A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:37:53 · Dan Novaes
[00:37:53] S0: If I were starting in this space, right, again, and I didn't have, like, a huge UA budget, and even if I did have a UA budget, like, you know, I would do this, and we are doing this, but we see a lot of apps, right? We're always in the business of looking for new products that have product market fit, and I'm meeting all these, like, 20-something-year-olds that, you know, were basically me 10 years ago, you know, doing these, like, one-off apps, and the amount of times that I have seen, like, how have you scaled this? It's not through paid user acquisition. It's not them going to Facebook and Google. Like, sometimes they do that a little bit, but a lot of them don't even know how to do that. What they're doing is, there's this idea of clipping, right, which, you know, you can essentially, that's how a lot of the, uh, big kit guys and YouTubers are growing their channels, and this is slightly different. It's like, basically, they get creators, and creators is different than influencers. Creators are people that are good at making those little short-form TikToks and, you know, reels, et cetera, and they basically pay them, like, $30 to $50 per video and give them basically, hey, look, I have this product. I need you to create captivating content for, like, a specific niche and then post it on, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever, and basically, it's like one video a day, but if you think about it, say every video is $30 and it's 30 videos, it's about $1,000 a month. If you get 30 creators that are doing that, you're getting, 30 times 30, you're posting 900 videos. Of 900 videos, if you mathematically think about how the algorithm generally operates, if 1% goes viral, that's nine videos, right? Some of those videos will get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. Those people then see that video, it feels organic because these people are good creators. They're not, it doesn't feel like an ad.
00:39:32 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:32] S1: And the difference between them and influencers is just the number of followers. These guys will have no followers effectively.
00:39:37 · Dan Novaes
[00:39:37] S0: They most of the time have no followers. And in fact, they're actually, their entire job is to just make videos for you effectively. And that's like, and then you can give them like bonuses on that, but it has to be, it has to feel organic, right? That's what they're really good at. And look, if you want to look at who did this really well and actually got an exit out of it, relatively bootstrap team, the Cal AI guys, right? Cal AI sold to MyFitnessPal. I can't remember if it was like 50 or 75 or whatever. They had thousands of these guys, right? And essentially like, you know, that's working really well right now, right? So tactically, that's a great opportunity for you to, it's something that I see, it's like almost the language. Like, you know, it's, I think like, you know, I'm middle-aged millennial, I guess I'm 37, right? In my 20s, the big growth loops were the shares and the referrals and you could do stuff with like texting, like mass texting. And then the generation before me, when I was in college, it was the email stuff, like how LinkedIn grew and Dropbox and all that stuff. So if you think about it, it's like that was the referral system. The next referral system was, you know, kind of what we were doing in the apps and like, you know, but these things get shut down over time because people, you know, capture. The one I see now that's most common with these like 20-somethings and like the Gen Z is this content creator-led marketing because the algorithm in TikTok and Instagram are incentivized to help accounts with zero followers grow or else it messes up their loop. Like how do people become creators? And so as long as you can post stuff that resonates with people, feels authentic, you're going to get views. And so it's a great addition to paid marketing and paid marketing today is getting more and more competitive because in the world of AI, products are easy to build, eCPMs are going up and it's becoming harder and harder and the payment periods go longer and longer and you're competing with like the TikToks of the world on budgets and it's very difficult.
00:41:24 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Novaes
[00:41:24] S1: Do you think on the creator-led, do you think it works for consumer and B2B or do you need to have like a mass market, you know, like Duolingo, I'm Duolingo, like no brainer to do this because everybody could use it, right? But does it matter or if you're B2B in a niche, you just got to find the right creators? [00:41:39] S0: I actually think that like the niche is actually the best. Like think about how TikTok actually works, right? Because it's like if I'm a nurse and I only talk about nurse stuff, the algorithm's going to know, show this to nurses. It's the best time ever in history to start a niche business, I think because with this strategy at least because the algorithm will find the people who care about whatever you're talking about. And so B2B is great too. Like B2B is even better if it's a niche B2B product. Like if I build tech software solutions for plumbers, I can create a lot of great content. [00:42:11] S1: Yeah, walk me through how to do that. I mean, I've got a company, for example, doing B2B SaaS, AI B2B SaaS for property managers, right? Like short term, like you sell things, you have an Airbnb or whatever, right? They sell software that helps you make, you do that better. And they're like, you know what? I'm spending on Google, I'm spending on Instagram, I'm doing all this stuff. It's okay. Nothing's flying. I want to do this creator-led strategy. What do I do?
00:42:30 · Dan Novaes, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:30] S0: I think like, yeah, figure out what are the problems that property managers are going to focus on, right? It's like everyone's worried about what AI is going to do for their properties or how they should be using AI. I'm focused on videos that tell them like, here's what the top property managers are doing and it's like almost a listicle and the services they're using, right? And then embed your service in there, like as one of the services. It needs to feel authentic and organic and that's the same whether we're talking about property managers or whatever, right? I think that there was a guy that was actually able to do this and you might have probably saw it on Twitter. He had created that company called Pulsia or something and it was just AI slop spelled backwards and basically like, he was AI slopping like any niche effectively but he's still like 10 million AR in like a few weeks, right? And the content wasn't even good. Like I remember like looking at the videos, like I was signing up to all of them. I was like everyone because I like to look at the growth loops and I was just like, this is wild. Like, you know what I mean? Just out of interest, it was interesting. But you see, that's just the power of like that highly niche effective marketing. [00:43:31] S1: But you, just to be clear, you make that, you make the video yourself or you just have an idea of what the video is and you let them know?
00:43:31 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Novaes
[00:43:31] S1: But you, just to be clear, you make that, you make the video yourself or you just have an idea of what the video is and you let them know? [00:43:37] S0: I think to do this well, you need to have someone that like, it probably should be the founder if you don't have the time or you're a larger company, like you need to have someone that can really understand like the process of the script and the content creation and what you want to get. I think like, there was a good Twitter post around like one of the Cali iFounders I think posted where it's like, if you remove the app from this, the video probably wouldn't make sense to some degree. But it also has to like resonate where it can't be like a, an actual ad or feel like an ad because that's also not going to work. He had broken it down actually I thought in a really thoughtful way and I can't, I can't remember the name of the article, but I would just look it up like he was, he had posted about it and it gave a really good insight. [00:44:17] S1: But let's say, so you have this idea like, okay, let's figure out how to use AI for your business and you figure it out and you got the tools and like this is the general script. Where do you get these creators, especially creators like in your need? How do you find them?