Scaling a video app to 800M users, one market at a time

CapCut is one of the fastest-growing video editing apps in the world, built by ByteDance to give anyone the tools to make TikTok-ready content in minutes. By the time WinzeeDigital came on board, CapCut had already proven itself at home. The next step was scaling that same momentum across the US and Europe, markets with higher acquisition costs, stronger competition, and audiences that don't respond well to creative built for somewhere else.

The brief was simple to state and hard to execute. Keep installs growing, keep cost per install sustainable, and do it without losing the creative energy that made CapCut feel native to TikTok culture in the first place. That meant building a system that could keep producing new, relevant creative as fast as its audience scrolls.

The strategy

We built a TikTok-first creative engine to test UGC-style ads at scale across the US and Europe. Paid acquisition ran across Google and Meta at the same time, with creative performance on TikTok feeding directly into what we tested on the other platforms. The media spend got smarter every week because the three channels were learning from each other instead of running in isolation.

The creative

European creative was rebuilt market by market rather than translated from the US version. Different hooks, different pacing, different cultural references for each country, because what worked as a UGC hook in the US rarely worked the same way in Germany or France. On the retention side, we built a Meta retargeting loop aimed at the points where users typically drop off, designed to lift D7 and D30 retention so install growth translated into people who kept editing.

The results

CapCut now counts 800M+ monthly active users worldwide (Sensor Tower, April 2026), with the US and European markets performing as stable, scalable acquisition channels. The creative-to-media feedback loop kept cost per install efficient even as spend scaled, and market-specific European creative outperformed the translated approach it replaced.