App Growth Playbook: Deconstructing Sound Map's 'Invite 8 Friends' Referral Loop

Zibo Gao, founder of the "Pokemon Go for music" app Soundmap, has a refreshingly honest take on building consumer apps.

His journey didn’t start in a dorm room with a grand vision. It started in 2021, after a boring stint in consulting, watching founders raise millions on ideas he knew he could execute better.

Zibo asked himself, "Why are they getting millions of dollars from me... when the product looks like something I can do, and much better?"

It led him down a path of relentless experimentation—building everything from a Taylor Swift friendship bracelet app to a mental health platform—and uncovered a core truth that now drives Soundmap's incredible growth: genuine user love is the only growth hack that matters.

How Soundmap beat Spotify's Dominance by classifying its app as a 'Game'

Zibo, who studied Econ and Psychology, not product design, demystifies the process with a shrug.

He sees app building not as some arcane art, but as arranging "rectangles on a screen" and making sure the user flow makes sense.

Having managed his college band and tried to launch a "very torpid" social app in the past, he learned more from doing than from any playbook.

This pragmatism is the foundation of Soundmap. The app intentionally dodges the subscription model that dominates the app store. Instead, it monetizes like a game, driven by in-game currency, boosts, and power-ups.

This aligns the app's revenue with active user engagement, not just a passive recurring charge. It’s a completely different psychology.

Perhaps his most brilliant move was a simple, strategic one. He classified Soundmap in the "Music Games" category on the App Store.

His reason was that it’s way easier to be #3 in "Music Games" category than #1 in "Music" category.

Competing with Spotify and SoundCloud is a death sentence whereas competing in a smaller pond gave them instant visibility and kickstarted their growth flywheel.

The Hardest Part of Building Consumer Apps

Ask Zibo what the single greatest challenge is, and his answer is retention.

He’s blunt about it. Anything more than 30-40% yearly retention is "nearly impossible." This is the brutal reality of the consumer space. Unlike subscription apps that build a comfortable cushion of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), gamified social apps live and die by their Annual Run Rate.

As Zibo says, "every year is a battle." There is no safety net. You're living on a knife's edge, constantly needing new users to come in and spend, while simultaneously trying to keep your existing users engaged enough to continue spending. It’s a relentless challenge that requires a deep understanding of user psychology and an endlessly improving product.

Soundmap's Growth Engine Explained: 'Invite 8 Friends' Loop That Drives 35% of All Growth

75% of Soundmap's growth is organic, built on 3 deliberate pillars:

1. Referrals, account for a massive 35% of growth. The loop is simple and powerful: invite 8 friends for a free lifetime premium subscription. This wasn't a number they guessed. They started with 5, but too many people completed it so they had to up the difficulty. It’s a clear value exchange that works.

2. Paid Ads make up 25% of growth. His initial strategy was refreshingly lazy. No complex funnels, just 6-to-8-second face videos with text overlays, or a "Locket style" ad with 3 seconds of text and 3 seconds of app footage. It worked. Later, this evolved into a sophisticated ambassador program. They find real users—often through their own FYP—and empower them to create content, then simply put money behind the organic posts that are already performing the best.

3. App Store Search & Word-of-Mouth, driving the final 35%. This isn't a strategy, but the result of the other two pillars working in harmony with a product people actually want to use.

This engine is supercharged by a key insight into user psychology. While a paywall appears during onboarding, the invite wall is what gets priority.

It’s shown on every single app open within the first 24 hours.

The data is undeniable: 85% of all invites happen within that critical first-day window.

You have to capture that initial dopamine rush and excitement before a user churns.

The Truth About UGC and Virality: Why 'Crappy' User Videos Outperform Influencer Campaigns

Founders are obsessed with finding the secret to going viral. Zibo argues the "real alpha" isn't a secret growth hack; it's having a "cracked product" that users genuinely love and want to talk about.

He also delivers a tough truth about the founder-as-creator model. He tells the story of going viral himself in 2021 while stuck in a quarantine hotel. But by 2023, he felt his effectiveness wane. "I've just gotten old," he says, "my face just doesn't work anymore."

He realized he couldn't possibly create better content than 15 different ambassadors who are living and breathing the platform.

He also takes aim at the modern definition of User-Generated Content. "People forgot what UGC stands for," he says. It's not content from a freelancer you hired. It’s "truly user-generated."

He shares the story of a brand that spent a fortune on polished influencer campaigns in Mexico and Brazil that fell flat. But then, real users started making their own "worst quality videos with crappy captions," and that content exploded, driving millions of downloads. That is the power of authentic excitement.

Zibo's Advice for Consumer Founders in 2025

Zibo's final advice is a dose of realism. First, "be honest with yourself" about your goals. If you just want to make money, there’s a whole playbook for that: the "$6.99 weekly sub," the dark patterns, the app review tricks. But if you want to build a sustainable social product, you have to be ready for the high bar of achieving real K-factor and strong retention.

Second, stop thinking users hate ads. They don't. They hate bad products. Paid ads just guarantee you a spot on someone's feed. If your content is good and your product delivers, it's a fantastic discovery tool.

Finally, he cautions that the bar for success is only getting "higher and higher." While AI makes parts of development easier, he can't imagine it replacing even a quarter of his engineers. The core challenge remains the same. You have to be brutally honest about your metrics and build something people genuinely love.

Hat Tip to Newform for the insight.

Top Tweets of the day

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Interesting comment on this post:

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Rabbit Holes

1. The Next Great Distribution Shift - Summer Sessions by Reforge

2. Five Founders by Paul Graham

3. My Top 10 Most Popular ChatGPT Prompts (2M+ Views, Real Data) by /r/ChatGPTPromptGenius

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