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Hey {{first_name|there}},
In January 2021, Notion had a bad week.
A handful of "How I use Notion" TikToks went so viral… the downloads overwhelmed their servers.
And guess what they did? They paused ALL product work for six months to fix it.
Today Notion makes $600M+ a year. And it didn't buy that reach… its users made it.
Here's how that happened…
634 Notion videos. 374 creators. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Five years of them.
I'm not even gonna LEAK the full teardown here. But these 3 are worth stealing 👇
📱 1) their biggest creator post is 15 seconds of a phone
It's @easlo's "Notion beginners vs pros (Part 6)". Unlike a normal tutorial, it shows you the slow way first (🤮)… then the same task in one tap (😌).
Nobody talks. Nobody even shows their face.
And that's ONE part. He's posted 25 Notion videos like it.
Steal it:
"[your app] beginners vs pros (Part 1)" 0-3s the title on screen, phone over a clean desk 3-8s the slow way, caption ends in 🤮 9s same task, the caption swaps to 😌 9-14s the one-tap way end on the thing that made it work. No talking.
Same task. Same app. WAY fewer taps.
The full shot list (and 6 more findings) is in the free teardown. If you want it, simply go to the link below and knock loudly.
🎓 2) a med student beat Notion's own best post 8 to 1
🎥 @Medic_Dave · 523K views · 3.4K subscribers · ▶ watch
In 2021… a med student posted "Notion VS OneNote". Not as an ad. As someone who USED it.
That one video beat Notion's own best post in the data 8 to 1.
More:
21 of the top 50 creator posts are about school, uni or studying
14 videos from pages under 10K followers passed 200K
none of Notion's own posts made the top 50
The best Notion creators in the data… are just people who live in it.
So when you hire creators, don't let a small following put you off. It's more about how they use your product.
If they don't already use your app, skip them.
💸 3) creators sell their own templates, so Notion barely pays
118 of these posts push the creator's OWN Notion template. And only 31 of 628 are flagged sponsored.
So for those 88 creators, every video is a template sale disguised as a tutorial.
The creator gets paid every time a video lands… and Notion gets the reach by design.
Template in, signups out.
Make it theirs. Make it pay. Give creators something of their own to sell on top of your product: a template, a preset, a workflow or a code with a cut.
🧠 4) run the same teardown on any app
Now the part that actually matters for you…
You can run this SAME teardown on any app… yours, or the one you're competing with.
create a free Virlo account
connect Claude to Virlo (a database of 20M+ viral videos)
paste this with the app's name
Run a UGC teardown on [APP NAME] using Virlo, then show me what to copy for [MY APP]. Search TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for [APP NAME] with data_intelligence_enabled set to true. Keep the creator posts (not the app's own account), rank them by views and give me 7 sections: the top post beat by beat with a shot list, which creators win, how many creators, the formats by median views, templates or codes and sponsorship, the full-video format, and the older videos that still rank. Link every video and never invent a number.
You paste it… then go make a coffee. And Claude comes back with all 7 sections, every video linked.
📡 5) or keep a marketing agent on it
Or set it up once inside Virlo… a marketing agent that keeps pulling every video about the app you point it at.
It runs in the background… pulling the new ones… and flagging the videos that break out.
Then you ask Copilot (the chat inside the app) why a video worked, and it breaks it down for you.
So sure, this one's about Notion. But if your customers already post about you… maybe it's about you too.
How was today's issue?
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btw i drop sauce like this every day on X and LinkedIn.
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