Almost by accident I've created a tool for solo founders to build an organic TikTok growth channel for their product. Wdyt about my approach?
I started this year from building an iOS app for dancers. And needless to say, I launched to crickets - all downloads only from friends)
Concurrently I watched a lot of video about how great the TikTok UGC marketing is. As I understood, the only thing you need to do is to spend unknown amount of money to find that "viral format" and you are golden 😄
But I'm bootstrapping, so burning money wasn't an option.
Though from TikTok experiments I've noticed that my video posts are dying immediately while few quite terrible carousels still getting some views week after posting.
Reason that I figured out later - they are well-indexed by TikTok search and bring you users weeks and weeks after publishing. So it is a long-tail SEO strategy.
And I decided to double-down on carousels.
Here are the results of my TikTok account after posting 39 days straight:
- around 85 carousels published
- 1090 followers at the time of writing, crossed 1K today and put the link in bio, will see if that will make any difference
- best post got 300k views
- 789k views on account in last 28 days
- this drives roughly 30-50 downloads of my mobile app per day. I mention it subtly from time to time in carousels.
CarouselPoster started as my internal tool to facilitate making 3 posts a day. Now I'm making it a public SAAS
My method is SEO-shaped, not viral-shaped.
- you build a one-time Knowledge Base about your niche (keywords you want to rank for, research from Reddit and forums, style notes, product positioning).
- The AI generates carousel drafts from that Knowledge Base - not from a single prompt like generic tools.
- You refine drafts in a visual editor, swap or AI-generate images, decide where your product gets a mention, and publish straight to TikTok.
I'd be glad to hear from you what do you think about such product and about using carousels for TikTok long-tail traffic. Would you use it?