Hamza Alsamraee
@HamzaAlsamraee
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Founder @ | 1B+ views | Now scaling consumer companies backed by a16z, sequoia, and lightspeed | Sometimes @stanford
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Hey Twitter 👋 I’m Hamza. I’m a Stanford-based growth hacker who has scaled consumer companies backed by a16z, lightspeed, sequoia, & more. I've helped them:
- Go from 0 to 1M in ARR in a few months.
- Gain over 5M+ users.
- Average a 48% decrease in CAC.
Here's how we do it 🧵
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I've generated 10m+ in revenue through TikTok and I figured out the best video hook to drive conversions
Let’s get into split screen hooks👇
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We've acquired 20% of a college campus in a few days:
It's by far the most effective way to get social density quickly to acquire 5x more users.
How? Chick-Fil-A. 👇
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This is the story of how I went from writing math books to scaling Newform to 30+ clients
I’ve never shared my story publicly so figured I’d share it here. A thread 🧵:
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Running ads but getting low quality users?
You may be doing one of the cardinal ad sins
Here are three things to avoid like the plague when running paid short form content
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I built what became the largest Instagram math page over the pandemic
Here's how I did it 🧵:
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At Newform, we pay our in-house creators 6 figures
That’s more than my cofounder and I pay ourselves
Why?
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Acquiring 5 million users without getting lucky 💰
Here's how we’ve done 300 MILLION+ views with an average of 5.6 on return in adspend (for every $1 spent, we generated $5.60) 👇🧵
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I’m a math major at Stanford
I’ll be the first to tell you I’ll never solve a partial differential equation for work
But why is that the standard we judge the value of learning by?
This whole idea of “it’s not applicable in the real world” is silly
College isn’t a vocational
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I grew
@JoinFaves
from 0 to 200k+ active users.
And it took us from 0 to ~1M in AR.
I wish I knew how to do this in the beginning, so i'll give it away for free 🧵
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Hosted a consumer sushi dinner yesterday, thank you to everyone who came by 🥂
Hosting one in the bay next month - dm me if interested in joining ✉️
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If someone dunks on college, they’re usually one of three groups
- They didn’t do well in school. Skill issue for the most part
- They did too well in school. These are exceptions to the rule
- They regret what they studied. Again, skill issue
The reality is college is a great
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Hosting a dinner in NYC on June 6th
If you’re a consumer founder/growth operator, we still have a couple of seats left
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Since the Newform dinner in NYC was a banger--we're hosting another one in LA
April 1st
If you're building or investing in consumer, DM me
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Yesterday, I made my 10,000th short-form video.
After a while, the basics that can optimize watch time by 100%+ become routine.
But when talking to my startup friends, lots of them didn't know some of the basics.
So I wrote some of these down on my notes in the uber today:
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Created a group chat for consumer founders & marketers - comment or dm me if want to be added 👋
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After making 10,000+ tiktok videos for apps, here's what we learned
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I began creating content at 16, and eventually grew what became the largest Instagram math page.
In the next 2 years, I drove 100M+ organic impressions for my personal brand and drove ~$1M worth of sales for my books, which were featured in some of the biggest Arab news outlets.
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Before I attended
@Stanford
, I led growth at Faves, a consumer app backed by
@lightspeedvp
Once we pivoted to freemium, we scaled the app from 0 to ~1M in AR in a few months.
I now use the same content strategy with several other consumer apps.
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1/ Authentic and Trusted Content
Authenticity is King: Overly polished ads stick out.
Here's an example we made where the video on the left looks objectively more professional. But it does worse than the simple video on the right.
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Why TikTok?
Other Ad-channels follow 1) social-graph discovery or 2) long-form content.
TikTok audiences are hyper-consumers who spend reactively & consume ~300 unique videos/day.
Specialization + duration fosters hyper-engagement.
➡️ TikTok is king 👑for user acquisition.
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5/ Targeting
Unlike other platforms (Google, etc), launching broad/loosely-targeted campaigns leads to higher conversion.
A simple broad campaign with good content > complex retargeting strategies.
We've learned that since TikTok has existed.
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I was born in Iraq on Nov 29, 2002. The Iraq War started three months later.
I threw rocks at American soldiers when I was a kid. I didn’t like America.
But 10 years and 4 days ago I moved here
And I was met with open arms
Happy birthday America
Here’s to ten more years 🦅
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3/ Comments
Comments are your reviews section. Positive vs negative comment sections showed a 60% performance difference in our tests.
Another example: we seed comments with copy that follows genz language " w app" "sooo useful" "Kobe Bryant of apps".
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Before I continue on what our content strategy is, our numbers speak for themselves.
Lets dive in 👇
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⬇️Here's a recap if you'd like a visual, broken-down version:
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4/ Scaling Production Well
Quickly scaling content volume is the bottleneck.
Influencers are expensive & slow, you want to optimize for total content output.
