How I Market Heirloom With UGC, and readheirloom.com Is Now Live

Two things happened for Heirloom this week. I put together a repeatable short-video workflow to market it, and readheirloom.com is now live as the app’s home on the web.

Heirloom is the app I built for reading old handwritten letters. You photograph a letter, diary, or document and get a transcription, the same text in plain modern wording, and an English translation when the original is in another language. Everything sits beside the original page so you can check it. You can find it on the App Store.

The video I made for this post

Here is a 20-second example of the kind of clip the workflow produces.

It is not a real customer, and I want to be upfront about that. It stars an animated letter with a face, and the on-screen letter is an example I wrote, not a real family letter. This one has captions only, with no voiceover.

Why I call it a UGC flow

UGC usually means user-generated content: someone talking to the camera about a product. For a small app, I have found the format useful, but I do not want to fake the “user” part. So my version works a little differently.

I keep the whole thing in a private toolkit I call UGC Machine. It is a set of Python scripts, product briefs, and script files, and it is deliberately boring:

• A brief per product. Who it is for, what they are afraid of, what the video should make them do, and what I am allowed to claim.
• A bank of angles and hooks. For Heirloom, that means things like a letter from 1943 that nobody in the family can read, or an attic box that was kept but never opened.
• A script batch each week. Every script has an ID, a hook, a caption, and a list of the claims it makes, so I can check them against the App Store listing.
• A few ways to render. An animated letter character, a disclosed AI presenter, or screenshots turned into a short story.
• A review step. Frames get checked against the script and the claims before anything is staged.

The scripts do not post anything. I upload to TikTok from my phone and nothing goes live without my yes.

The rules that keep it honest

The more I automated, the more I wanted written rules. These are the ones I hold to:

1. No fake customers. The creator is either an obvious character, like the letter, or me speaking as myself. Never a synthetic person pretending they used the app.
2. Disclose anything synthetic. If a video uses an AI presenter or a synthetic voice, I turn on the platform’s AI-generated content label and say so in the caption.
3. Claims stay inside the listing. Heirloom can misread handwriting, so I never say it reads every word or is perfect. It gives you a draft you can check against the original.
4. One change per batch. If I change the hook and the length at once, I cannot learn anything from the result.
5. Views are not wins. A clip counts only if something I care about moves, like App Store page views from TikTok or downloads. Views just tell me which hook held attention.

That last rule came from experience. Over about a month I posted a lot of short videos across several apps and could not tie them to any measurable App Store traffic. Posting more was not the answer. Making fewer, more specific videos and tracking where they lead was.

readheirloom.com is live

The other piece of news is that Heirloom now has a proper website at readheirloom.com.

The homepage says what the app does in one line: read the old letters your family kept. It walks through the same idea as the app, from the handwritten page to a faithful reading, then plain modern wording, then a library where letters are kept. There is a sample reading so you can see the result before you commit. On the website, pricing is page-based: one credit reads one page, and you see the exact number before you pay.

The site is also a better place to point people than a short caption. A clip can make someone curious in a few seconds, but a genealogy-minded viewer usually wants a minute to see what the result looks like before downloading anything.

What comes next

The loop is simple: make a batch, review it, post a few clips, then look at the numbers and change one thing. If a hook moves App Store views or downloads, it earns more attention. If it only earns views, I retire it and try another.

I will share what the data says as it comes in, including the clips that do nothing. If you have old letters in a shoebox, you can try Heirloom on the App Store or take a look at readheirloom.com.

Image: The readheirloom.com homepage. The sample letter shown on the site is synthetic.