Norway's Wonderloop Pulls together top Viners to promote app

    Social apps should have the hooks built right in for that viral growth, but how should you introduce yourself into a new market? Norway’s Wonderloop, a video profile app, has seen some success in the Norwegian markets, but to properly introduce themselves to America’s youth the company pulled together 17 trendsetters together for a type of promotion we haven’t seen Nordic social apps leverage before.

    Convening in Orlando, Florida, Wonderloop flew in 18 teen celebrities with large Vine followings including names like Jerome Jarre with 6.9 million followers and SpecialK – Khayman with 1.6 million vine followers. At the get-together, Yung Poppy who preformed “If you want a burger”, which received around 4000 likes after just 3 hours on Instagram. According to the company, Vine videos from the weekend received over 100,000 likes and 5 million views.

    Leading up to the event the Viners could choose from video-profiles in Wonderloop who should win VIP tickets to the event as attendees using the hashtag #liveitup. This caused a decent stir to get into the invite-only app, which surged downloads.

    “We are basically blowing our pre-seed round on one big stunt but with apps it’s go big or go home,” says Hanna Aase.

    Wonderloop, as we’ve covered before, has users to create short video profiles of themselves which others can use to browse or introduce to their connections. While Vine is known for going off in sillier directions, Wonderloop has some more serious hooks. “Teens are used to video and they will just never use LinkedIn,” Aase explains, also mentioning that seeing someone on video is much more effective than just looking at someone on paper. As testament to this concept, Wonderloop has now hired someone they met through the app, who is now based in Los Angeles.

    To reach America’s youth Wonderloop seems to have the right focus of going where they are. Whether this was a longterm cost-effective strategy or not I guess we’ll find out by what happens next with Wonderloop.

    Here are a few vines from the event and hotel:

    If you’re like me, your response might be “kids these days…” but respect to Wonderloop to going where their users are.