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How Plutus helped Tea turn an accidental viral moment into an ongoing creator-led growth campaign, reaching #1 in the US App Store and 13M downloads during the partnership.
Tea had shipped a product people wanted, but nobody was seeing it. About 100 in-house UGC videos had died at 200 to 300 views each. Paid ads weren't producing the growth the team needed either.
Sean Cook, Tea's founder, went camping expecting to come back and shut the app down. While he was off the grid, one video unexpectedly hit 3 million views and the app flooded with downloads.
Within 48 hours, the problem was obvious. The product was fine. Distribution was broken.
Tea needed a way to make that moment happen again, without depending on luck.
Why now | Tea needed to capitalise on the sudden attention before it faded.
What success meant | Turn organic attention into US installs and recurring revenue at a cost a bootstrapped app could sustain.
Our goal was to turn that initial spike into a repeatable organic acquisition channel.
Primary objective | Drive US installs through consistent organic reach rather than relying on individual viral videos.
Supporting metrics | US App Store chart position, cost per install and growth in recurring revenue.
We hand-picked and onboarded 10 creators matched to Tea's target audience of single women in the US.
We moved away from polished, expensive videos and focused on raw, low-fi content that felt natural on TikTok. The goal was to make videos people would actually stop to watch, share and talk about.
Each creator posted multiple times a day, testing different hooks, angles and formats.
When something worked, we made more of it. When an approach consistently underperformed, we moved on and tested something else.
Across the partnership, the programme published 16,914 posts, giving us enough creative variation to find what resonated with Tea's audience and keep improving the content.
We also used TikTok's comment section deliberately.
Creators prompted viewers to share opinions and sparked conversations around the problems Tea addressed. Some of those discussions took on a life of their own.
At peak, comments asking about the app passed 100,000 likes. One comment alone reached 114,900 likes.
Those conversations gave us another way to understand what people responded to and helped the strongest content reach further.
Within 60 days, Tea reached #1 in the US App Store, overtaking ChatGPT and Threads, and held the top position for two consecutive weeks.
During our partnership, Tea recorded 13,060,428 downloads, approximately 98% of them in the United States.
Our creator content generated 290.9 million views, with a reported cost per install of $0.03.
At its peak, Tea reached approximately $800,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Organic acquisition grew so quickly that Tea turned off paid ads, with the influx of new users putting pressure on its servers.
The attention didn't stop with our creator accounts.
Tea became a major topic of discussion across other social platforms, particularly X.
Posts discussing the app reached 43.4 million, 7.9 million, 4.8 million and 1.7 million views. People loved the idea, hated it and debated everything in between.
That wider conversation generated more than 1 billion additional views across X and other platforms, including approximately 500 million on X alone.
The attention eventually reached mainstream media, with CNN, AP News, Essence and Fox covering Tea.
What began as one accidental viral video had grown into a much larger conversation around the app, supported by a daily creator programme.
The biggest lesson from Tea was how much difference consistent testing and the right creative approach could make.
For this audience, raw, low-fi creator content performed better than the polished videos Tea had previously tried. Posting at a higher frequency also gave us more opportunities to find winning ideas and improve them.
The comment section became an important part of the strategy too. Prompting discussion encouraged people to engage with the content and helped the conversation spread well beyond the original creator accounts.
Tea had already experienced what one viral video could do. The challenge was finding a way to build on that momentum.
Running creators as a daily testing system gave the team a way to keep finding new angles, reach more potential users and reduce its reliance on paid acquisition.
Tea continued working with us on a monthly retainer after the initial growth.
What started as an effort to capitalise on one unexpected viral moment developed into an ongoing creator programme, producing content, testing new ideas and building on what worked.
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