#42 • TikTok 4 Kitchen Knife Sharpening
"Post 4 times a day." That, eventually, "worked." Now what?
You are reading 3Bits & Change, Joseph's email about building a direct to consumer business on the internet. Today’s email was written to the sounds of a quiet morning.
[Single image videos have links to the full videos]
Good day!
Vivront has been looking for underpriced attention. We want to grow this thing! We’ve found millions of views in the last weeks.
It’s easy to spend our way to traffic. Recently, an adwords campaign rebuild accidentally targeted the whole world. Traffic showed up in droves. :) It was the wrong traffic.
How do you get more focused traffic, but for cheap?
When every thousand views on FB and Insta paid media cost $10 (often more) what is an entrepreneur focused on preserving cash and “learning” going to do to gain attention?
I resisted the dancing social network and it’s wildly under 30 crowd until I found a set of constraints I thought worth trying.
I started with the following:
No face
Food stuff and knife stuff
Raise awareness about 📬 kitchen 🔪
Bit #1 • What to make?
I was not going to dance with knives. At the time I was also not interested in using my face to provide a point of view. So I started just messing around.
The account started about a year ago on 8/17/21. The first video was about squishing a tomato with a knife - a uniform human frustration. 534 views was way more than I got on Insta posts at the time (or now). So I thought I’d keep going.
Some cooking process videos got mixed in with some knife skills videos and some UGC we tried in January of 2022 (low views). That mix persisted with a few videos a week until May when I decided to get 3-4 pieces of content out the door as many days as I could stomach.
Around this time I changed my perspective on my face being in the videos too. People need to bond. Faces can do that. Also, if I was a character in front of a machine, that could be easier to digest psychologically. So I donned my glasses and an apron and went to the shop.
I focused on trending songs and matching the format other creators were using with those songs but bending the content toward dull kitchen knives and sharpening. I was so excited to break past the 1000 views mark! So excited.
A few days later I posted a video I had in drafts that was an unboxing of a Food52 spanish cup order. It got over 3000 views in short order. And I started getting more interested. That would have cost me $30 on other platforms. Instead it cost me 10 mins of mess around time. So, let’s mess around some more.
A group of adworld friends have been way helpful in ideation on knife storytelling. They suggested I get and tell stories of each knife coming across the bench. Not able to get stories for each knife I thought I’d simply tell stories of knives going from dull to sharp. Another few thousand views arrived, 5/16.
I then made lots more content, nearly daily, for over a month before another video broke 4000 again. What a slog! The video that broke out was about a salad in some really great light on 6/17 that I shot just before devouring it.
After the salad, videos I posted started getting in the thousands of views. Then I went back to the scale and did some math about how much sharper a knife was that was sent in. I got the idea after sharpening a friend's chef knife that measured ~1200 and I decided to not sharpen it to 100, making it 12x sharper, and only sharpened to 300, making it 4x sharper. The thinking was to make the edge both more durable for them and less drastic of a change in sharpness from their dull knife. It can take some getting used to a sharp knife after having dull knife habits.
Afterall, knives can be made to be too sharp. But, that’s for another post.
And here marks a pivot. I had learned that the internet liked the scale and measurements and before and after shots.
Videos started getting +10k views. A few would get hundreds of thousands.
Buying the traffic in the screenshot above would have cost ~$5000 in paid media at ~$10 CPM. Sure the audience is young but I now ask them to share the service with friends and family. And even still, for 2 hours of time editing and the effort to document what’s already on the bench, the company is not spending those thousands on media.
And some videos really take off. This one is $17k worth of paid media alone.
And another…
Bit #2 • What does it mean for a knife to be sharp?
We’ve earned $13k in media impressions on this video educating folks about what it means for a knife to be sharp and how the scale works.
Like most, I didn’t know sharpness measurement tools existed. Perfect. So it’s a scroll stopper because it’s different. So we leaned into it.
The tool measures the sharpness of a knife by the grams of force it takes to cut a uniform plastic string. The numbers in the display tick upwards as you use it. Oh, the suspense.
The highest force in a measurement is shown on the screen until the tare weight is set again. The higher the number, the duller the knife. A butter knife? Generally ~2000g. A factory edge on a new knife? Typically ~300g.
At first I used this tool to measure the uniformity of an edge. As a freehand sharpener using powered tools it takes practice to make edges the same sharpness on the whole of a blade (tip, mid and heel).
Little did I know how interesting this thing would be to the internet.
Now, folks make requests of what to test on the scale. Anyone know where to get some obsidian and how to sharpen it? :) How about a surgical scalpel? How about… “can a knife be sharpened to a 0?” And, if you’re wondering, like the internet does, the lowest we’ve sharpened so far is a 4.
Bit #3 • So how’s it going?
It took a long time to get to 1000 followers. Then, over a weekend with a trending video, the account got to 2000 followers in a day.
When a video trends it can get hundreds of views every few seconds. You can wake up with a few hundred new followers on the account and thousands of likes with ~50 comments.
For this account, it seems like the videos that grow bigger do so after a few days on the platform.
Take a look at the last 7 days of activity.
The account will cross 10M views in the next week. 7.8M views were in the last 28 days and 1.3M in the last 7 days.
Direct traffic is up on the dot com. TikTok removed the link to our webpage on the mobile view. Who knows why? The link is still there on the desktop (but who uses desktop TikTok?). Either way, we’ve sold sharpening packages with the “tik” coupon code. We’re also shipping packages to states we’ve never shipped to before. Welcome Louisiana!
What’s Next?
We’ve added new topics. It all needs tuning. The followers and the algo don’t seem to like the cooking or edu videos. But, we’d like them to like that content. :) It might be a losing battle. We’ll see. They certainly also like cheap knives being made sharp too.
There is traction around pre-cut fruit content in grocery stores that we’ll keep prototyping and learning about.
We have an idea for a “will it sharpen” series. A stop sign? A drivers lic? Etc.
There are more videos to make and share based on comments folks make on other videos. Just started posting those this week. Here is one on differences between German and Japanese kitchen knife geometry.
We’ll keep messing with songs. Using trend songs can make very similar videos posted on the same day produce wildly different results.
Sum
You can grow Tik accounts. It takes curiosity, iteration and time. Document over create. This is a volume game. We’re gaining lots of views and profile visits. We’re also learning what themes potential customers are interested. There is both validation in the process and a realization of so much more work and learning to be done.
Shout if you’d like to talk Tik for a brand or topic you’re running.
And if you’re on Tik. Follow along - https://www.tiktok.com/@vivront_
Change
That school lunch debt
It’s August and admin teams are back in district offices. Be ready for more articles like “Without free school meals for all, many fear lunch debt will return ‘with a vengeance’” penned by Kalyn Belsha this week.
In the 2017-2018 school year the total debt tracked to individual student meal accounts across 570 districts in the country was $11 million. It’s very likely in our macro conditions that we’ll generate far more this year.
That $11M is both a big number and a small one depending on perspective. With 90% of the kitchen knives dull in 120 million households it’s achievable that 1% of the market sharpen their knives with one company. If it’s with Vivront, we’d pay off the debt in full each year.
Locker room food at the airport?
A locker for your airport food! Here. Think of those Amazon boxes at grocery stores but you used your phone to order lunch on the way to the gate. A ghost kitchen gone wild. Numerous “brands” of food can be delivered in the same space.
On Your Way
It’s August. Find a body of water. Lay around and read a book. The school year is just ~4 weeks away.
Follow Vivront.com on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Follow @josephrueter on Instagram or Linkedin.
Order kitchen knives sharpened or give the gift of sharp at Vivront.com.