Hey all,  

Hope you're having an awesome day! I’m Julia, and every week in this newsletter, I break down the exact marketing tactics I’ve learned building software and consumer products (bootstrapped + VC backed) and lean into the organic, creator, and paid strategies that fuel viral growth. No fluff, just real tactics you can apply.

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Today, I’ll walk through how I was tasked with building an off-app distribution engine at Citizen — and ended up creating a system that took us from reviving dead social accounts to driving millions of downloads. Since then, we’ve scaled to over 1 billion views, grew our Instagram from 30K to 350K followers, partnered with hundreds of creator + meme accounts, and turned the 25+ pieces of organic content that we spin out every day into a real acquisition machine. 

If I had to do it all over again, here’s exactly how I’d build it from scratch:  

Worth Caring About: 

There are some incredible brands that have built excellent content distribution engines. Take Hill House Home; their social media manager, Kennedy Smith, transformed HHH Instagram page into a brand vortex. What does she focus on? Driving revenue by creating a shoppable ecommerce experience on Instagram. The marketers I see crushing it have business growth (revenue, customer acquisition, sales, etc.) as their end game. In my experience, goaling towards revenue provides a clear target. 

The 3 Part Formula for How We Got Citizen to 1 Billion Online Views:

When I started building our content distribution engine, I truthfully didn’t have a plan in mind – I just knew I needed to start testing and seeing what worked. I started with posting mock-ups of our incidents I had slapped together in Figma…those static posts quickly got nowhere. 

I knew the impressions in my vertical were out there somewhere (any person living in an urban area is at least somewhat concerned with public safety). So, I started digging, stalking accounts online and found a budding niche: up-and-coming city accounts that people seemed to engage with heavily (we’re talking 10%+ engagement rates on their IG accounts, totally organic). 

These accounts were sharing the same style of information we were distributing on Citizen: public safety content. It was raw, unedited, unfiltered — it resonated with people. When I looked internally for content I could use to mirror this, I turned to our own trove of user videos. People create content with CitizenCam by shooting live videos on ongoing crimes across the country.

Now, I know what you might be thinking….this is an unfair advantage. You had all of this content already made for you to distribute. I promise you: if you look at your business (B2B included!), there’s going to be a system or process ongoing from which  you can easily spin out content.

Now, here’s the 3-part formula (content, distro, testing) I would follow if I had to do this all over again: 

Part 1: Content

The raw formula of Content that worked to get us 1 Billion views: 

1. Fast to make — so you can make a high volume of this (aim for 20 posts/day across platforms)

2. Cheap to produce

3. Interesting enough to share

I’ll break down the key indicators that showed us our distribution machine was working. 

Volume > Perfection: 

We didn’t waste time overthinking content. In fact, we took the opposite approach: high volume, fast iteration. Social media content from your favorite brands isn’t perfect anymore (shoutout to Anduril who is recently crushing it on Twitter), and I felt it was important to have more shots on goal at virality vs. a totally polished video. That bet paid off by [literally] 16,000% when we presented our YoY online growth. 

What did the initial investment look like: I started taking user videos and posting them in near-real time on Instagram. It took me 5-10 minutes per post from video creation -> live post. Once I got stat sig that these gained views (a few thousands, nothing big because we had a small follower count), I hired a part time contractor to scrape our video feeds all day and do this. It was clear that consumers wanted to see active safety situations from around the country. Then, the account grew even more – we had passed 80K followers and I saw some videos doing 25K+ views. At that point, I hired a small offshore team to do this 24/7 for this team. I wrote AI prompts via ChatGPT to guide them, and the consistent formatting and language was scalable and well-received by people online. 

What winning looked like for us: High volume posts (over 20/day), steady account growth on all platforms, videos that hit hard randomly while the rest slowly grew in views. Even today, we have some videos that do 20K in views while others have done 10-100M.