We have a team of creators who have been trained, iterate based on data, & create 15 videos w/in 3 days of starting.
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2/ Creative Volume
Small & nuanced changes in hooks make a huge difference.
Here’s a prime example of the SAME EXACT VISUALS, but the hook has a slightly different voiceover. Results in close to a 2x performance increase.
At Faves, we created & tested 1000+ videos within 1 yr.
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If you want to reach social density quickly or want to jam growth, let's chat:
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Above all, we know how to CONVERT. It's a formula that we've mastered over 2 years continuously for 20+ companies.
If you want to:
1) Cut your acquisition costs.
2) Drive scalable growth.
💌Just give me a DM or book a call here:
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Engage with this tweet or comment if you're a consumer founder in the bay area — I'm hosting a dinner next month 👀
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Comments are a crazy underrated tool in a paid marketer's hands.
Here's how to use them to your advantage to cut CACs drastically: 📉
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Have been working with more and more mid to late stage companies lately (Series A+).
It’s incredible how much just 25% decrease in CAC amounts to. We’re talking six figures a month.
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Tiktok shop is literally letting you print money right now
64k in revenue in one week. 0 in ad spend
Here's how you can take advantage 🧵:
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This post is blowing up
So i might release another tactic to hack social density in a few days
It’s a simple tool we’ve used to get lines of 50+ people
Comment below if you want me to dm you the hack👇
We've acquired 20% of a college campus in a few days:
It's by far the most effective way to get social density quickly to acquire 5x more users.
How? Chick-Fil-A. 👇
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Everybody talks about the "algorithm"
But it does not exist
No seriously, there's no algorithm.
It’s basically all machine learning: matrices multiplied by other matrices to maximize some event. A math optimization problem at play. And each problem (i.e. campaign, day, cost
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This growth hack works so well, I've bought tens of thousands of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches.
And now I have enough points for a years worth of chicken.
Founders, comment and I'll legit deliver you a Chick-Fil-A sandwich for lunch or dinner.
We've acquired 20% of a college campus in a few days:
It's by far the most effective way to get social density quickly to acquire 5x more users.
How? Chick-Fil-A. 👇
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People sleep on the importance of payback period
If I've learned one thing from running ads for 30+ startups, it's that you need to make your money back as soon as possible
IMO, 90% of the time a yearly subscription is better for your startup
In this environment,
Cashflow>LTV
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@AKASpencerScott
@oliver__b1
The ARR hides the fact that these subscriptions have very high churn. If growth stopped—the actual revenue for the year would look more like 100k
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20 calls booked so far just from twitter - looking forward to talking to everyone this week. Thanks for the warm welcome 🚀
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Even if tiktok gets banned (it won’t)
Short form content is here to stay
Eyeballs will just shift to meta or YouTube
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Running ads for your app? You're doing it wrong. Five of the most common and critical mistakes we see daily 👇
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Just like "proof of work" makes financial networks like Bitcoin run
Proof of context is how social trust and social networks are built
*If you know, you know*
We use this in our content all the time
When I made content for my last startup
@JoinFaves
I used to show ice spice
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We've acquired 20% of a college campus in a few days:
It's by far the most effective way to get social density quickly and acquire 5x more users.
How? Chick-Fil-A.👇
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Just as financial markets scaled and liquidity priced in everything, the ad markets have priced everything in as well
There's no point in complex media buying anymore, there's no edge
But content remains as the singular and most important edge
Content becomes the new targeting
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Some tips while implementing:
🎥 Use engaging b-roll if you do(SUPER IMPORTANT).
🪝 Create pain-point focused hooks (i.e. “I hate this - here’s how to solve this problem“).
💻 Run an analysis of top-performing videos and their length to iterate in them.
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Straight into it:
1/ Hooks
If you're going to put emphasis or time into anything, put it into hooks.
The first 3 seconds of watch time can change the outcome of your video performance by 100%+
And it increases by another 50% w/ dual screen hooks -I'll write a thread next week
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I pay my top creators $200/hr.
If you know how to make good UGC content, shoot me a DM.
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The more alarming stat is how few breakthrough consumer products have been founded in the last several years
Breakthrough consumer products in the past ~20 years by founding region:
SF Bay Area: 21
LA: 2
Other: 1
New York: ZERO
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Content is truly the new targeting
And this doesn't just apply to B2C. But B2B too
If you want to attract the right clients, don't talk about problems that the wrong clients have
We used to center our materials around scaling super early products because we thought it was
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2/ Always Use First Person
Instead of saying: “Here’s how you can do this”
Say: "Here’s how I did this"
It's much more organic and trustworthy
👉 i.e. "Here’s how you can lose weight" -> "Here’s how I lost weight"
We've seen a 10-30% increase in engagement when implemented
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Hot take: The Asian startup ecosystem is way more exciting than the European one - A thread🧵:
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Find a behavior that people repeatedly do on the app, then paywall it.
Cosmetic features never work.
