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Just over 8 months ago I was dragged to a dinner at a busy restaurant in Newport Beach. More than half of the dinner party didn't know each other, I was exhausted from the weekend, and quite honestly I wanted to be anywhere else. It was so loud I could only talk to the person directly across from me on the crammed dinner table, so I introduced myself and asked the classic question: "what do you do for work?"

That question turned into a two-hour conversation that cemented the belief that someday I’d collaborate on a project with him.

Fast forward to today and that stranger across the table is now one of the co-founders in my first ever SaaS startup: Snowball

Less than two months ago we publicly launched and today we're sitting at $3,000 in MRR.

Although to some this may not be a crazy feat, we haven't spent a single dollar on ads and all three of us still work our other jobs (for now). And honestly? The ride so far has been one of the most chaotic, humbling, and rewarding experiences of my life.

I've been wanting to write this newsletter for a while now but kept putting it off because, well, I've been burning out candles busy building. But I think it's important to pull back the curtain on what it actually looks like to go from an idea to a real product that real people are paying for because it looks absolutely nothing like what Twitter tech bros make it seem.

Here's what I'm going to break down:

Let's get into it.

I'll give you the bar conversation version.

The Problem: Most content strategists, UGC creators, and marketers spend hours upon hours scrolling, saving videos, and trying to reverse engineer what worked. Along with this, parsing through data across multiple accounts or niches is a nightmare.

Solution: With Snowball you can scan entire TikTok accounts and niches in seconds, surface the hooks and patterns that actually driving virality, and chat with the videos (like Claude/ChatGPT) to build out new scripts/hooks/angles/anything you can think of.

Think of it as having a senior content strategist on your team that can find viral posts in your space and can tell you exactly what's working and why - except it does it in seconds instead of weeks. It’s essentially the ‘Claude’ for TikTok.

Quick overview in video below

We built this because I live this problem. I've spent years as a growth marketer and content strategist, and even with all that experience, the amount of time it takes to research, plan, and execute a content strategy is absurd.

We wanted to make that process 10x faster for everyone (especially if you need to scale the process across an entire team of strategists). The best content teams post videos at scale, inspect their winning videos for viral markers, and replicate the winners with different variations for continued success.

Snowball doesn't replace your creativity; it replaces the time before it and superpowers you to achieve virality consistently.

I know this is the part most of you want to hear about so let me be real with you — there’s no major secret growth hack. No viral launch strategy that I reverse-engineered from some Y Combinator playbook. The honest answer is less sexy but way more useful.

1. Go all in on one channel

As you could probably guess, TikTok was our #1 channel. Mainly because that’s where our users live (we are spreading to IG reels and Youtube soon don’t worry).

Along with this, TikTok's algorithm is still the closest thing to a meritocracy in social media. I wrote about this years ago and it's still true. You don't need a massive following and you don't need to be a professional videographer. You need to make content that resonates with people and TikTok will find those people for you. With even 10 followers you can have a video go massively viral that gains you thousands of users for your app.

2. Create viral content that ties back to your app

What we did was simple. I never ‘hard sold’ Snowball. I’d explain a viral content strategy that core potential users would gain value learning from (along with earning my trust of knowing the space). I would then tie this story or strategy into how Snowball would help you either achieve a similar outcome. Here are three examples of this below.

I broke down how Claude’s entire growth marketing team is one person
I broke down the viral content strategy of Wispr Flow
I broke down what UGC teams are doing to growth hack TikTok

📌 Key note: Making a video that starts off straight selling my app would have a tremendously hard time gaining traction to any degree. The first 10 seconds is extremely important and that’s why you need to hook them with real value.

No influencer deals. No paid promotions. No ads. Just consistent, authentic content showing a product that solves a real problem. That's it. That's the growth strategy.

A couple of our videos hit at the right time and got way more reach than we expected. But you can't get lucky if you're not posting. We showed up every single day and gave the algorithm opportunities to work in our favor. And believe it or not, I used Snowball to help replicate the winners.

For example: Here’s a video that is almost a replica of my video posted above just on my personal account not the Snowball account.

Alright, this is the part of the newsletter where I get honest about the stuff nobody talks about. Building a product sounds glamorous on Twitter. In reality it's 90% unglamorous problem-solving and 10% small wins that keep you going.

Lesson #1: You have absolutely no idea how people are using your product until you talk to them.

This is the single most important thing I've learned in the past two months and I cannot stress it enough. You can look at your analytics dashboard all day long. You can study your user flows. You can read every product management book on the shelf. None of that replaces a 15-minute conversation with someone who is actually using your tool.

We built features that we were certain people would love. Features that made total sense to us as founders. Features that we personally would use every single day. And then we'd hop on a call with a customer and find out they didn't even know the feature existed, or worse, they were using the product in a completely different way than we intended.

It's humbling. It's also the most valuable data you will ever collect.

If you're building something right now and you're not talking to your users at least a few times a week, you are flying blind. Full stop. I don't care how good your data is, I don't care how many user surveys you've sent out. Get on a call. Ask them to share their screen. Watch them use your product and you will learn more in 15 minutes than you will in 15 hours of staring at Stripe.

📌 My advice: Pay first users small Starbucks gift cards to have full honest feedback sessions.

Lesson #2: Three cofounders is a cheat code. (if your skill compliment each other)

With three people who trust each other and bring different strengths to the table, you can divide and conquer in a way that a solo founder simply can't. Out of the three I’m the only nontechnical founder but my two technical founders have a very different set of skillsets.

📌 My advice: Fully outline where your skills are and aren’t. Your cofounders should have little overlap.

Lesson #3: Pricing is a living, breathing experiment. (it’s never easy)

We have multiple pricing tiers and I'll be the first to tell you we still don't have it perfectly figured out. Pricing is one of those things that founders agonize over before launch as if it's set in stone forever. It's not. We've already adjusted things based on what we've learned from actual paying customers.

📌 My advice: Lunch with something reasonable, pay attention to how people react, and don't be afraid to change it. The worst thing you can do is spend three months trying to find the "perfect" price before you even have customers to test it on.

Lesson #4: $3K MRR sounds small until you realize what it represents.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that $3,000 a month is life-changing money split between three cofounders. It's not. But here's what it is — it's proof. Proof that strangers on the internet find enough value in what you built to pull out their credit card and pay you for it every single month. That validation is worth more than the dollar amount. Having even one subscriber is an incredible feeling and will fuel you to continue to push through any obstacle.

I'll keep this short because honestly we're only two months in and I'm not trying to act like I have all the answers. I very much do not. But here are a few things I wish someone had told me:

We're just getting started. The roadmap is packed. The user feedback is giving us a crystal-clear picture of where to go next. And frankly the market for what we're building is only getting bigger as more and more people realize that content isn't optional anymore, it's the game.

For example, Forbes just reported that Unilever scaled their direct creator network from 10,000 to 300,000 in under two years [read my full post on it]

I'll keep sharing these updates as we grow. The wins, the losses, the lessons, all of it.

For those that stuck around this long here’s a 15% discount off any plan for your first month.

Use code at checkout: GANNONSNOWBALL15

Hopefully this newsletter is helpful to someone building out there. If you're building something too, shoot me a DM. I'm always down to talk shop.

Last but not least, something good is just around the corner

- Gannon

Follow me on my other socials: gannonbreslin.com

That’s it for today. Hopefully, you enjoyed today’s newsletter. If you think this would help a friend don’t be shy and share!

Disclaimer: Gannon’s Newsletter does NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. Gannon is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses.