How I beat the US TikTok market as an outsider

This will be a series of articles aimed to explained in a detailed way how I managed to succeed getting into the US market with TikTok and how I'm leveraging the AI to make content for my different accounts while promoting my own apps.

For a long time I treated marketing as something that had to be dealt with after finishing an app. This led me to treat my distribution in a completely different way from what I do today. Bear with me and I will show you how my failures taught me how to do this correctly

An average developer would normally think:

First you build the product -> Then you polish it -> Then you launch it -> Then people arrive.

That was our main fantasy for many years.

The reality is less comfortable. Most apps do not die because the code is bad. They die because nobody notices them. Nobody understands the problem fast enough. Nobody sees the product in the context where attention is already happening.

And if you build consumer apps, that context is not Product Hunt, Hacker News, or your landing page, it is TikTok.

This has been one of the hardest things for me to accept as an indie developer. I like building, shipping and improving the product. But the market does not reward effort in the same way a compiler does. You can spend weeks building something useful and still get no signal at all if your distribution is weak. The market doesn't care about your ideals or what you like, the market wants solutions to problems. If you do not bring solutions you're done for.

This is what takes us to the next point, the right market for my products. For many of the products I want to build, the right people are in the United States. Many of you have asked me why the US. the reason is pretty simple the US market is bigger, has more purchasing power, and is more used to paying for subscriptions, mobile apps, and digital tools. This matters a lot if you are building products around fitness, food, fashion, lifestyle, productivity, or personal finance. A small difference in conversion in that market can completely change the opportunity.

However, the problem if you are not American is pretty obvious. Like me, many of you are from the EU or other countries which are banned from reaping the sweet fruits of the American market through TikTok. My devices, my IP, my App Store, my habits, and my content environment all start from a European context.

So after reading experiments from other indie developers, including posts like the one @alexcooldev shared about TikTok distribution, I decided to build my own US-first TikTok setup.

Start With a Dedicated Phone

The first thing you need is complete device isolation. I did not want to use my personal phone, my normal Apple ID, my Spanish App Store, or a device full of old signals. TikTok has many ways to infer where an account belongs, and the worst possible start is creating a “US account” from a phone that clearly behaves like a non-US device. In my case, because I am an iOS developer, I already had several test iPhones. I used an old iPhone X I had as a spare device. For anyone starting from zero, this is still a very affordable option. You can find old iPhones for around 50 euros on second-hand marketplaces. You do not need the latest device. You need a clean device.

The next obvious question is pretty obvious. Do I need a US SIM card? No you don't. I'm not using it actually, nor an e-SIM either. What matters for TikTok is keeping the device signals aligned.

Reset the iPhone and Make It a US Device

The first step is to reset the iPhone completely. Once the phone starts from zero, configure it as if it were a US phone. Choose English as the language and United States as the region.

This matters more than it seems. The selected region affects the App Store, which is one of the signals TikTok can use to understand where the device belongs. If your language, region, store, IP, and account data are inconsistent, the account starts looking strange before you even publish anything. You want to make the setup coherent.

Set up:

-Region: United States.

-Language: English.

*Important: Later, the VPN location, phone area, and address should also match the same general geography.

Create Fresh Accounts

At this point you need a new Apple account. Do not reuse old accounts. Do not use accounts connected to other experiments. Do not use anything that already has history in another country or another context. I recommend creating a new Gmail account first and using that to create the Apple ID.

One of my first fears when creating one was the phone number I'd have to hand them. During the Apple account creation, Apple will ask for a phone number to verify the account. In this step, do not panic. That number is used to send you a code and verify the creation process. It is not necessarily the number that will define your App Store account.

Again, keep it in mind: Fresh email. Fresh Apple ID. Fresh TikTok account. Fresh device state.

If TikTok sees a strange mix of old signals, mismatched regions, and accounts connected to other locations, it will not spend time trying to understand your situation. It will just classify the account as suspicious and shadowban you.

Configure the US App Store

Once the Apple account exists, the next step is making sure the App Store is also configured for the United States.

On the iPhone:

Settings-> Media & Purchases-> View Account.

From there, you can create or configure the Apple ID used for App Store purchases.

This is where you need to enter US account details.

The important part is consistency. If later you are going to use a dedicated IP in New York, your address, phone area code, and time zone should not point to California. They should make sense together.

I used GPT to generate a US-format phone number and address aligned with the location I planned to use for the VPN. The payment method can be set to None.

After this, the phone is effectively operating as a US iPhone from the App Store point of view, without needing a US SIM.

Up to this point, you can do the setup from your normal home Wi-Fi. The VPN becomes important in the next stage.

Use a Paid VPN With a Dedicated US IP

Now comes the location layer.

You need a VPN or proxy that makes the phone appear to be in the United States. There is a lot of debate in the indie community about which option is best. Some people prefer proxies. Others use VPNs. In my case, NordVPN has worked well, but the specific provider is less important than the type of IP you use.

