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25 Million Push-Ups, 10M Squats, 1M+ Users (Android and iOS) and 1,000,000$ with our app Pushscroll the first dedicated app that made you do Push-ups before doomscrolling.

In this article I'm going to tell you how to find the next Pushscroll, an app that is so easy to market it will make your life as an app founder 10x easier.

Now let's get to the meat and potatoes:

WHAT IS A VIRAL APP IDEA?

What are the principles of a viral app idea?

First of all, your app idea should solve a fundamental human need, think of Maslow's pyramid of needs:

You won’t care about being more confident, if you don’t have food on the table.

Often it’s very hard to fulfill a need in the physiological space, since most people in first world countries already have water, clothing, sleep etc. So most profitable apps usually fall into safety and security.

For example for Health (Cal AI, Pushscroll, Lifereset)

Then also make sure your idea is in a growing market, aswell as a big market. To see if a market is growing you can check google trends, or just have a feeling for what’s being discussed on TikTok right now.

A good example would be doomscrolling, since it affects Millions of teenagers, and it’s unfortunately a growing problem.

As you can see it’s slowly growing up with no sign of it being a temporary trend.

It also has a lot of search volume in high paying countries such as Germany and USA

Since the market is so big, and the demand so fundamental, your app does not necessarily have to solve the FULL problem, it can also solve a part of it, or solve it for a niche. For example our app targets people who also want to be more fit.

Having a specific solution to this huge niche which is doomscrolling is better than to have the full solution to a smaller niche. That being said, hyper specific niches for underrepresented niches are also a strategy, but usually they don’t exit at huge valuations (example: Pokémon card valuation).

They have high perceived value

The perceived value you can create with your app directly correlates to how much you can charge for it.

perceived value can be roughly estimated like this:

it’s the dream outcome you can provide with your app (e.g. stop doomscrolling) multiplied by how likely it actually is that your app can achieve that dream outcome divided by how long it takes to get the dream outcome multiplied by the effort and sacrifice you need to put in on top.

So you want to maximize the top part, while minimizing the bottom part.

Your app concept is extremely simple and straightforward to explain

People underestimate how brain rotted people on TikTok and IG are, you have to assume maximum brain rot. People scroll on social media at their highest dopamine peak of the day, and if something is even slightly confusing, even just for one second, the brain needs to do extra work and it will scroll, therefore your app idea has to be EXTREMELY easy to understand ideally with visuals which we’ll get into later:

You need to be able to explain your app in 3 words:

e.g. UMAX: Face Analysis

CalAI: Ai Calorie Counter

Pushscroll: Pushups before Doomscrolling.

This is not only important for viral videos but it also determines how likely someone is to share this with their friends.

Your app needs to be visual

Umax for example makes you take a picture of your face, and then you can immediately see your stats and potential, and how to improve it. You instantly see the value.

Same for Cal AI, you snap a picture of your food, and instantly get the macro breakdown, the value is immediately obvious without ANY explanation.

The groupchat test (”did you hear about”)

Your app needs to be sharable in the friends groupchat, you can achieve this in many ways, e.g. having a funny concept (pet rock), being something that people want to share with their friends to help them succeed in life. Shares especially on IG are a big part of Instagram's algorithm, and that will boost engagement and therefore views like crazy.

In practice it will be something like this: “Did you hear about X”.

e.g. “Did you hear about that app that let’s you track calories with just a picture?”

Your app needs to have moments which are worth sharing, showing immediate value from just 2-3 pictures.

Your app idea should spark emotion, e.g. surprise, anger, anything but neutral emotions.

What Methods can you use to find viral app ideas?

Warm up a new TikTok account in your niche.

Warming up consists of scrolling on your FYP on TikTok, and watching in full length content that is in your niche. press on “interested” to boost this process.

Once you have a curated niche feed try to get into the shoes of the person in that niche, bonus points if you’re already in that niche.

The problem with your current feed is that social media is an echo chamber, so everything you consume is a reflection of your own inner desires. However if you want new ideas you have to explore new perspectives.

Social media has 2 Billion users, and there are a ton of subniches in there with millions of users in them.

Copypaste and modify what already works

Apps that take a proven viral idea, for example quittr, can easily adapt it into other similarly big niches. For example quittr for smoking, quittr for vaping, quittr for sugar addiction. Simply copy what already works and adapt it into a new unexplored niche. Or you can pick an idea and significantly improve it, copying usually makes it hard to exceed the competitor because the competitor will have first mover advantage.

Always look on Sensortower to see if they actually make good revenue, some apps get a ton of downloads but their revenue sucks, don’t be that app.

If no app in that subniche has reached any significant revenue, stay away from it, e.g. social weight lifting apps.

