is if I find something that, that has organic signals that it's doing well. If you put ad spend behind that. Bonkers, Right? And so you call that spark code. That's what TikTok calls it, is sparking it. Yeah. So TikTok says, okay, we can take your content natively inside of TikTok and just put ad spend behind it and then show it to other users as though it's organic and just has the call to action button at the bottom. And so if you find things that natively or like organically go viral, download that video, put it inside a meta, download that video, put it inside a TikTok, download that video, put it inside a snap. Like, and people are people everywhere and the intent is the same. As long as it's being seen by the right audience, you're still going to have really good conversions. I work with enough brands to know what their number one complaint is going to be, because everything you're saying sounds amazing. But I know the brands are going to say, I need control. I need to be able to maintain my brand image. I need to be able to make sure this doesn't go viral in a bad way. How do you answer that. Conflict potential? Yeah. No. Super. Good question. I'll say one, I think brands need to be a little bit more uncomfortable. Risk it to get the biscuit, if you will, for sure. So I understand that brand image sensibility. As a Chief Product officer, like, I get it. Right. We also have a community where we talk to 30,000 of our most engaged users every single day. Right. And brand image is really important to us as well. But what's interesting is your brand image is already out there, and I would say it's loosely defined by you already. Anyway, if you're running marketing campaigns to put your ads on subways or run commercials or do interstitial ads or whatever it is, that is your version of your brand identity. Your brand identity is actually what happens when you go into TikTok and search the name of your app. That's your brand identity. And so what's more powerful, in my opinion, and I challenge you guys to do this, go search noise app on TikTok right now, and we will be all over your search. And they're all videos that come out of our platform because we just drown out any opportunity to be off message by making sure the message comes through us onto those platforms instead. So to translate what you just said to a much larger brand, Starbucks, you're saying that, yeah, you can curate the Starbucks ad, but the person's still walking in the subway or down the street with a Starbucks cup. And that's just as much of brand image as anything else and what they're wearing and how they're wearing it and everything else. I mean, in some countries, carrying around a Starbucks cup is style, and that's something that the brand may not be able to control. So that's basically social media. Yeah. And I mean, I can find a million TikToks of people talking about the Shamrock Shake and whatever else. And I'm sure Starbucks definitely is paying people to promote the new Shamrock Shake, but some people probably just want to talk about it on their own. I got a text about a Shamrock Shake, like, three days ago, a hundred percent. And in my opinion, like, what's more powerful from a brand's perspective of people are going to talk about it. Right. And I'll touch on this if you guys want to. You can create your own virality if you just put enough content out there about what you want to talk about. And so in Starbucks's case, I was a barista for five years. That was my high school and college job. There was a secret menu on Starbucks that we as baristas knew about. And I can to this day still make you a Frappuccino that tastes exactly like Captain Crunch. Oops. All berries, right? That is not on the menu. But as soon as people on TikTok found out there's a secret menu at Starbucks, it became a gigantic trend. So just like Suno has done recently with their viral campaign of turn your texts into songs, I don't know if you guys have seen those at all. They're everywhere right now. Yes, it's taking over. So Suno. I don't have confirmation this happened, but I am 90% sure that Suno actually created that viral campaign on their own. And so on the flip side, if I was Starbucks, I would love to create a viral campaign around the secret menu at Starbucks instead of that just happening organically because then I can control the brand image. It does give you more of the control back that we were concerned about in the first place. So it's basically like just tapping into what's already happening and steering it a little bit better. And then the other piece that I'm really curious to get into with you because you mentioned that you are a SaaS platform giving intel about how all this is going is the other thing that the brand probably cares about is like, how do I prove this is working? Like, what's the measurement on all of this? So can you talk to me a little bit about what you show what they have access to, about how all this is going for them and how they integrate that with their other performance based campaigns to drive their marketing strategy overall? