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The Growth Newsletter #154

Incentivize UGC. Hack through the Cold Start. 10M-view YouTube Shorts.

I hope you're all enjoying the Fresh Start Effect—where we're more motivated to start a new habit at the beginning of a new time period (week, month, year, decade, or birthday). 

A new year is the strongest example since it's so hyped up.

So ride the high and get things done. You might as well.

Today's topics: Incentivize UGC. Hack through the Cold Start. 10M-view YouTube Shorts.

Let's dive in 👼

– Neal

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1. Incentivize user-generated content (UGC)

Insight from Barkbox and Article.

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.

2. Hack away the Cold Start problem

Insight from Neal O'Grady 🍉.

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. 

• Consider fake followers. It is against TOS to buy followers, and I don't recommend it beyond your first 1,000... but do whatever you can to not look like a ghost town.
• 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.

3. The structure of a 10M-view YouTube Short

Insight derived from Jenny Hoyos' interview on the Creator Science podcast.

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:

1. Hook: Grab attention immediately with a shocking or interesting concept. Combo of:
   1. The first frame. Make it stand out. Tease what's coming. Add text. 
   2. The opening line and ~2-3 seconds. Get to the point fast.
   3. Again, study our Hook Vault.
2. Foreshadow: Tell a story, give context, and set expectations for what's to come. Get them invested in closing the loop and let them know to expect.
3. Transition: Transition from opener to meat of the content without losing momentum. For example, instead of saying "let's get started," Jenny says "So I cooked ILLEGALLY" which intrigues people and segues to her cooking.
4. Body: Deliver on the expectations set in the foreshadow. If telling a story, use a "BUT-SO" framework to keep viewers invested (and the "but"s keep people intrigued):
   1. I went for a walk
   2. BUT it started to rain
   3. SO I sprinted as fast as I could
   4. BUT my shoe fell off
   5. SO...
5. Closing line: Wrap it all up neatly. End with a bit of humor. Cut abruptly because a high retention percentage is a positive algorithm signal.

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:

1. Hook: "My mom has never had a Mother's Day gift"
   1. Shows her mom getting it without showing what it is—teasing the ending.
2. Foreshadow: "So I'm going to change that and buy her the best present for $5"
3. Transition: "So I went to the dollar store"
4. Body:
   1. Jenny shows the gifts she's buying, why, and then assembles the gift
   2. She weaves in the story of WHY her mom never got mother's day gifts in the past—being too poor to afford them previously
5. Closing:
   1. She shows her mom opening the gift
   2. Her mom accidentally drops and breaks the gift (a twist to the story)
   3. Ends abruptly after her mom says: "You're my favorite daughter" and Jenny says "but I'm you're only one"

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!

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News and links

News you can use:

• TikTok is planning to grow its ecommerce business tenfold across the US and Latin America.

• GroupM is teaming up with YouTube, Disney, & NBCU for streaming ads.

• Google Chrome introduced a feature called Tracking Protection, which restricts third-party cookies by default.

• Facebook has started archiving all users' link history, and is using the data for targeted ads.

• OpenAI is opening the GPT Store shortly to let people buy/sell GPTs.

Tool we recommend*: Talk by Ortto

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• Increase productivity with auto-generated response suggestions
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Helping you delight your customers a lot faster and easier. 

Sign up for free today and get started using Talk.

*Sponsored by Ortto

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Something fun

From Tim Urban:

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— Neal and Justin

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer