Good Morning. This is the Method. Every week we share how we’re winning the business game.

This weeks focus is riding winners:

• Leveraging a TikTok feature to multiply content views🔧 

• The foundation of Noah Kagans success🏋️

The TikTok Feature We’re Using To Leverage Viral Content

On our road to a million dollars in revenue at Rugby Bricks, we've created and published thousands of pieces of content.

Journalists may call us an e-commerce company, but we're content creators at our core.

We've succeeded because we - Peter Breen, have created content that is valuable enough for people to want to engage with us on a deeper level, like buying our kicking tees.

But creating good content is one thing; getting people to see it is another. To maximise our contents reach, we are continually experimenting with ways to play the algorithm games of social platforms.

One such experiment we've been running is on TikTok.

They have this unique feature that allows you to reply to comments (on your content) with a video response. And when you do - TikTok will show your reply-to-comment video to everyone who watched the original.

So if, say, your original (the one someone commented on) video got 100,000 views, there's a good chance your reply-to-comment video will get 80,000 or so.

And the cycle repeats - you can then create a reply-to-comment video for a comment on the 80,000-view video and get another 60,000 views.

Here's an example.

This video (of Pete's goal kicking from 100m - worth a watch, BTW) got 170,000 views. Someone said the video was cropped - implying we used editing tricks to make it look like Pete kicked that goal.

Pete replied to that comment with this reply-to-comment video which got 120,000+ views, and for 5 minutes of work, we saw our online store sales double for that day.

Notes

Social media is as much guesswork as it is about consistency. Very few people go viral without creating hundreds of pieces of content. Go to our Tik Tok, and you’ll see most videos get 10 - 20,000 views, but every now and then, one pops off with 100,000+.

What we’re doing here is taking maximum advantage of the ones that do hit with these reply videos.

Some creators, like tabs chocolate, are doing this and turning 1x viral videos with a 1,000,000 views into a funnel of reply video’s that get another 5 - 10,000,000 views.

What Noah Kagan Attributes To App Sumo’s Success

Not doubling down on winners is a classic entrepreneur's mistake.

For reasons unbeknown to us, many of us like to hit home runs, then never do them again.

Noah Kagan, the founder of $100 mil+ email marketing start-up AppSumo, has built his business doing the opposite - he doubles down on what works.

While building their email list in App Sumo's early days, they tried doing a giveaway to get more signups. In this context, a giveaway is a competition where people hand over their email addresses to submit an entry.

App Sumo is a daily deals email for software, so they setup a competition with a couple of free software subscriptions as prizes, and promoted it as best they could.

It worked surprisingly well. They doubled their email list with their first giveaway.

They thought, wow, that was cool, it worked. But then they just sorta carried on as you do in business, and the giveaway's success started to fade from view.

That was until Noah had one of those wait-a-minute moments - What about that giveaway thing - why don't we do more of them.

And so they did - In 10 months, Appsumo grew their email list from ~2,000 to ~150,000 subscribers by just doing giveaways.

We actually did a giveaway for this newsletter once after hearing Noah's story, and the same thing happened to us - we doubled our readership with our first giveaway. But guess what? That was over a year ago, and we haven't done one since….

So while we sit here, letting you in on this mistake - we still repeat it ourselves. For something so obvious and simple to understand, It's in our experience remarkably hard to avoid.

Anyway, the moral of the story is when something works, do it again and again until it doesn't work anymore.

Notes:

If Noah and co at AppSumo didn't keep running those comps, they wouldn't be where they are today; perhaps they wouldn't exist anymore at all.

Building a business is hard - you lose way more than you win - so it's super important that when you find those winners, you milk them for every drop.

Doing this will significantly improve the trajectory of the thing you're building.