TikTok

“There's this like problem called the interestingness problem, which is that when you open up an app there's one metric that matters called TTF. And TTF is time to fun. How long does it take me to have some fun inside this app? Get some dopamine and all the gre…”

“Almost all digital advertisers have realized that this selfie style content that looks like native content, if you're on TikTok, it's got to look like it's going to be a funny or cute or interesting or amazing video. Or if it's on Instagram, it's got to look l…”

“You can't advertise for this on Facebook or, like, pretty much any ad network, because they don't want you advertising cigarettes, even though this is, like, a nicotine-free, tobacco-free, and he's like, so it's all just organic, like TikTok, basically people …”

“We have in the ballpark of around 15 ish million impressions from these videos. And it's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch, took our content and some videos have over a million. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.”

“So far, the hashtag that we asked people to use has gotten thirty million views in three weeks.”

“Like if I was trying to grow a newsletter I probably would go try to sponsor like super micro people on Tik Tok and YouTube. Like these guys that are guys and girls that are like sub 10,000 subs. Like if your channel has like 966 subscribers, like you'd be a p…”

“The windows of opportunity, those white spaces, right? The windows, windows are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter every iteration, right? There was the page search probably lasted a good six years. After that or around that same time, there was display …”

“The best promotion we did recently was we just announced that we're going to give 5000 dollars to some person who takes our clips and turns them into TikTok videos and gets popular on TikTok. And we got, I think, thirty million impressions on TikTok in like, 2…”

“So it's actually not a great place for creators. It's a great place for content. It's not a great place for creators to build relationships with their fans. That's why most TikTok creators move to YouTube to build that.”

“I see TikTok as a bit of like a content accelerator, but like if you're new to content creation and you want to find out what works faster, then go to TikTok because it's a low barrier to entry to post. And if something doesn't get viewership, no one really se…”

“Almost forty million monthly visitors for the last six months straight. And it's just plastered with ads.”

“The biggest threat to my company is TikTok. Every day, like, you know, somebody, there's like every, every quarterly offsite, we're hearing about the latest TikTok numbers. Wow. Their growth is crazy. Wow. They're blowing us away. Wow. The stars are going ther…”

“Most ideas that have been super successful are not complete new from old cloth cut, right? They're like, and I don't like the cliche of building on the shoulders of giants, but it's like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree.…”

“Basically, these eighteen-year-old kids are like the most creative people I've ever seen. But then there's guys like you and me, these like money people and influencers, and everyone's doing the same fucking circle jerk Alex Hermosi stuff, and it's really lame…”

“And I gave him the password to my TikTok. It's been one week. So in one week, this kid has taken you and I's videos and posted it to a day on TikTok. And in six days, maybe I think one week's tomorrow, he's gotten 1.5 million views. And I went from basically z…”

“I don't think people want to read a bunch of news in the same way that they're willing to like swipe through mindless videos for entertainment. And so I think that's where Has this problem that a lot of Silicon Valley ideas have, which is they try to sell you …”

“Like, the average TikTok is funnier than the best videos back in, like, 2006.”

“That's actually something we've clocked and we've wanted to be careful of because sometimes people have their song go viral, the sound, but people don't connect that sound to the artist. So there were a couple like viral sounds. If you asked me who the artist …”

“On TikTok, our goal is to reach new listeners, and YouTube is more to nurture the listeners we already have and to nurture the platform because it does pay well. So more views on YouTube is more money in our pocket from the AdSense and stuff like that. But yea…”

“That, that, that first video that we did where we landed on Zambia and found this Zambian artist, that, that video has seventy two million views on TikTok and seventy two million views on YouTube Shorts.”

“The whole goal with these videos is to not make it seem like you're selling someone, especially on TikTok. The moment you feel like someone's like, hey, check out my song, you're gonna swipe away. So you have to provide entertainment first, and we have found t…”

“TikTok at this point, too, even, if you try to write the word link in bio or even Spotify, they'll hide the comment. And we've tested this. I've written that, I've posted that comment under my own video, logged into a different account to go there, and the com…”

“TikTok taught us a lot about the fact that the platform is the creator in that context, right? Like if you take the top 10 creators off of TikTok, TikTok's still TikTok, right? You still open it, and you, it's a for you page.”