Just avoid free or heavily shared VPNs. Clunky and free VPNs share the same IP ranges, those IPs are more likely to be flagged, abused, or treated as low-quality signals. For this setup, I prefer a paid VPN with a dedicated IP.

I used NordVPN with an annual subscription and added a dedicated IP. When choosing the IP location, I selected the United States and chose New York as it is closer to Spain compared to the West Coast, so latency is better. Keep in mind that what matters here is to keep everything coherent for TikTok, that's why I made the rest of the account data match that location.

If the dedicated IP is in New York, the phone area, address, and time zone should be compatible with New York. The country alone is not enough. The region inside the country also matters.

At this point, you have a clean iPhone, a US App Store, a fresh Apple ID, and US network coverage through a dedicated IP.

Now you can install TikTok.

Create the TikTok Account

Download TikTok from the US App Store and create a new account.

Again, use a fresh email. It can be the same new email you created for the Apple ID, or another new one. What matters is that it must not have any kind of history attached to old experiments.

After creating the account, I recommend editing the profile immediately. Add the profile image, username, and bio at the beginning. In my first account experiment I waited a few days before editing the profile and got shadowbanned right after making those changes. It may have been a coincidence, but I now prefer to make the account look complete from the start.

Now it's doomscrolling's time:

Do not post immediately. This is where many people make the mistake of treating TikTok like a publishing tool before the account has any behavior. A brand-new account that instantly starts posting content is not how most normal users behave.

Before publishing, the account needs to look like a real user.

✅ Day 1: Search and Watch

On the first day, go to the search tab and look for your niche. If the app is about calorie tracking, search for topics around weight loss, calorie deficit, meal prep, fitness meals, high-protein recipes, food mistakes, and similar content.

Then spend around 30 minutes watching videos in that niche. Watch them fully, scroll normally. Do not like posts. Do not follow accounts. Do not behave like a bot trying to complete a checklist.

The goal is to simulate real consumption.

Imagine a teenager doomscrolling inside one topic of interest. That is closer to the behavior you want than a marketer trying to force signals into an account.

At this stage, the account is learning and being learned by the platform.

✅ Day 2: Add Light Engagement

On the second day, repeat the search behavior, but start adding light engagement.

Like some videos, especially those with strong engagement or those that are very close to the kind of product you are building.

Do it slowly.

Do not open ten videos and like all of them in ten seconds. Watch the content. Let the video play. Like only the ones that make sense.

You can also follow a few relevant accounts, but keep it limited. I would stay under five follows at this stage.

Saving posts is also useful. TikTok treats saves as a strong interest signal, so I like saving a few posts with more than 50k likes inside the niche.

✅ Day 3: Start Training the For You Feed

From the third day, you can start using the normal feed more actively.

By now, TikTok should already have some early idea of what you care about. Your job is to correct it. When the feed shows relevant content, watch it, like it selectively, save some posts, and maybe follow a small number of accounts. When the feed shows content that has nothing to do with your niche, press and hold the video and choose Not interested.

This is important because it tells TikTok not only what you like, but also what you do not want.

You can also start commenting on posts with strong engagement. If you do not know what to write, look at existing comments, understand the tone, and write a natural variation. The comment does not need to be brilliant. It just needs to look like something a real person in that niche would say.

At this point, the account is no longer empty. It has search behavior, watch history, likes, saves, follows, negative feedback, and comments.

✅ Day 4: Start Posting Slowly

One post per day is enough at the beginning. You do not want to flood the account with content before understanding how TikTok is classifying it.

The first posts are not only about reach. They are about signals.

Does the niche respond? Does the hook create retention? Does the visual stop the scroll? Does the problem generate comments? Does the format get saves? Does TikTok push the video to the right audience?

At this stage, your activity should be focused on learning than going for volume.

If the account gets bad early signals, posting more will not solve the problem. It will only create more bad data.

✅ After One Week: Automate Carefully

After a week, if the account is stable and the first content tests are running, automation starts to make sense.

There are tools like PostBridge, Genviral, and Postiz that can schedule and publish content. I personally use PostBridge, but any of them can work if the workflow fits your needs.

The useful part is not only scheduling but connecting these tools to a larger AI content system. For example, you can build a pipeline that researches viral formats, extracts hooks, generates script variations, creates or edits vertical videos, adds captions, prepares descriptions, schedules posts, tracks performance, and then uses the results to generate the next batch, that is where this becomes interesting.

Once you understand the niche and the account is correctly positioned, AI can help you test more angles with less manual work.

The content superpowers

The technical setup matters as you would not be able to play this game without it. However, as stated, you still need the tools to promote your work and that's where automation of content comes in.

I got a whole system covering this: how I research formats, create scripts, generate videos, and post them automatically without depending on tools like OpenClaw, just your normal AI subscriptions.

If that process is useful to you, leave a comment and I will explain the full workflow in detail.