I created Co–Star’s distinctive voice and ran all socials, growing the Instagram following from 0 to 2 million in 18 months. As Co–Star’s audience expanded, I perfected the voice for both content and brand teams; designing content for in-app and web experiences, working on IRL brand activations, and conducting TikTok street interviews.
I ran all of Co–Star’s socials from the beginning, and created several viral evergreen meme formats based on my interpretations of modern astrological archetypes. Running the Instagram was sort of like a constant user test. Having such immediate access to our audience’s engagement habits taught me how to predict trends in content that would automatically “hit” and content that would ultimately fall flat.
Content Design
Co–Star’s core content is its daily horoscope features. As a content designer, this meant that it was necessary to write resonate content with enough variation to change daily without repetition. To achieve this, I collaborated with the engineering team to develop a skeleton of interchangeable and dynamic variables. This innovation allowed me to generate millions of different horoscopes with only hundreds of content pieces.
Reading: You in love
Co–Star’s relationship readings were the app’s first ever premium report, and set a precedent for in-app purchases, earning over 700k in the first week of launch. The challenge here was creating a comprehensive report that was both scalable and hyper-personalized. The user should want to return to the report as a reference, even though the content remained static day to day.
The process involved researching other similar reports, psychoanalytic works, theoretical texts, pop novels, and interpersonal anecdotes and using the findings to write several long-form concepts. Through user testing, I was able to finalize a single concept, and used our existing dynamic skeleton to make it personalizable.
Push Notifications
Co–Star’s push notifications are famous for their voice. The question we kept asking was “How does a push notification get someone to check their horoscope?” I experimented with writing notifications in several different styles and voices; drawing from conversations with friends, old diaries, and late night notes app musings. Then I used performance data to hone a definitive character for the voice: ‘your cool, ex-punk older sister, who sees right through your bs but ultimately just wants the best for you.’
Some of these later became the inspiration for a viral Twitter meme format.
TikTok
TikTok was a new frontier. Memes and content strategies that had worked well on Instagram didn’t cleanly transfer. I collaborated with the freshly hired TikTok manager on developing video formats and posting strategies that could potentially go viral on the new platform. Together, we created Co–Star’s TikTok street interview format and took turns starring in/filming them. Many of our videos went viral, earning millions of views and landing brand partnerships with Amaarae, Amtrak, and Dior.