In a TikTok video with over 3 million views, a woman in a fluffy, maximalist coat sits in the back seat of a luxury SUV, parked in the middle of a New York City street. Atop the 6-second video, a line of text reads, “our bodyguards got us matcha.” The camera zooms in on two intimidating men in full suits with red ties, each carrying an iced matcha latte as they walk back to the car.

In a similar video, a young woman films a sleek Chevrolet Suburban as it pulls up in front of her house. A man in a suit opens the door for her before she’s whisked away, surrounded in the car by other stoic, professionally dressed men. They wheel her carry-on-sized luggage as she enters the airport, safely escorting her to her flight as she brags in the on-video text: “pov you ordered security to take you to the airport.”

These posts were timed strategically with the launch of a new app called Protector, which debuted last week in Los Angeles and New York City, allowing ordinary people to order a Secret Service-like security detail. But the videos weren’t organic.

“We posted 14 pieces of content for [Protector] which resulted in 15 million views and over 30,000 downloads,” the women from the matcha video, Fuzz and Fuzz, wrote in a TikTok, disclosing that they were hired to make these videos.

The other creator, Camille Hovsepian, was not organically promoting the app, either, a Protector spokesperson told TechCrunch. The creator’s boyfriend, serial entrepreneur and growth hacker Nikita Bier, is an adviser to Protector.

In Bier’s playbook, which earned his own apps acquisitions by Discord and Facebook, rage bait is part of the fun.

“Once you make 8 figures, you shouldn’t waste the rest of your life trying to get incrementally higher — like doing a b2b saas startup,” Bier wrote in a recent post on X. “Instead, you should be thinking of ways to piss off millions of people on the internet each day by launching controversial app concepts, for pure love of the game.”

Though Bier’s growth strategy is artificial, it has proven successful in generating buzz. He recently advised an AI-powered health app to change its name from Most Days to Death Clock, then told the app to add a survey that predicts exactly how and when users will die. Sure enough, the app shot to No. 6 on the health charts in the iOS app store and got a shoutout on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“Me telling you to rename your app: $24,000/mo,” Bier wrote on X. “Your app in a joke on Colbert: Priceless.”

But for Protector, which Bier describes as “Uber with guns,” the idea is more tenuous than adding a gimmicky AI feature to a health app.

Protector’s guards are active duty or recently retired law enforcement, each of whom has government-issued permits to carry firearms and work as a guard. Hiring a security detail on Protector will cost users at least $1,000 for a minimum of five hours, plus a $129 annual membership fee.

According to estimates from Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, Protector has been downloaded by U.S.-based iOS users about 97,000 times in the first week after its February 17 launch. About a third of those downloads came on launch day, as it climbed to No. 3 on the App Store’s Travel charts. This initial curiosity around the app has slowed down, though; as of February 27, it sits at No. 70 on the Travel chart.

Though people are downloading the app — perhaps out of sheer curiosity — these installs don’t guarantee that people will actually pay to use it.

Protector’s target customer is unclear, since it’s difficult to imagine what kind of person would be on board with paying over $1,000 for such an ostentatious, unnecessary service. Perhaps as another tactic to boost engagement, Protector has made appeals to a highly specific audience: business executives who are concerned about their safety after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (who would likely have access to corporate security anyway).

“If a Protector was present [when Thompson was killed], crisis could have been averted,” the company claims in a video on X. The security guard in the video then runs through three possible scenarios where he claims he could have deterred the assailant from committing murder.

With such a minimal potential customer base, it’s not clear how Protector will be able to sustain itself.

But for now, the app has backing from angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan. The former a16z general partner is known for losing a public bet that the Bitcoin price would reach $1 million, and he has a special interest in backing “startup societies” and “network states” like Prospéra, Honduras. Last year, he furthered this goal by renting an island near Singapore to host a 90-day “Network School,” which he described as “a technocapitalist college town” for “everyone who doesn’t feel part of the establishment” and believes that “Bitcoin succeeds the Federal Reserve.”

While “Uber with guns” is less extreme than adopting islands to be part of a larger, Bitcoin-based revolution, apps like “Protector” could have a more direct effect on average people.

Protector isn’t the first company to pursue this concept. BlackWolf, an app that also offers armed ride-share drivers, operates in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas; Appfigures estimates that BlackWolf has been downloaded about 256,000 times since launch in 2023.

Like Protector, BlackWolf has leaned on extravagant social media marketing and fearmongering, capitalizing on news of driverless Waymo cars being vandalized. BlackWolf founder Kerry KingBrown urges viewers to use his service instead of taking a Waymo, as though other, more reasonable alternatives like Uber and Lyft do not exist.

These tactics recall Citizen, the community-sourced crime-reporting app that offers a $20 per month service where users can connect with a security agent in an emergency.

If these new apps can learn anything from Citizen, it’s that the incentives of public safety and startup growth don’t mix. This was especially clear in an egregious incident when Citizen founder and CEO Andrew Frame promoted the app’s livestream feature by broadcasting a seven-hour manhunt for a suspected arsonist, offering $30,000 for information leading to the man’s arrest. But after blasting notifications to all Los Angeles users to join the pursuit, it turned out that they had the wrong guy — the Los Angeles police arrested an innocent person.

Though Citizen is still operating — and Frame remains CEO — its mistakes loom large as Protector prepares its next announcement. Protector isn’t just working on “Uber for guns.” It plans to launch an app called “Patrol,” where users can crowdfund security guards to surveil their neighborhoods. The more money users donate, the higher the level of security they can unlock, including robots and drones to monitor the area.

It’s a controversial business move in a time when Americans’ trust in law enforcement has wavered in the wake of high-profile police killings.

“We’re not mall cops,” a security guard said in a promotional video for Patrol. “We’re real cops.”