Some Viral Lessons Of Empathy

The story behind our success with Flo: tens of millions views, half a dozen viral formats, and exceptional engagement.

Each cycle is many new cycles

The women’s health app space is competitive. Clue, Stardust, Lively, and Musa, among other more-“utility” apps are battling for market shares. None, however, come close to Flo’s scale, which holds over 30% of the global user base. Flo was investing in ads and influencer marketing but they weren’t running multi-account UGC marketing. Some of their competitors, like Aavia and Musa, were managing networks of dozens of creators when Flo started — often using Flo’s legal issues as anchor hooks for their most effective formats. We knew breaking through wouldn’t be so easy, but Flo’s strong position gave us a chance to dominate the conversation. And that kind of challenge is exactly what drives us.

A Deep Research

As a medical brand with a strong reputation, Flo had to maintain strict guidelines for tone, language, and messaging, which made content ideation more complex. Finding the balance between staying compliant and creating content that feels relatable, engaging, and conversion-focused was a challenge. But having worked with financial institutions before, we knew it was possible to find creative gems out of those constraints. We ran what we call a vertical deep research. Using our in-house tools and processes, we collect large amount of content from creators posting in the niche-segment — here “period tracking” and “women’s health”. We then manually sort through and categorized everything to spot ideas and patterns. This gives a deep understanding of the space — some of our top-performing videos came directly from repurposed insights from there. We also compile all competitor accounts. If they’re active in UGC marketing, we likely have them in one of our research datasets — we do excessive research. We simultaneously identify the everyday struggles that, here, genuinely resonate with women — their emotions, routines, and monthly experiences. The purpose is to uncover a wide range of relatable topics to build upon.

Rolling through viral formats

While our initial hooks focused on curiosity and informative angles — positioning Flo as “the only app you need to take care of yourself” — it quickly became clear that education alone wasn’t enough to drive real impact. So instead, we shifted our focus toward emotion. Content that felt deeply personal — the kind that makes every woman scrolling through TikTok pause and think, “That’s literally me”. The unfiltered moments most women can relate to. The campaign aimed to maximized awareness, and reach, paving the way to showcase Flo’s premium features and advanced use cases — many of which are often unknown to everyday users. So we turned women’s most relatable everyday themes into content that felt raw, real, and impossible to scroll past.

The ‘That’s So Me’ Format”:

It’s a skit-style video where creators act out the small, chaotic moments women experience during their periods. We want to hook viewers instantly with something inescapably relatable.

“Me when my period is late but I feel cramps. checking the tissue to see if there’s even a dot of pink.” — 10M views

This video is intentionally shot in a bathroom to make the setting look authentic, unfiltered, and familiar. That rawness works perfectly with a snippet of the Flo app showing how it can guide you if you’re late. It made over 10 million views and 1,600+ comments, with women flooding the section saying things like “This is literally me every month”.

Women experiencing cramps — name a more “universal” struggle to build empathy. A creator shown lying in bed with a heating pad, shifting uncomfortably from side to side. It captures an intimate moment known too well — like a peek into private life, surely not an ad.

“The instant relief you get on your period when you finally pass the blood clot that’s been causing so much pain”. — 3.8M views

The video hits 3.8 million views, with hundreds of women opening up about how they feel — grateful, relieved, and comforted to know they’re not the only ones going through it.

We continued building on hooks of a similar nature, as per our usual approach, replicating the formats that consistently drove engagement. We produced multiple viral videos featuring the app:

“When you wipe and see blood” — 500k+ views

“A realistic morning of day 2 of my period”— 430k + views

“Things we all do when on our period” — 200k+ views

Through this process, we discovered that late or irregular periods were among the most common concerns. This insight led to our most viral format for this campaign.

The “Conversation Starter Hooks”

Initially, we noticed these hooks performing well, so we turned them into open questions that encouraged women to share their experiences and fostered a sense of community. In July, we saw an immediate uplift with this hook.

“ok so was everyone’s period late in July??” — 1.8 Million views and 3600+ comments.

The monthly reference made the content feel timely and relevant. We kept experimenting with variations and subtle tweaks.

“Anyone else waiting for their August period?” — 3.6 million and 13k+ comments

“So everyone’s period is late in August?” — 3.2M views and 1,600 comments

“Everyones period is late in September?” — 1.4M views and 6k+ comments

Non-question variations also performed incredibly well. Once a hook goes viral, it’s often best to generate new combinations and keep testing — rather than sticking to a single winning format.

POV: You’re just enjoying being a girl and suddenly realise your period is late — 322k views

You never want to get stuck in one format. With Flo — as with every client and project — we keep iterating constantly to uncover new formats and angles.

The Chat Screenshot One-Slide Format:

Flo has a partner feature where you share cycle and pregnancy information with your partner. None of the formats we originally ran worked. The one-slide chat screenshot worked on another campaign, and it was the perfect one for this feature.

“If he wants to, he WILL.”–2.9M views

Celebratory Humor Format:

Another viral format that got traction was the “Celebratory Humor Format.” We didn’t just want to focus on the challenges or frustrations women face, we also wanted to highlight the lighter, more joyful moments that come with them.

Going the polar opposite of frustration, pain and challenge, we tried to highlight the joyful moments. With “yes, i got my periods”, we turn anxiety into relief and trigger the opposite emotion, which also turns out to perform.

Straight-Out-of-Deep-Research:

Remember the deep research from above? It served as a basis for multiple hooks and formats mentioned here, but a specific format we found directly there worked again and again. It did us well, minting multiple millions of views.

“How much period blood we think we lose vs how much we actually lose”
— 5M+ views

Winning a battle — and ready for many more

We hit 55M+ views with a 2.7M engagement rate. While Aavia leaned on endless wall-of-text videos and Musa focused on Gen Z-oriented app-screenshot hooks, both strategies missed the most valuable audience for these apps: women aged 25+ and millennials. Gen Z and teenagers simply aren’t the paying demographic here. From the half dozen agencies Flo put us in competition with, we outperformed by an order of magnitude — driven by our long-term multi-format, and more advanced strategy. This project is one that drives high impact and is a true delight to work on. A significant share of Flo’s growth this year has come from TikTok organic, and we’re proud to be one of the team that helps to maintain this momentum.