70,000 views, fewer than 10 sign-ups: what five phones taught me about short-form video
I ran about 20 TikTok accounts on five iPhones to grow an app. One video reached about 70,000 views and brought fewer than 10 sign-ups. Views measure attention. Sign-ups measure whether you did a job someone needed done, and that takes three things lining up at once.
In late 2025, one of my TikTok videos for Sayura, my affirmations app, reached about 70,000 views. It brought in fewer than 10 sign-ups.
That wasn't a one-off. In a typical month, all my TikTok and Instagram accounts together added up to about 100,000 views. Those are monthly figures. Separately, by late January 2026 my cumulative totals since starting were about 140,000 views on TikTok and 350,000 on Instagram. App downloads barely moved.
If you're a business owner being told to "just go viral", or being sold an AI tool that pumps out videos, this is the part the pitch leaves out.
What the setup looked like
I didn't do this casually. I ran five iPhones and about 20 TikTok accounts across four themes: spirituality and horoscopes, sales and personality, affirmations, and a face-reading quiz. Each account was warmed up for about seven days before it posted anything. I tried scheduling and content tools including ReelFarm, PostBridge and Viral.app.
It was a real operation, and it had real friction. One account got zero views from its second video onward. Another was banned within ten minutes of being created. I also paid for outside help. A content contractor charged about $2,500 for 32 pieces. Of the 14 reels, only one got more than double my usual views. Comparable reels elsewhere cost $25 to $45 each.
I also learned what reach costs at each level. Influencers charged about $200 to $400 a video. Ambassadors, who copy a format that already worked, cost under $10 a video. For one creator test I offered $3 per 1,000 views, capped at $600, which buys about 200,000 views in two weeks, plus a share of any revenue. I had set aside roughly US$1,000 to US$1,500 a month for at least six months to pay people to try formats, and I treated it as the cost of learning. After I cut the supplier whose automated reels performed worst, my own organic posting cost about $158 a month.
So I had volume, tools and paid reach. What I didn't have, most of the time, was customers.
People want the hole, not the drill
Marketing has an old line for this. Theodore Levitt, quoting Leo McGivena, put it simply: people don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.
Clayton Christensen and his co-authors turned that into a method in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article. Their famous example is a milkshake. A fast-food chain found that many morning milkshakes were bought by commuters who wanted something to make a long, dull drive more interesting and stop them getting hungry later in the morning. Improving the milkshake itself did little. Understanding the job the customer was "hiring" it for showed what to actually improve.
Apply that to video. A view means someone stopped scrolling. It says nothing about whether they had a job your product could do. My 70,000 viewers were hiring that video to fill thirty seconds. Almost none of them were hiring it to find an app.
What looks like a marketing win is often just entertainment that happened to carry your logo.
My twist: three things have to line up at the same time
Looking back across all those accounts, my conclusion is that results need three things in place at the same time:
The right audience
The people watching actually have the problem you solve. A horoscope video can pull a huge crowd that has no interest in an affirmations app.
A reason to act now
An incentive: something free, something they get immediately, something that ends. Without it, "interesting" becomes "maybe later", which means never.
A clear offer and one action
One thing to do next, stated plainly. Not "check us out", but "take the free quiz" or "book a trial".
Get one or two of these right and you still get views. You need all three for sign-ups. Most advice about short-form video only covers the first half: hooks, trends, posting volume. That part fills the top of the funnel. It doesn't tell anyone what to do when they get there.
I don't think short-form video is a waste of time. It's one of the most powerful channels a small business can reach for. But it needs a system, not just volume. Compare that with paid search for The Modern Shrine, where people arrive already typing their problem into Google. The job is visible before they click, which is why cost per sign-up was the number I could actually manage there.
Read the views before you blame the video
Views still matter as a diagnostic. From my own notes, this is the rule of thumb I ended up using for a new account:
It's not a law, and platforms change. But it stops you rewriting a good video when the real issue is a new account, or buying more accounts when the real issue is a weak opening. And once views are healthy, the question moves on: audience, reason to act and offer. That's the bottleneck that a bigger view count won't fix.
Why AI content tools don't solve this
AI tools can make video cheaper and faster. That's genuinely useful once the system works. Before that, they make the wrong thing at higher volume, the same trap I described in You probably don't need an AI salesperson. If the offer is unclear, a tool that produces 30 videos a week just spreads the unclear offer further.
The hidden cost isn't the subscription. It's the months spent reading a view counter as if it were a sales report.