In a Tiktok video with over 3 million views, a woman with a fluffy, maximum coat sits in the back seat of a luxury SUV, parked in the middle of a New York City street. At the top of the video with 6 seconds, a text line reads, “Our bodyguards took us Matcha.” The camera is magnified in two intimidating men with full red bonds, each wearing an icy latchas while walking back in the car.
In a similar video, a young woman films a soft chevrolet peripheral as she pulls in front of her home. A man in a suit opens the door for her before she is hiding away, surrounded by other stoic men, professionally dressed. They traverse her luggage of size as she enters the airport, safely accompanying her on her flight as she boasts in the text in the video: “Pov ordered you security to take you to the airport.”
These posts were in strategic times with the start of a new app called Protector, which debuted last week in Los Angeles and New York City, allowing ordinary people to order a security detail as service security. But the videos were not organic.
“We have posted 14 parts of the (defenders) content which resulted in 15 million views and over 30,000 downloads,” wrote women from the video Matcha, Fuzz and Fuzz, in a tiktok, revealing that they were employed to make these videos.
Another creator, Camille Hovsepian, was not organically promoting the app, nor a spokesman for the defender told Techcrunch. Creator’s boyfriend, serial entrepreneur and growth hacker Nikita Bier, is a defender’s adviser.
In the Bier Game Book, which won its application purchases from Discord and Facebook, Bait Rage is part of the entertainment.
“Once you make 8 figures, you don’t have to lose the rest of your life trying to get higher gradually – how to make a startup B2B Saas,” Bier wrote in a recent post on X. “instead, you need to think of ways to pierce millions of people online every day starting the controversial concepts of apps, for pure love.”
Although the bier growth strategy is artificial, it has proven successful in the generation of buzzing. Recently he advised a health application empowered by him to change his name from most days at death, then told the app to add a study that predicts exactly how and when users will die. Of course, the app was shot at no.6 on the health tables in the iOS application store and took a cry in the late show with Stephen Colbert.
“I tell you to rename your app: 24,000 dollars/month,” Bier wrote on X. “Your app in a joke in Colbert: No price.”
But for the defender, whom Bier describes as “uber with guns”, the idea is more tense than adding a delightful feature to a health application.
Defendant guards are an active task or recent retirement law enforcement, which each has permission issued by the government to hold firearms and work as a guard. Employing a security detail on the defender will cost users at least $ 1,000 for a minimum of five hours, plus an annual $ 129 membership fee.
According to Appfigules estimates, an application intelligence firm has been downloaded by US -based iOS users about 97,000 times in the first week after the beginning of February 17. About one -third of those discharges came on the beginning day after climbing no. 3 on the App Store travel tables. This initial curiosity about the app has slowed though; Since February 27, it sits on no. 70 in the travel table.
Although people are downloading the app – perhaps out of full curiosity – these installations do not guarantee that people will actually pay to use it.
The intended consumer of the defender is unclear, as it is difficult to imagine what kind of person would be on board with the payment of over $ 1,000 for such a noticeable, unnecessary service. Perhaps as another tactic to increase engagement, the protector has called for a very specific audience: business leaders who are concerned about their safety after the killing of UNITESHEALTHCARE CEO Brian Thompson (who is likely to have access to corporate safety anyway).
“If a defender were present (when Thompson was killed), the crisis could have been avoided,” the company claims in a video of X. Guard of security in the video, then goes through three possible scenarios, where he claims he could have prevented the attacker from committing the killings.
With such a minimum possible customer base, it is not clear how the protector will be able to hold himself.
But for now, the app has backed by angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan. Former A16Z general partner is known for the loss of a public bet that Bitcoin’s price would reach $ 1 million, and it has a special interest in supporting the “beginner societies” and “network states” such as prospéra, Honduras. Last year, he further leased this goal by renting an island near Singapore to host a 90-day “school school”, which he described as “a technocapitalist college” for “all those who do not feel part of the establishment” and believes that “Bitcoin succeeds”.
While “Uber with weapons” is less extreme than to approve the islands to be part of a larger, Bitcoin -based revolution, applications like “protector” can have a more direct effect on medium people.
The defender is not the first company to follow this concept. Blackwolf, an app that also offers armed ridershare drivers, operates in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennesses and Texas; Appfigures estimates that Blackwolf has been downloaded about 256,000 times since the beginning in 2023.
Like the defender, Blackwolf has relied on extravagant marketing on social media and afraid to be afraid, capitalizing news of driverless cars that have been vandalized. The founder of Blackwolf Kerry Kingbrown encourages viewers to use his service instead of taking a way out, like other alternatives, more reasonable as Uber and Lyft do not exist.
These tactics are reminiscent of the citizen, the community -sourced crime reporting application that offers a $ 20 per month service, where users can be linked to an emergency security agent.
If these new applications can learn anything from the citizen, is that public safety incentives and starting growth do not mix. This was especially clear in a wild incident when citizens’ founder and CEO Andrew Frame promoted the direct feature of the app by broadcasting a seven-hour maneuver for a suspected arson, providing $ 30,000 for information leading to the arrest of the man. But after exploding reports to all Los Angeles users to join the pursuit, it turned out that they had a wrong son – Los Angeles police arrested an innocent suspect.
Although the citizen is still working – and the frame remains CEO – his mistakes approach as the defender prepares his future announcement. The defender is not just working on “Uber for weapons”. He plans to launch an app called “Patrol” where users can collect security guards to observe their neighborhoods. The more they donate money users, the higher the security level they can unlock, including robots and drones to monitor the area.
It is a controversial business action at a time when the confidence of Americans in law enforcement has waved in the wake of high profile police killings.
“We are not goods police officers,” said a security guard in a promotional video for the patrol. “We are real policemen.”
