A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:34:41 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[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. [00:34:49] S0: Yes, this is an unpopular decision to do immediately after you raise $20 million. But what we realized was it is easy in the AI era to rack up old sounding numbers of ARR. But if you want to build an enduring business, you have to sell to the right people and what we realized was we had, you know, this $1 million of revenue that we caught that was just going to ask for things that we didn't want to build. They were white labelers. They were resellers. They were building agencies, perfectly fine businesses, by the way, just not what we wanted to build and they wanted, all of this tooling and technology that we didn't want to create. And I would say that even the three months that we were serving them from January to, you know, April caused probably about a year's worth of damage on our product roadmap of things that we had to support, that we had to undo, tech debt. I mean, we were late to fire these customers and my best advice, again, to founders is focus, focus, focus. If you find yourself constantly dealing with people that aren't your core customer to maintain an ARR metric, understand the debt comes due someday and it might be the right decision to hold on to them early stage. Sometimes you do have to show momentum and ability to sell for fundraising, but sooner or later it will come that you have to deal with that.