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, great question. I like to think of it as a I won't claim. This is my quote, this is Diego's quote. He's our CEO and co founder and he always says that you should go to sleep every night knowing that a million people heard about you today. And so if I am making noise about my brand on shortform or if I'm doing programmatic marketing or whatever else, anybody who's listening that understands the space well knows that it's just about bulk impressions everywhere. Right? Talking about me somewhere will always lead to someone talking about me elsewhere. And so in our case, what we show on our dashboard is pretty straightforward. It's just what are your cumulative views? Where are the views coming from based on the playbooks that you're defining? Right. So here are my general ad ideas. If you're familiar with Meta, we set them up very similar campaigns and then Playbooks and then posts, right? And they're all nested that way. So I can run splits of my campaigns if I want to do different costs and I want to target different audiences and that kind of thing. So we do all that normal stuff. But the dashboards really just show you how many views am I getting per day, how much am I spending, and what are my engagements? Because the flip side is inside of whatever you're measuring, my installs, my purchases, especially when you go viral, it is so clearly obvious because you just see a giant tent pole. Yeah. How are you measuring views? So we actually calculate all the views that the creators post on the platform. So you go to each creator and you find out how many views they have of their video. Yep, that's correct. Every single video, every single creator. And then we just aggregate all that. So it's really simple for you, actually just to view it in aggregate. But you can go look at individual creator success as well if you want to. And can you see their individual content? Yep, you can. So you can drill all the way down. And can you say, I want to work with this creator only now, like, can you shift it? And what control levels do you have at the platform? Again, we do things a little differently. Right. And I like to think we do it the right way. There are folks who will say, I'm sure you guys are familiar, like, I'm going to go pay my creator $1000 to go make a about me one time. Right. We were definitely in that boat in 2022. We worked with YouTubers for our last consumer apps for games, and we just told them, like, hey, we're just not going to do that. We know You're a Roblox YouTuber. You don't have any other options to monetize. We're it. We're going to offer you this deal. Right? Because we know if we pay you $1,000 to make a post about us, we're probably not seeing a positive ROI on that actual post. But the cumulative of those, we will see roi because those will be in the algorithm forever. They'll continue to be getting recommended to users who like this stuff. It matched our audience really well. And so we told them we're just going to do it based on cpm. It's just going to be purely in performance. And so if you want to, you can totally say in our app right now, in our platform, I'll pay you guys $500 to make a post. Like, that's totally fine. If you want to do that. I would actually recommend instead, just pay the cpm, because performance works on both sides and it makes sure that everyone's aligned. And we like CPM specifically because if I am a creator and someone pays me $10,000 to promote a makeup brand, the likelihood of that being a positive return on investment for the actual makeup brand is almost zero in most cases. Right. So as a creator, do I want to go out and schlep myself around town to get one $10,000 deal that will never return again because it didn't work out for the makeup brand, or should I then be aligned with the makeup brand's goals of, hey, this is clearly working. It's getting good viewership, it's converting well, we are both rewarded in this case, I'm going to increase my rates or increase my budgets or continue working with you or expand who I'm working with. And when the creator makes $3,000 for a viral post that the brand loved because it converted for them, they're going to continue to get work through that brand rather than just that one $10,000 deal and then having to go find another one. And so we want to make sure that they're both aligned in that way. So when they come to the platform, you're actually just saying, I'm available for creators to come post about me. You're not necessarily picking individual creators. You say, hey, here's my cpm. Here's what my brand is about. Here's what I want to talk about. And creators go, yeah, I'll talk about that all day long. Okay, awesome. So I'm a marketer. I have a budget, but I also kind of work a little bit with organic. I'm trying to figure out. I kind of want to work with some influencers. I know that I should be advertising on social, but should also be doing some organic social. I'm like, early in my strategy. What's your pitch to them? My pitch would be is if anyone says they're an influencer, they're already too expensive. If the word influencer comes out of your mouth, I already am like, okay, no, this is not going to work. Kudos to the folks that can command those sorts of dollar amounts. I mean, if you're Kim Kardashian or whatever. I was going to say Kylie Jenner. Here's the crazy thing. If I'm Kim Kardashian, right? I had seen this a year ago. I know Coca Cola pays Kim Kardashian $1 million to make sure that Coke is in her fridge or something, right? Like, when she opens the fridge in her shorts, it's there. But I also know that one of the most impactful things that she ever did for a business in terms of marketing was she had bought like some slime for her kids and it was in a thing where you squish it. Why does slime always go viral? Should we do a segment entirely on slime's virality? I have theories, but she posted this non ad thing about slime and her kids loving it and it just absolutely sold out the shop and transformed this person's life. And now they're like this massive sells slime grater. And so what I would challenge is those are more effective than the ones that Coke is paying her to make sure the coke is in the fridge. Like it's a different ballgame. And so I