Startup Sphere |
If you're posting screen recordings for your app or SaaS, people will subconsciously swipe past it because it looks like an ad. Try generating an AI-made mascot and let it star in a TikTok slideshows.
A wellness app's duck carousels have hit up to 574K views a post from an account with about 9,300 followers, and one was shared 5,500+ times.
The Tactic
Pick one cartoon character, put it on every slide, and post TikTok photo carousels that help your audience or make them laugh. The slides never pitch the app. Quabble, a mental wellness app, runs its TikTok, @quabble_app, this way with a cute duck.
1. Character
Make one character and use it everywhere. Quabble's duck is the same duck that sits on the app's home screen, so my guess is new users recognize it the moment they open the app. You don't need an illustrator. I'd make mine in Gemini - describe the character once, then ask for it in new poses and scenes. Google says it keeps "a character's appearance across generated images," and the free tier includes that functionality.
2. Format
Post photo carousels instead of videos. Each slide is the character plus a line or two of handwritten-style text on a plain background. Quabble's run eight or nine slides, with titles like "how to survive a weird mental health day" and "ADHD type 1 vs type 2 explained by ducks."
Comical posts don’t come across as ads right off the bat.
3. Topic
Write about the viewer's day. The slides give small advice ("do the basics first. water. food. shower. air.") or a relatable joke, and the last one gives people a reason to share: "send this to someone doing better than they think." The last slide does a lot of the work behind those share counts.
4. Voice
Give the character a personality and use it everywhere your app talks. Duolingo's owl, Duo, is the big-budget version of this tactic. The team replies to comments as Duo, sometimes with a video.
The Business
Quabble is a mental wellness app from museLIVE, a San Mateo startup founded in 2021 that started as a weekend side project.
It bundles meditation, breathing, mood tracking, journaling and a duck character you look after.
The app is free to download, with a subscription at $8.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it has a 4.8-star rating from 4.4K App Store reviews.
Revenue isn't public. It's VC-backed, with a 3 billion won (roughly $2M) seed round in 2022 and a second, undisclosed round in February 2025.
How It Was Built
Here's the prompt I'd use to get a v1 going in Claude Code:
I want to build a tool where I type the text for 6 to 9 slides and upload a mascot image for each one, and get back 1080x1920 slide images with the text in a handwritten-style font, ready to post as a TikTok photo carousel.
It's for app founders who post TikTok carousels to promote their own product.
I have no coding background, so explain your choices in plain English.
Before writing any code:
1. Ask me up to 5 questions about anything unclear.
2. Tell me the hardest part to build, and whether an existing service or API can handle it.
3. Propose the smallest v1 that proves the core works: no login, no payments yet. List what we're leaving out.
4. Recommend a stack and the accounts I'll need to create.
5. Give me a step-by-step plan where every step ends with something I can test myself.
Wait for my OK before building.Your Move
Make your character. Describe one mascot to Gemini, or draw it yourself and upload it, then ask for about 10 poses in the same chat: happy, tired, at a laptop, confused.
Write three carousels about your user's problem: a "how to survive X", a "type 1 vs type 2", and a "send this to someone who…". Give each six to nine slides, with one or two lines per slide.
Post them as TikTok photo posts this week, one a day, with the app link in your bio.
Reply with a link to your first carousel and I'll feature the best ones next week.
How useful was this week's tactic?
Till next week,
— Vlad
