A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:30:24 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:30:24] S2: By the way, how much is a billboard? What does that cost? [00:30:27] S0: So the one by our office was $40,000 and then the one somewhere else in San Francisco is $20,000 for a month. [00:30:33] S2: Okay, so accessible to most seed stage startups.
00:30:36 · Isaiah Granet
[00:30:36] S0: Correct, I would advise, you know, only do it if you have something to say, but it was accessible enough. Although we got a lot of flack from our investors. Are you serious? Are you doing a billboard at seed stage? This is like, a little early and I said, you know what, just trust us and I don't think they did trust us but we did it anyways. Our whole bet here was, what if we made this go really viral? And so as soon as they went up, we went out with an iPhone and we shot this video from the street. And we did some captions, and overlays to make it look like a TikTok video. And then we set up this gigantic influencer campaign where we posted it, then we had a few newsletters go out about it, and then we had this big spread of influencers, and then it just caught fire. I mean, in truly a remarkable way, we at our peak were fielding like seventy thousand phone calls a day to this number. It was insane. The numbers that we were talking about at the time, we didn't hit that until much later into 2025. The scale of individual people calling in my in this manner and at the time it was a very, very big deal, and it got this huge wave of business that we had no idea how to handle. I look back and I love this campaign we spent in total about $400,000 on it. It was amazing put us on the map but we also had no sales reps, we had no HubSpot, we had no sales. We had zero way to capture, quite literally, three months of funnel. Three months of back to back to back to back to back meetings that we got out of this. We had no way to capture it.