Sam Parr explains how the Roommates app got 100,000 users with one viral infographic. The post stereotyped roommates in four San Francisco neighborhoods, tagged local shops, and locals shared it so much it drove massive sign-ups with zero marketing budget.
If you ever see one of these BuzzFeed articles and it'll be 50 things only Long Islanders will laugh at or 50 ways you know you're from St. Louis. The thing about those is they don't get a huge amount of traffic, but the people in Long Island or St. Louis, they will always click it. And the click-through rate is through the roof. And we didn't have a budget when we launched the app Roommates. What we did was we made an infographic where we called it the typical roommates of San Francisco. And what we did was each image of the infographic said, here's the people from the Marina. Here's a typical roommate from the Mission, and we named 4 different places that they would shop. What's a funny quote they would say? We shared them out on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and we tagged those restaurants and those stores. And most people were like, "Oh, this is so funny. They totally know us." And they ended up sharing it, and we got 100,000 users.
