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TikTok Slideshow Marketing for Indie Apps

Part of Marketing & Social: every channel kit and how they link to each other.

Post 6-image photo-mode slideshows about a human moment your product creates, send them to TikTok as drafts, add a sound by hand, publish, and let the numbers decide which hook to repeat. This is the "Larry loop" that took one indie dev's apps from near zero to a few hundred dollars of MRR in a week (self-reported, see the case study), written down so anyone can run it, with or without an AI agent.

research niche → write hook → 6 slides (same scene) → draft to TikTok → add sound + publish
      ↑                                                                          │
      └──── keep / retest / drop the hook  ←  views · saves · profile visits · installs · paid

Why slideshows (and why people call it "wild")

  • Cheap per post. Six images and six short lines. The reported API cost was about $0.50 per post ($0.25 with batch generation) and ~60 seconds of human time (case study).
  • Many shots on goal. 1–3 posts a day is realistic, so you find a winning hook in days, not months.
  • No face, no filming. The format is text over pictures. That fits apps where the result is visual (rooms, faces, outfits, food, before/after, a game moment) and founders who won't be on camera.
  • The hook is the whole game. In the Larry data, hooks about another person + doubt → shown the result → changed their mind got 147K–234K views; hooks about the app or its features got under 3K.

What's not proven: claims like "slideshows get 5× the reach of video" come from vendor blogs without data. See reference/research-2026-10-12-tiktok-slideshow.md.

Start in 3 steps

  1. Today (60 min): read docs/01 and docs/02, then run social-tiktok-slideshow to get 10 hooks and your first 3 slideshows (slides, image prompts, caption).
  2. This week: use the account like a normal viewer first (docs/07), then post 1–3 slideshows a day by hand or from drafts. Log every post in templates/post-log.csv.
  3. Every Sunday (20 min): run social-tiktok-slideshow-loop on the log. It tells you which hooks to scale, keep, retest or drop, and which slide to fix (hook or CTA).

What's in this folder

Folder What's inside
docs/ The method, one topic per file (below)
case-studies/ Larry × Snugly (the reference case) · 3 posts a day for a Quran app · other founders using slideshows
reference/ Research log with sources · skills, repos and tools · TikTok photo-post API facts
templates/ Hook bank · one slideshow post · post log (CSV)
skills/ social-tiktok-slideshow (make the posts) · social-tiktok-slideshow-loop (read the numbers, with a script)

Docs, in reading order

  1. What a TikTok slideshow is, and which products it fits
  2. The slideshow loop, step by step
  3. Hooks: the formula, what worked, what flopped
  4. Slide design: sizes, safe zones, text, keeping the scene the same
  5. Posting: drafts, sound, captions, cadence
  6. Metrics and the decision table
  7. Rules and risks: AI labels, ad disclosure, many accounts, automation

Five things to remember

  • Write about a person and a moment, not your app. The app name goes on the CTA slide and in the caption.
  • Same scene on all 6 slides. Lock the room / face / object description; change only the style.
  • Drafts, then a sound by hand. The API can't pick trending audio; that last 60 seconds is yours.
  • Measure to money. Views alone lie. High views + no installs = fix the CTA; few views + good installs = fix the hook.
  • Label AI images and disclose that you're promoting your own app. It's TikTok's rule and it protects the account.

Keep it current