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The hack here:
Compile a lot of competitor ads that are most high-performing.
Repurpose or draw inspiration.
Then make some killer ads with it.
Let me know if you'd like me to do a while deep dive into how to use PiPi effectively.
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3/ PIPI ADS
Hands down the best $150 you'll ever spend.
PiPi Ads allows you to:
- Look up specific content
- Specify your industry
- Understand spending on ads
- How well ads do
- Better your onboarding flow
- etc...
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Hosting a consumer founder/investor dinner in SF Tuesday 2/27
DM for an invite 💌
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where and if you go to college defines your life trajectory and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that (including me)
if I was at X vs Y college or if I didnt go to college, my life would likely be very different
professionally, socially, emotionally etc
its a hard pill
imo, going to college / where you choose to go to college is one of the most important decisions you'll make at this stage in life.
"college doesn't determine success", but it does amplify it.
and college isn't just for your "career", it's a formative life experience.
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We've made over 10,000+ TikTok videos for apps and I always see one type of content constantly outperforming
Seriously, it lowers the cost per install tenfold. Let me explain 👇
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@andotvu
Worked in high school when you couldn’t control your schedule and had to wake up
Wake up when you want. Just make sure it’s consistent every day
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As much as people shit on California
It’s still the the best state in America and it’s not even close
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You’ve probably heard of fiscal quarters (Q1, Q2...)
But there's another quarter for marketers: Q5
It’s the period right after the Thanksgiving and Christmas advertising craze is over (i.e. now)
Less bidding pressure = Cheaper ads
We're seeing this first hand
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I was eventually inspired to write my own math textbook
I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world
I wanted the book to be accessible, both in writing and price
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I'm addicted to Japanese BBQ
I've been ~30 times so far this year
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every week twitter complains about "meta performance"
maybe your ads suck? we had a great week idk
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We have sent thousands of cold emails for Newform
Our average open rate is 88%
Our subject lines rarely exceed a few words
Simple works
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After this, you can create content from the chicken sandwich giveaway and reach even more networks through both organic and paid content.
We've been able to do this and acquire a double-digit % of a campus within a few days
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Comment or DM me if I should share more of these whenever I'm in my next car ride.
If you want me to help scale your company's short-form growth and implement these hacks, let's chat:
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Campaign Set Up
Set a campaign optimized for a core metric (installs, purchases, etc) and let it run - don't try to optimize it manually.
Simple campaigns beat manual optimization 99% of the time.
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if a consumer product is in "waitlist" for anything more than a few months, they're just trying to avoid VCs ripping apart metrics and its easier to rely on the (often meaningless) waitlist number to raise
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We've been using this formula as one in our arsenal as long as TikTok has existed, and it's led to:
- 300 MILLION+ views.
- Average of 5.6 on return in ad spend.
- 50% avg decrease in CAC.
If you want to scale your consumer company, let’s chat:
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No, social media algorithms aren't "ruining society"
People who critique "the algorithm" forget it has no set morality, no set value system
It's a reflection of what's most optimal for capital flows given our late stage capitalist society
Capitalism "deterritorializes." It
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Optimizing for the right event when running ads is an art not a science
To optimize for the right event:
- Give the algorithm enough data to work with
- Optimize for the highest signal event, always
What does this look like?
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People do things that they would not usually do when there's a chicken sandwich involved, especially in the U.S.
❌ DON'T substitute this with brownies or cookies, it HAS to be Chicken Sandwiches, it's MUCH more effective (we've found chicken sandwiches to be 5x more effective).
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"No, TikTok Is Not Ruining Society" for the Stanford Review
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CTA
Unlike what these other marketing gurus tell you, cut that CTA from the video.
Consumers know exactly what to do after seeing a good product. If they don’t, your content probably sucks.
All a CTA does is dilute your video and make it longer for no reason.
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TikTok is the easiest place to scale to 100k a month
Yes, you can spend 1M/mo on Meta efficiently, but TikTok’s ROAS on smaller budgets is amazing
Tiktok ads = More bang for your buck as a startup
Meta ads = More scalable
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Want to see the cold email I wrote?
Engage with this tweet and I'll write a thread / send you the email.
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If you dismiss Tiktok as having a low quality audience, you're probably optimizing for the wrong thing
If your goal is revenue
It makes no sense to optimize for a click, for example
Instead, try optimizing lower down the funnel
Right optimization = Performance
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@MaanavKhaitan
Older people are usually the ones with power and are naturally more resistant to change
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We just did an analysis on thousands of tiktok ads
80% of drop off happens within the first 3 seconds of an ad
That's how important hooks are, and why we test so many of them
Don't lose a customer because you have a bad hook
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@CalvinnChenn
I think more and more non technical founders are making it now
Technical talent is not as rare as it was. CS grads 10x d over the last couple of decades
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Want to dig in deeper? Grab some time on my calendar to chat content and ad strategy:
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I'm looking for more media buyers.
Will pay commission for anyone who refers.
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