App Store #1 Overnight: How WePush (formerly SongPush) Turned Creator Marketing into a Multi-Million Business

Markus Cremer, Co-Founder of WePush, has built a platform that has now enabled over 500,000 collaborations between brands and creators. It all started as SongPush – a music promo agency born out of a deliberate niche strategy. Today, WePush operates as a creator marketplace tackling the much larger brand market, enabling campaigns with 50 to 100 creators at once.

In this episode, Markus explains why going through a narrow niche first was the right move, how a single creator video catapulted the app to number one in the App Store overnight – and why the briefing is the single biggest make-or-break factor for any campaign.

From SongPush to WePush: The Path Through a Niche

Markus deliberately started in the music industry – a market whose contacts, problems, and dynamics he already knew from personal experience. Only after gaining traction there did he expand into broader markets. This focus on nailing a niche before scaling runs as a common thread through the entire conversation.

A defining moment in the company's history: a video from creator Cengo pushed the app to number one in the App Store overnight. The numbers speak for themselves – 30,000 downloads in a single night, and the servers went down for 30 minutes because the infrastructure simply wasn't built for that kind of surge.

Also notable is the pivot away from Twitch toward TikTok. The reason was simply market size: in Germany, there were only around 200 streamers with more than 100 concurrent live viewers – far too small a market to build a business on. TikTok offered the reach and dynamics needed instead.

Creator Marketing: Why 50 Videos Beat 3 Influencers

WePush deliberately bets on the power-law principle in content marketing: out of 300 produced videos, typically only 10 drive around 70 to 80 percent of overall performance. Creative briefs increase the odds that genuine viral outliers emerge among the many videos produced.

One key insight from practice: sharing and saving rates matter more as success metrics than raw views. TikTok's algorithm rewards content that gets actively shared and saved far more than content that's merely watched passively.

To scale campaign quality, WePush is working on an AI briefing generator trained on current trends per industry. The goal: creators get ready-made concepts as inspiration instead of starting from a blank page.

UK Expansion and Marketplace Dynamics

The expansion into the UK served as a kind of dress rehearsal for the later move into the US. An interesting pattern emerged: the advertiser side of the marketplace took off immediately, while creator acquisition turned out to be considerably harder than expected.

A striking difference between markets: in Germany, almost every produced video went viral. In the UK, by contrast, it typically took 7 to 8 paid videos before 1 or 2 actually took off. This illustrates how differently content dynamics can play out from market to market – and how important it is to understand these differences before scaling.

As a general rule for the marketplace: network effects are decisive. Every new creator who joins the platform automatically makes WePush more valuable for advertisers – and, in turn, more demand from brands attracts even more creators.

Hiring, Leadership, and Founder Learnings

Markus speaks openly about one of the most expensive mistakes in the company's history: bad hires. Overly senior employees brought corporate politics into a startup environment that actually needs fast, no-nonsense decision-making.

As a countermeasure, WePush introduced paid trial phases before full-time employment – a step that, in Markus's experience, massively improved hiring success rates, because fit and working style show up in real day-to-day work rather than just in an interview.

In the end, Markus boils down his most important advice for founders into a simple formula: talk to users, launch fast, don't run out of money. Three principles that run through the entire story of SongPush to WePush – from the first niche in the music industry to international expansion as a creator marketplace.

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More about Markus Cremer:

• –LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markus-cremer-63480b74/
• –Website: https://wepush.com

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