would say if you are new to this game and you have budget, either one, become familiar with how this space works for yourself. The free version is record yourself, right? And that's where we started. Like where we started was recording ourselves and handing Canva slideshows to our most engaged creators of our last consumer app and having them post them. And when one of those slideshows did 300 and drove 20,000 installs for us for $150, we're like, okay, clearly this works way better. And so I would say if you are new to the space, try yourself. See how it works. Understand social in a way that most people don't, because once you get it, you don't unlearn it. It's very much like learning a bicycle. And it is very advantageous for you to understand that because then when you start putting advertising spend behind your social knowledge, that that's when you see massive returns on the time and attention that people are actually giving the content that you're putting out there. So if you have $10,000 to spend on a marketing budget and you want an army of creators to come post about you, I could sit here for another three hours and talk about all the benefits of why that's so useful, especially if you do programmatic. Because one of the best ways to feed your programmatic funnel, you always need new creative. So why not also double dip on all of the content that people are putting out there via all of these humans out there, a hundred percent. So, Nick, you call yourself a platform, but really you're essentially an ad platform, right? You're an advertising platform. Where does this go? Where are you taking this company? Because right now it's a very effective, like you're almost cheating meta out of advertising because you're in a good way, because you're using their Algorithm without having to pay for it. Where do you take this company now? I won't go into the final vision. Right. Because we're still building towards that. But I will posit a question to you. Do you think that more people are likely to drive for doordash or post about a brand on their phone, on social media and get paid for it? Well, robots are going to be doing all the driving. So when you were talking about AI ads not being effective, I was thinking more that there's a whipsaw effect of like, I don't know about you guys. When I see an AI posting that monotone voice, I immediately skip it. So there's going to be a drive towards humanity. And so with a drive towards humanity, an ad platform that, that brings up the humans and not the influencers and not the AI, but actually like connects humans through the algorithm, could be very, very effective. So I'd say that a more realistic longevity driven business would be the posting versus driving. In that example, we're very focused on being the largest gig economy app in North America where you can go drive doordash today, right? I can go drive doordash right now, but it requires me to get in my car, go somewhere else, have my car smell like food, you know, maybe food I don't want to eat, and then it smells like food the next day and I don't know exactly where I'm going because I've never been in this neighborhood before. It's a lot of work, right? Or would you rather sit at home with your kids and post about a brand that you're interested in? Right. Like TikTok shop has unlocked a lot of this concept already. Like, in my opinion, TikTok shop is a progenitor to all of this, where you have people who are obsessed with learning how to on TikTok shop and sell stuff because they've heard stories of, you know, this mom talked about a mop one time and went viral and she made $700,000. Like, that's incredible. Wow. She cleaned up. She for sure cleaned up. And where we want to head is like, you know, driving for doordash is something that's changed a lot of people's lives, have been really positive for them. You're gonna make that even more accessible. Yeah, my phone is so much more accessible than having a car. Right. And so the barrier to entry for us is just more people and more brands and more knowledge on both sides and how the space works and the thing that we keep coming up to and the, you know, you Guys are asking really good questions that I hear all the time because this space is new and it's evolving really rapidly and the results really speak for themselves. And that's kind of like the nice part about it too is I don't have to do a lot of selling because once you feel it and once you've experienced it, why would you do anything else? Correct. Okay, so we're running up on time, but I want to ask you quickly, you've mentioned how important it is to start to understand the space in these platforms. So can you give any advice to mobile brands about what these platforms entail? Like what do they misunderstand about TikTok or short form platforms that you can kind of give them a nugget about right now? Yeah, for sure. So viral is different depending on what your goals are. I'll caveat this by saying, like, if I am selling slime, right, a hundred thousand views could be transformative to my business, especially if it's someone talking directly about my slime. 