Toca Boca has 100s of users generating daily content for them on TikTok. Bringing in 1.5B+ views and 10M+ bookmarks.

They didn’t spend a dime.

A thread for “gaming or creative” apps that want to put their acquisition on autopilot and win long term:

Toca Boca is a sandbox/creative game. It’s currently #8 in Education.

Went up to #2 during Christmas:

I’ve collected 50 accounts (there are more). Those are users, mostly teens, posting daily creative content from the game. So that you get the scale, over the past two years, those accounts generated

1.6Bn views and 10M bookmarks.

The content they post looks like this. Community is gigantic & they interact with each others’ posts generating heavy (natural) engagement.

They come from various countries.

From a sample of 10 accounts, i found: 2x RU, KZ, DK, 3x US, BR, AT, TR

Look at those accounts, they’re clearly trying to grow and farm attention.

So the question is, how do you create such fans and/or a community that’ll want or be intrinsically incentivized to build up an account and create daily content without asking nothing in return?

Those kids are self-rewarding themselves through the dopamine it gives them getting views and building (street) cred.

It makes total sense and looks exactly like what happened for Incredibox.

This is clearly a mid/late stage growth strategy here, once a core daily active user base has been nurtured: let them build their own communities and sub cultures.

They probably made Discord servers and Subreddits too.

But can you take the lead and create/promote those communities yourself Get control over pushing the incentives and be able to bootstrap such TikTok/IG ugc networks.

One could showcase the dopamine/cred gained of having such accounts by engineering the first few for instance. Build them up in-house or through paying a handful of core users to do so, and then somehow let them be discovered by the rest of the community.