What you can do: This week, spend 10 minutes looking at the winning content in your vertical. Where are the eyeballs going? How can you lean your brand into this? I’d recommend making 5-10 pieces of content about your brand. Set a timer and see if you can do it in 10 minutes, cap yourself, and see what happens.

Part 2: Distribution

Lean Into Creators for Distribution
I knew we weren’t creating the world’s highest quality content. I also knew I needed people (specifically, millions of people) to see it. Instead of trying to grow alone, I reached out to the pages that were already growing and convinced them to work with me in two mutually beneficial ways: sharing content (e.g. sending each other top videos), and sharing audiences by posting together on social media. After all, they had the followers I wanted to tap into, and I had users on the app they wanted to reach, too. If you don’t have an existing app or audience you can tap into, it is definitely not a deal breaker (and is, in fact, the norm for first time founders) 

Tactically, here’s what we did: 

• Set up Citizen’s Creator Program: Partnered with local content creators & meme pages to co-create and cross-post. At first, my budget was $0 to do this and I had to show traction to get more buy in. This took some convincing to find partners willing to try it out, but every vertical out there has thousands of ambitious creators who are open to trying new things and want to grow with brands. 

• Expanded our Citizen’s network of amplifiers: UGC (user generated content) creators, community pages, and media outlets that boosted our content for us. We started reaching out to pages of all sorts (memes, news, pets, etc.) who had followers that fit our ICP or a potential ICP we wanted to test into. Shoutout to Heave who really helped us here (p.s. let me know if you want an intro to the founder, David)!

What winning looked like for us: I quickly realized the Creators were on fire and our follower count got a jolt of caffeine from these posts. Collabing on posts was fast, easy and the more success we had, the more they and other creators were open to it. Our collab’d or boosted videos got 10x the reach of a post that didn’t have a creator collaborator, and with enough experience, we were able to train our eyes to what videos might actually perform well. 

What you can do: This works best if you can lean into Creators or pages in your vertical. Take your best post from this week and send it to 10 people who can boost it (repost, collab, quote-tweet, etc.)—whether it’s friends, community pages, or influencers in your niche. If you’re a brand starting from 0, think about what you can bring to the table to incentivize them to work with you, and A/B test your cold reach outs. 

Side note: I tried very hard to stay away from traditional influencers for any of our marketing. We didn’t see the same ROI on a post that cost us $5K from a traditional influencer vs. a long-term partnership with Creators in our program. 

Part 3: Test and Will It Into Existence 

Test Until Something Hits (And Force it to Hit) 

We could have just stuck with testing the figma mock ups of our incidents (remember those from earlier on?). But it was getting us nowhere. I don’t like to pretend something is scalable when it isn’t. To get to 1B+ views, we never stopped testing our growth hacks and strategies. We found that content is 50% of it, the growth hacking is the other 50%. We test new growth strategies every quarter to boost content. 

What winning looked like for us: Easy, repeatable hacks we could use to grow organically. Something as simple as remixing content that came up on our reels feed and sharing it with our audience was an easy way to contribute to our volume goal and keep our audience engaged. We track our online views daily (and use a combo of a software called Keyhole recommended by my friend Jordan Banafsheha + manual tracking). Shoutout to Citizen’s Social Media Manager, Mara Huberman, who I was lucky to have join my team — she’s a hardcore executer and an incredible team member.

What you can do: Figure out what your winning 50% content + 50% growth hacking combo is. What content works for your brand/vertical and what growth hacks can you start to try immediately? I recommended two of my favorites: collabing online with other accounts (this can be $0) and remixing top content in your vertical (also the same as growing an aesthetic page). 

Well, how’d I do? I hope you found tons of value in this content. From Elon Musk tweeting screenshots of Citizen v. X in the app store, to working with the best creators in the business, and seeing everyone grow alongside each other, it’s been an incredible privilege to lead marketing at a top consumer app. I’d love for you to pick one thing to try here and reply to me with how it goes. 

Julia