Photo Restoration App – 20M installs, 20x in 30 days

The Format Was the Whole Job The first rounds of content did not work. Remini is the AI photo enhancement app owned by Bending Spoons, and paid ads had stopped producing awareness, so the team moved to creator-led content with SideShift. Hooks, visuals and editing styles all had to be tested before anything landed. Once one format hit, installs went from 1 million on September 1 to 20 million on October 1.

Barriers

• Paid ads had stopped moving awareness even as spend kept running.
• Remini had no infrastructure for sourcing, briefing and managing creators at volume.
• The early creator content missed, and there was no shortcut around the testing that would explain why.

Approach

• Format before volume. The early weeks went into testing hooks, visuals and editing styles. Scale came after.
• Creator supply handled outside the company. SideShift provided creator access and ran production, so Remini could keep testing without building a content operation.
• Kept going through the flat stretch. Testing continued while results stayed weak, and scale only came once a format proved out.

Results

• 1 million installs by September 1
• 2 million installs by September 8, doubling in a week
• 20 million installs by October 1
• 20x growth in the 30 days after the winning format landed

Conclusion Format testing looks like wasted budget right up until the week it stops looking like that. Getting from 2 million installs to 20 million took three more weeks, all of it on a format that did not exist in the first round of content. The date that splits this campaign in two is September 8.