A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:22:44 · Isaiah Granet
[00:22:44] S0: Yeah, I hope Upfront doesn't listen to this. But if they do, I've given them a hard enough time. They passed on us and they had to pay about double the price in January. And we went from $100K to $500K in February, and then $500K to a million in March. And at the end of March, we had about $3 million-ish in the bank. And we decided that we were going to do a really big billboard campaign. Everybody's seen the AI billboards today. There were not AI billboards early 2024, and what we did was we put up a phone number on a billboard. And the whole theory was like, you know, physical marketing can be really effective, especially in a digital world. Nobody puts phone numbers on billboards besides for Jesus or rehab and if we did it right, we could get it to go really viral. And so we ended up spending about a quarter of our total runway to put up these billboards that had a phone number on it and said really simply, still hiring humans? And that billboard video ended up getting now, I think, close to a billion impressions across social channels. Today, that number that we put up still gets about three hundred-ish phone calls a day and we ended up flooding ourselves with meetings. We got to $2 million of revenue by the end of April. We raised our Series A from Scale Venture Partners in June. And then immediately afterwards, we turned around and we fired fifty percent of our customers. And we dropped down to sub a million dollars of revenue, which is a whole other story. But to answer, is momentum carried us so far early 2024.
00:24:11 · Pablo Srugo
[00:24:11] S2: So let's go. I mean, there's a bunch of key moments there that I think are really important. The first one is the January moment where you put out a video and it goes viral. Now you've had time to reflect. Everybody wants to go viral with a launch demo, like everybody, right? And now, it's super polished and there's all these things. First of all, did you engineer it or was it pure luck? What do you think you got right, thinking back to that moment? Because that was the on switch, right? After that, you started to do more of it.
00:24:36 · Isaiah Granet
[00:24:36] S0: Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. My short answer is, is if you're praying for virality, it won't happen. You have to understand the first thing about marketing is that you are never just getting attention. What you're actually doing is you're trading. You have to offer some value in return and for us, there was a lot of thought that went into this whole campaign. So the first video, we shot it on Christmas. It was all through Christmas Eve. My poor head of marketing, who was our third hire, was filming it and we went back and forth seven times. And the video, the whole thing that we wanted to do and we focused on was show the latency. And we did it with a little bit of controversy. And you always have to have a little bit of controversy. So we showed the latency, and then we made the call about politics. So we made the call a political survey phone call, specifically to get people engaged about the content and the idea that we were pushing. And we did it very Casey Neistat style, if anyone's familiar. So at the time, 2023 was sort of tail end of a lot of popularity, very plain background. Here's a phone, here's a timer, here's the content that's being said overlaid digitally, and then we put it up, and basically we paid influencers. Which was also not as common in software at the time, to go do reposts of that, and we ended up having it catch and go viral. We did have a lot of tailwinds at the time. Voice AI was so novel and new that just the idea that you could talk to it was so unique for people. And we focused on this idea of it's not a fake demo. This is real, it's here, you can try it.
00:26:07 · Pablo Srugo
[00:26:07] S2: I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it. It's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. So I, you know, there's a few things to point out there. First of all, you have to, I think people miss this. You almost have to latch on to some tailwind that's bigger than you, right? Voice AI is becoming a thing. People are already interested. They're already in that mindshare. You're not taking them to somewhere else. That's huge just from a starting point and then you add in the way that you shot it, right? Where you're copying something that's working. I know, I don't use TikTok all that much, but my understanding is there are these kind of songs that go viral, right? And if you latch onto that song, your odds of going viral with a video go up. It's kind of the same idea. If there's a format that's kind of working right now, you latch onto that. You're just layering odds of virality on the cake and then the third piece. I mean, the influencer one is the obvious one, right? But, a lot of people, I think, jump to that. It's like, let's just get a bunch of people to reshare this video about something that nobody really cares about in a format that's not that interesting. It's not going to happen. You can't just push your way to virality.
00:27:18 · Isaiah Granet, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:18] S0: Right, and that's the last piece there that you said is probably where on the next campaign we really got it perfect. Which is you should be, for any post that you give to an influencer, a target for your marketing team should be, will this go more viral than their typical post? And what you see for a lot of influencer reposts is it's this artificial boosting. It's not this exponential growth, and what we saw from especially our early campaigns was some people would get followers based off of the fact that they had posted our content. And there's some well known influencers who I won't say their names, but you can go back and look at their reposts and their timing. Our post put them partially on the map because it went so viral, they ended up getting like five thousand or seven thousand additional followers from it. [00:28:01] S2: So that first one, when you say it went really viral. What are we talking about in terms of views, as an example? [00:28:07] S0: I think it was around one hundred million views across all social channels. [00:28:11] S2: That gets you $100k in revenue? [00:28:13] S0: That got us $100k ARR. Look, the product wasn't great back then, I'm not gonna lie to you. We had a lot of work to do and we didn't know who we were selling to. We didn't have any credibility, which is a whole other issue and story. But yeah, the one hundred million views turned into this flood of inbound that we didn't know how to capitalize on and by the seat of our pants, we managed to capture $100k of revenue from that.
00:28:13 · Isaiah Granet, Pablo Srugo
[00:28:13] S0: That got us $100k ARR. Look, the product wasn't great back then, I'm not gonna lie to you. We had a lot of work to do and we didn't know who we were selling to. We didn't have any credibility, which is a whole other issue and story. But yeah, the one hundred million views turned into this flood of inbound that we didn't know how to capitalize on and by the seat of our pants, we managed to capture $100k of revenue from that. [00:28:35] S2: But you saw firsthand, you experienced the power of virality, which I think then leads into this billboard campaign. So now let's go deep on this billboard campaign, which gets you the next, let's say million in ARR. The idea is clear, let's put billboards that are controversial. Offline is not that done, at least back then. So it's a little novel and people will call the number, but that's the really high level. How do you actually execute it?