A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:32:08 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:32:08] S2: Let’s dig into a few pieces. The first one, just in terms of channels, first of all, how many views are we talking in cumulative there? It’s got to be a billion. If the other one was a hundred million, what are we thinking about? [00:32:17] S0: Yeah, about a billion. [00:32:18] S2: So let's say it was a billion views. What’s that split? Is it TikTok, IG, and then everything else is noise? Or how does that play out typically? [00:32:26] S0: So the majority of views came long tail on Instagram, which was just not helpful for us. We don't get a lot of value out of those and then what we found was Twitter and LinkedIn were the most helpful channels by far. I think Twitter is such a powerful channel and it's underutilized by most people right now. [00:32:41] S2: And then walk me through a little more in detail the influencer campaign. I think everybody's familiar with influencer marketing, makes a lot of sense. But how do you make it work? Because you could spend a lot of bad money. That's very ineffective, and you're like, oh, this person got all these followers. Look at their views on their last post, and they post your thing, and it's nothing. And they move on to the next video, and you just. It just wastes $5k or $10k or whatever it is.
00:33:02 · Isaiah Granet
[00:33:02] S0: Yeah, first of all, always negotiate upfront with influencers. So we have a whole guide on how we do this. Which is you're building a relationship in the long run, and you want to make sure that you're working with people that are high integrity, that you negotiate clearly upfront, you set boundaries. But then you also need to be writing the copy and the content for them. Making sure that they're hitting on the pieces that you want. For us, that was, holy smokes, this AI startup is asking, why are you still hiring humans, and creating a conversation in their comment section. And then also making sure that you time it correctly. You want to be perfectly timed between East Coast and West Coast in the United States. And then as the day goes on, you need to understand how the algorithms work for where they're going to try and catch viral content. So X is really interesting. Right now, what we see is the posts that pick up, it's usually about seven to eight hours after the post. So it's actually quite long and what you need to make sure is that you talk the influencers well to that. And then what we do is we actually have European influencers who overnight are posting to keep the view count climbing. And so for mega virality, I could spend an hour alone just talking about how we do it. The short answer is intentionality actually matters. If you find yourself just paying people and not saying, who is watching this? What are they talking about? When are they going to see it? You're not going to have a successful campaign. You're just going to burn cash.
00:34:20 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:34:20] S2: These days, where are you finding these influencers? [00:34:22] S0: Oh, that's a good question. I actually source them manually for the most part, and we pretty much work with micro-influencers to start with. So we try and find people with under fifty thousand followers. [00:34:32] S2: And you're doing it across channels but you're saying LinkedIn and Twitter are actually the best place to have people with ten thousand, let's say, followers on Twitter, as an example. That's a good one? [00:34:40] S0: Exactly, yeah. [00:34:41] S2: So this fuels you to a few million ARR, and then the other move that you made at one point. Which was quite wild, is you, as I understand it, fired half your customers.