Consume content from completely different niches and inspiration might strike

When you consume content in completely foreign niches your brain creates complex connections and you might get a very creative idea. My idea for Pushscroll came through my struggle with doomscrolling, but also my big interest in Fitness.

Big creative ideas come when your brain is in “play mode”, pursue your childhood interest, take a week off to learn photography, you’d be surprised how many ideas pop into your mind by just trying out things outside of your comfort zone.

How can I make my app visually appealing?

Minimize the complexity of your app

Think of the feature that will give 80% of the value to your app. Try to design this feature in the most minimal version possible. Imagine you had the world best designer but you’d have to pay him 1M per hour to design, what would you make him design?

e.g. Cal Ai has one button to scan food

our app shows how many minutes you have and the exercise selection.

A literal 5 year old should be able to use your app. Your core feature should be usable with just 2 taps. for tinder it’s swipe right or left, for tiktok it’s swipe up

Do not reinvent the wheel

This is a law of UX, humans are naturally trying to minimize the energy needed to do a certain action, and if you invent a completely new UX mechanism, the brain has to do extra work which will increase the complexity of your app. Don’t reinvent the wheel copy what already works, because humans are used to it.

Study content that goes viral and build features around that.

For example on TikTok many people use the Pushups filter game to go viral in the fitness niche, so we replicated the same UI for our app.

Validating that your idea is ACTUALLY viral using TikTok content:

It’s important to note, that this ONLY applies to B2C apps, if you have a B2B app, you shouldn’t even be on TikTok. We noticed that content can work on one platform, but not work on another. So if you’re in B2C I would recommend targeting TikTok first, but cross posting on Youtube shorts and Instagram. If any of them get views you know the idea might still work on the other apps but you need to change the format and hooks accordingly.

If you build a B2B app, shortform might not be the very best for your specific need, I’ve heard that X is a good place to verify ideas aswell as potentially Linkedin, however with those platforms their algorithm makes it hard to go viral without a proper audience, so if you don’t have an audience it might be worth it to curate one first, like Pat is doing.

To validate any content, you must first make sure that you have a good TikTok video, otherwise you won’t know whether your app idea sucks or your TikTok video or delivery sucked.

And to prevent having a bad TikTok video focus primarily on the hook, the rest of the video is important but not necessarily for getting views.

Hook skip rate, meaning the percentage of people who skip within 3 seconds of your video, is a direct correlation to views.

And what makes a good hook?

Bonus points if you can support your hook with clear visually interesting elements. Maybe in my hook I could have been doing Pushups.

Also it’s always good to use specific timeframes or numbers in your hook, that will paint a clearer visual in the viewers mind and make it easier to understand.

Use the word “YOU” people only care about themselves, so try to use the word “I” as little as possible.

Here is an example for a good hook that has worked for my video:

What if you could stop your doomscrolling addiction, by doing 20 pushups?

The specific methods to create a powerful hook are:

Formats are closely related to the hook you use. A format is basically the type of video you’ll produce. Some examples include “pov videos” where you use the app from your own POV, talking head, where you explain the app on a green screen with the app in the background. challenge video, somethign that mr beast does alot. The list goes on.

Basically to find a format that might work for your app, look at your competitor apps in the same niche, and adapt it to your own app.

For my app I use alot of screen recording and pov style content, but your app might benefit more from street interviews, or maybe lifestyle content (Cal AI has a lot of success with that.)

How do you show your app in a video when it’s not even built yet?

This part is very simple, you have to understand that people don’t care how their problem is being solved, but just THAT it’s being solved, so if you can again show them perceived value with the value equation we talked about before, then you don’t even need to have an actual app yet to verify that there might be potential for perceived value.

You can find visual elements on Youtube for example. For our app we used an AI pushups tracker which is not far off from our actual app. However do not mislead people by saying you already built the app, your public reputation is still very important.

How do you choose a niche?

It’s EXTREMELY important that the idea / app you work on is something that you can do for the next 1 years at least, with NO money being made, because Startups are extremely hard to do, and you have to mentally prepare yourself for it being extremely difficult. Your excitement will wear off after 2 months, so pick something your passionate about and something that brings you meaning. I’ve had days where i literally wanted to give up on this idea, but i continued because the idea could help a lot of people stop scrolling, and people especially in our community told us how helpful it is for them.

So personally I would recommend working on something meaningful and something that genuinely feels like play to you.

Besides that, the niche needs to be big if you want a big exit. and it needs to be a growing niche. e.g. Newspaper niche would be big, but it’s declining.

What tools do you use to research ideas?

What tools do you use to research content?

How do you write the script for a piece of content?

Technicalities in filming and posting it

💡IDEA VALIDATION TOOL