A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:28:55 · Isaiah Granet
[00:28:55] S0: So a key for any social media campaign that you want to be effective is you will have to have a way to engage with it. For the first video, what that was, was there was actually a way you could go to our website, talk to it, and people could post videos. And say, how great it was and, this and that. And what we realized was, well, we have an amazing tool at our disposal. We have a phone number you can just call and when you call it, you can just experience our voice AI. And so we said, all right, how do we get the word out about this? And for us, part of that is you have to invest in order to make someone realize that it's worth their attention. Part of what you're doing with physical advertising is saying, this is so important to me, I'm going to take up a little bit of your world to try and get some attention. And you want to be thinking about, what am I giving back? And putting the phone number on the billboard is this really clear CTA. It's very interesting and then you throw in this sort of controversy. And what I always say is, any time that you're trying to be controversial, you want to walk the line. Which is you want to get people riled up without being furious. Fury is a very tough emotion to handle, but riled up is posting, engaging and what we posed the question was still hiring humans. And we didn't say stop hiring humans like I said. We didn't try and go and say humans are worse than AI. We don't believe that. What we just said was, here's a question, and then here's a phone number posing that question. Why is there a phone number there? And what most people don't know is we only bought two billboards. It was one around the corner from our office and one somewhere else in San Francisco.