Xander Wanagel

Last week i learned quite possibly the hardest lesson of my life. I’ve been coding since i was in 4th grade (literally the majority of my life now), and get obsessed with the tiny technical details of hard problems. This led me to spend 4 months building Clippr, a new type of video editing app that has a mostly transcript-based workflow. And, as anyone who’s built a startup in this space would know, video editing software has some of the most gnarly technical issues to solve. Over time I roped in two of my engineer friends and we built an end-to-end video editing software with a timeline, waveform previews, semantically-splitting auto captions, gap detection, preview + export logic, async loading previews, saved project files, and quick exports. And by the end of all this, i had a beautiful piece of software BUT… Only 300 users. Most of which churned. Fuck. I realized i was building in search of a problem. None of my thousands of views of ugc really struck a chord and converted well, people in real life didn’t understand it, and even when I manually went to recruit the perfect users only like half of them would actually give it a try (even for FREE). Clearly the pain point wasn’t strong enough. My takeaway is this: competition is good. Build in a space where the core idea has been validated, and you have marketing angles to copy from. Everyone’s always looking to build a grand vision of something that has never existed before. A Steve Jobs tier insight that fundamentally shifts the way people approach the world. But why not at least start with something that makes sense already. Your neighbor’s kid used to just pick up the lawnmower and start knocking doors, and he made a decent amount that summer. I live in nyc now, and there are at least 4 pizza places right on my block. Some niches just always exist. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Stand on the shoulders of giants instead. Pivot time babyyyyy

I booked a call with Nicole after reading her thesis paper and it 1.5x'ed my business in 14 days. She told me which formats to double down on, which creators to cut, suggested more angles to try, etc etc. The call paid for itself and I would recommend it to anyone who's hitting a roadblock in their ugc. Obviously you have to be careful of the grifters but if you aren't willing to invest in your own learning you're unbelievably ngmi.

@kyanbuilds holy tuff

$10,000+ revenue on my app 23 days after launch LFG 💪🏼💪🏼 90%+ profit margin 😉 (after Apple 15%)

@singleclap1 thanks goat

@XanderWanagel Banger

today i crossed 10k downloads 😋 for the first half i was doing a lot of talking-head UGC and the second half was testing more faceless. faceless is so much worse for intent and reach that i honestly would not recommend it starting off. back to talking-head UGC.

@michaelque22 i have never seen someone so adamantly refuse to lose and i respect the fuck out of that, keep winning bro

It's been a tough March and April losing Meta as a channel entirely after profile got randomly banned. We finally got it back to what it was without relying on Meta and replaced it with 3 other growth channels. Fuck meta but they can't keep us down.

@Lemoinedefatima W sauce

I'm crying, guys! 😭 ​I just did a deep dive into all my app data—installs, views, and CTAs. AND I just realized I lost a ton of money bc I wasn't checking these daily correlations. ​I did ONE thing 2 months ago that massively spiked my app installs compared to my views, and I ignored it all this time. I've had multiple viral videos since then and didn't use that one hack... ​Please guys, when you go viral, I beg you to make a video answering a comment and showing the app. This video won't get many views, but it will spike your view-to-download ratio like never before! 😭

@michaelque22 wtf 😭😭

This is the first review people see on my app. Apparently we track ppls location and send a “full black van to peoples house”. Tried getting Apple to remove this to no avail.

@zach_yadegari @GeorgeLampro20 cinema

And just like that Cal AI is back like it never left

@michaelque22 @garrytan put it in the linkedin fr

“Just got accepted into YC!”😋

@Jahjiren both

Alright, let’s end finally end the debate

@nicholasnlawton neev popping off

SHIPPING SPEED IS INSANE RN

@michaelque22 holy shit

I take this statement back.

@algozeus_ @cesaralvarezll ive been suspecting the same issue, how did you confirm it?

@cesaralvarezll this was working until about a month ago now apple doesn’t count 90% of reviews collected during the onboarding i’ve experienced it on my app, and was confirmed with a couple of friends is it still working for you though?

Want to increase your reviews and rating of your app? Ask for a review mid onboarding. That’s how I reached almost 100 reviews with a 4.8 rating.

@julienhjung this funnel is super dialed bro

1 month ago: - free trial - yearly $39 - monthly $9.99 - lifetime $99 today: - no free trial - yearly $49.95 - weekly $14.99 - lifetime $99 I’ve almost made in the first 10 days of April what i made in a month in March, some days are slow, and I haven’t hit the numbers I wanted trying to do paid ads, but i know I’ll eventually get there - just trying to scale organic atm

@Davidjpark96 holy goat

we hit $1M MRR :) i don’t really have too much to say except i am very happy and this was really hard huge shoutout to the jenni team (esp. marc, matt, and shailesh) we're back baby!!!! 🥳

how do i get out of 100k view jail 🥀

@Dierrejohnson what is MAM?

how to get cheap installs: 1. strong ugc hook that evokes emotion 2. spam 100s of vids to TT & Insta 3. take winners & throw into MAM 4. Rinse & Repeat literally UGC on easy mode. Don’t overthink it.

@saymooneh bro you’ve been locked also keep it up

@XanderWanagel holyy locked 🔥

new digit unlocked

@nicholasnlawton huge

today, we launched SideShift Bootcamp! a gamified training engine directly within the creator mobile app and web app to take any new creator from 0-100 see you don't actually need to find creators, you can just build them from scratch. some of our top creators, didn't even know was "talking style" was 6mo ago, and now they make 4-5 figures a month via SideShift. creator quality over the next few months is going to drastically increase for all of our brands + agencies.