“They literally spent a billion dollars marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone.”

“I have a friend that I work with who manages speeds. I, you know, speed the kit. He manages his IP. I don't know what to call it. Like whenever there's a video of speed go viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it. And then they make revenue off…”

“So I looked up the TikTok views for this search of Trad Wife, a hundred and eighty-seven million, which was wild”

“Warren Buffett was the original finance influencer, right? And I, I've joked a million times that if he was today, Buffett in his thirties, he'd have a sub stack, a Twitter account, a podcast. He'd be streaming on TikTok, like doing all this stuff.”

“TikTok Shops is currently in that, like, it's very cheap, it's not that saturated, and TikTok is very motivated to promote these things, and TikTok customers are not, like, fully acclimated to the fact that now a bunch of the TikToks they see are selling produ…”

“If you want ads to work nowadays, don't make them look like ads. That's the biggest thing. As soon as I see an ad, I'm insta-swiping away.”

“And he just used YouTube and tick tock to go viral many times. And he built it up to like. Ten million or so a year, basically like, you know 10, 10 to twenty million a year in revenue on the Katana brand.”

“Tens of millions of dollars worth of slime gets sold from these guys. They got like, if you go to their Tik Tok, they have ten million followers on Tik Tok.”

“I think right now the retailers that are taking advantage of TikTok, the TikTok flywheel, are cleaning up. And what I mean by that is there is a very specific moment of time right now where You can create content on TikTok, either yourself as a brand or even b…”

“The thing that they're doing so smart is that, like, you've got a lot of people that are promoting the product on something like TikTok, right? And they're getting a lot of attention and eyeballs on it, but then the people arrive at something that is much more…”

“So people, so I think they've got millions and millions of views. And the young woman who did it is, like I said, 23 and Chevy and Geico and all these huge brands are commenting and making jokes on the TikToks.”

“And he grew 1.5 million followers from scratch. Look it up. It's called the Pacific Ben. That's B I N. It took him a year to build this thing. And when he launched, he had so many emails that when he opened up the calendar, he pre-sold the first year in like t…”

“And so I went into this feverish, like constantly telling stories on TikTok three a day for 30 days, and then was up to like seven million subscribers on TikTok and then shifted to YouTube and.”

“And on a whim, I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna shoot a quick video, the 62nd, talk about the Dyatlov Pass. And so I film it in my hotel room and I leave my phone in the room because we're going down to the water park and I didn't have a way to waterp…”

“The smart brands in the DTC space are basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and that's where they're getting just like a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody else who just doing very b…”

“Every decade or so, there's a new big hit social product, Facebook, then Instagram, Snapchat, now TikTok. It's time we are due for a new one. And the Twist will be that the content is somehow generated with AI.”

“Between 94 and 2013, it was a fantastic time to start companies in the consumer software space and invest in them from seed or series A. In 2014, the window just closed. You can look at the number of unicorns created in two th from 2014 to today, and it's real…”

“The way that the nature of TikTok and the nature of short form content is that they're not loyal to you. They're loyal to the feed and you might show up from time to time.”

“Also your TikTok views are not worth nearly Close to what your Instagram views are. It's probably a factor of 10 to 20 X difference in terms of the value per view, especially if it's a little bit more meme, a little bit more humor, any like that.”

“The people I've seen who monetize best off TikTok, their CTA on TikTok is DM me on Instagram. And then they work the DMs on Instagram. For whatever reason, IG just converts way better to monetize than TikTok does.”

“They have more followers on TikTok and social media that follow their brand, their team. Then every single professional baseball team, including the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers combined, all MLB teams combined.”

“This is 100%, I think better than TikTok, actually. I think it's better than TikTok. And it's, this is V-one.”

“And this was one of the only cases ever where CFIUS had actually retroactively unwound a deal. CFIUS had denied deals with foreign buyers, but they had never, what they're trying to do with TikTok today over the years is TikTok would be the second one after Gr…”

“And the cool thing is that TikTok is promoting slideshows right now.”

“So I believe that there's an arbitrage right now to use AI to create these accounts, basically like meme accounts and then, you know, sell your software through them.”

“Apps got way easier to build, and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed you know, over the last, let's say, five years ago.”