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TL;DR
Nick & Ivan grow apps not by making content but by posting comments at massive scale — 300,000 Instagram comments → 7,000 link clicks from one campaign (~4x projected return), run by two people and an army of automated phones. They apply the science of cold email to organic comments. Core distribution-automation material.
Key lessons
- Comments as a distribution channel — branded “intern”/founder accounts comment on trending, viral-potential videos in-niche (AI filters the feed and comment sections). Be early so your comment rides to the top.
- Transparency beats covert — the best-performing angle is openly “my friends and I built this app” / “I founded this”; authenticity converts (an anti-pattern to covert hidden ads). Soft CTAs + story hooks; people reply asking the app name, or visit the profile (link/mention in bio).
- Cold-email mechanics applied to comments — warm up accounts with harmless no-CTA comments (like inbox warm-up), spread volume across accounts, iterate angles constantly (one angle died in 2 weeks when IG started detecting it).
- The technical moat = phone farms — custom Android that loads/unloads ROM so each account ≈ its own unique phone; ~12–24 IG accounts/phone/day, ~60 comments/account; human-like input to dodge detection. 60 phones now → scaling to 1,000 = ~21M comments/month.
- The organic value chain: strategy/creative research → content creation (AI) → posting/warm-up at scale (the real bottleneck). They sell the posting layer; building it into a self-serve platform.
- UGC organic helps the platforms (fills the creator/consumer content gap, especially in underserved niches) — so it’s a win-win, not adversarial.
- 15% profile→link CTR is a good benchmark (3–60% range).
Related
- distribution-automation — the canonical concept page
- creator-content-engine · app-market-research · superwall-podcast