100,000 views is not what I consider viral. But depending on the size of your business, depending on your audience or whatever, that can be very viral. I consider a million views to be the beginning of viral. Viral is more like 5 to 10 million in my opinion. But it totally depends. So, yeah, it's subjective. It is very subjective on both sides, right? What I would say to folks that are learning how to go viral, right? And I caveat those numbers by saying this. Understand what your goals are first. And the most important thing you can do is understand your audience. Because when you understand your audience, you can then speak to them through these platforms in a way they understand. And what I always coach people in this space is the only thing that's going to drive action from a viral video for you is number one, it has to be relatable. I am not going to engage with content and therefore that content is not going to go viral if it is not relatable. And I challenge you guys, like open your phone, open TikTok or Reels or whatever your choice of short form media is and scroll down. And if you find something with more than 10,000 likes on it and you say that does not seem relatable to me, I would be shocked. Then send it in. It's a case study, correct? Because relatability is just, I see myself in it, right? And everybody's most important person in the world is themselves. And so relatability is number one. And then again, this is for conversions, right? Relatability is number one. And Then number two and three are what we call need and novelty. And so need is straightforward, right? It is cold outside. I need a jacket. Or do I need that mop? Exactly, exactly. My house is dirty. I need to clean, literally need to clean the floors. Correct. And so then the flip side of that is novelty, which is I need a mop, but I want the one where when I push it, it rings out the mop head. And that seems really cool. I've never seen that before. I'm so tired of having to do the old version of mop. Right. And so whether your product has just need focus or novelty focus, or in the best case scenario, both. Right. The self ringing mop is a perfect example of need and novelty. You need to understand what those levers are for you to pull in the social space in order to craft your content strategy around it. And so again, this sounds so complicated, but that's why I always say, like, if I am selling a mop, go on TikTok or go on Instagram and find viral content about people cleaning, about mops and people cleaning and moms complaining about how they don't have time to like wash the floors and whatever else. And then find one that's done a million views and then shift the narrative of that to actually talk about your product instead and blast a bunch of variations of that. One of them will go viral. And then there you go. It's so shockingly simple, really interesting. Need and novelty and relatability. And I think as we keep coming back to just like the fact that it's coming from these creators and it feels more authentic than AI or like the very canned obvious influencer or the very obvious ad where it's like, yep, you literally had someone craft this message in this way to be served to me in this moment. It feels more authentic when it's just like something you scroll upon and it doesn't feel like it was necessarily targeted for you, it's just a part of it, it's just seeping in. I have theories on this, obviously. One, I think that we've been bombarded with attractive people since the 60s in our marketing, right? So the mad men on Madison Avenue figured out that if you put a really beautiful woman in an ad and sell toothpaste, it would sell really well, right? And that continued on until the COVID era, when everyone is just paying these influencers to live this incredible life that doesn't seem achievable. And you have the perfect body and the perfect skin and the perfect smile and whatever else. And Then, oh, they're selling toothpaste as well. It gets your sort of, like, alarm bells up. But when you see a mom who doesn't have her makeup on and her hair is disheveled and she's just brushing her teeth, and she's like, this toothpaste is just my favorite toothpaste. My gums don't bleed anymore. My kid doesn't eat this one or, like, whatever else. Right? And that is so much better of a signal to people because, again, it's relatable, and I see myself in that. And I think that we've been sort of deprogrammed lately to just not trust hot people anymore. Like, this might seem kind of weird, but if you're extremely attractive on the Internet, I immediately think, what are you selling me? And your natural inclination to believe people who look like you is a lot higher. And the algorithms lean on that. Right? There's a reason why your feed looks like people like you, and it also sounds like you and is related to stuff that you like. And we're just reinforcing a lot of those personal beliefs in people and leaning on relatability. I'm not a supermodel guy living in my mansion in Beverly Hills, but I'd listen to some dude who looks like me and say, yeah, no, this toothpaste works great for me. Yeah. Awesome. All right, we are at time. Adam, any. Any last thoughts? Questions? Nick, how do people find you? How do they get in touch with you? Our website is getnoise.com. you can also just hit me up on LinkedIn. N I C W E B E R. I don't think there are a lot of us. I don't have a K in my name, so come chat with me on there. Or you can just send us an email. Heyetnoise.com and happy to have a chat. I usually will talk to founders, talk to creators, and just kind of get a feel for the landscape, what people are struggling with multiple times a week. So don't be afraid to shoot me an email. I'll hop on a call with you. Awesome. This was super interesting. Thank you so much for being here. And get noise, everyone. I'm kind of pumped to check it out myself. Great conversation. No, it's been a pleasure, guys. Nice to meet both of you. And yeah, I'm sure we'll talk again soon. Perfect. Thanks, all. See you next time. Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this and share with someone trying to grow their career. Or their business. Until next time. Keep growing.

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