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The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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- [00:00]
A
David park went from zero to $10 million with his AI startup in the last few years. And he's got this incredible growth tactic playbook. And we actually went through his playbook, paid ads, SEO, influencer marketing, you name it. And this is the most comprehensive, best playbook that I have seen of growth marketing for an AI startup today. It is incredible. And he just gives it to us, the people who listen to this episode to the end. This will actually change lives. Like people actually be able to take some of this, this playbook and implement in their startups. I hope you enjoy this episode. People charge for this stuff, but it's free here on the Startup Ideas podcast. Enjoy the episode. We got David park on the Startup Ideas podcast. I learned about him through this post. How to go from 0 to $5 million air profitably step by step when absolutely bonkers. Viral 4.5000 likes. He talks about organic short form content, influencer marketing, SEO, paid ads. Now this isn't just a clickbaity hook. He actually goes through exactly the playbook for how to grow. And he's grown himself. He's done it himself. He's actually since then gone to $10 million ARR with his startup Jenny AI. So I had to have him here on the pod. And we're going to just by the end of this pod. What I hope to get out of David, is some growth tactics for you to do the same. So grow tactics to go from zero to $10 million ar profitably. David park, welcome to the pod.
- [02:24]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I wrote this a while ago now, so I'll kind of be reading along with you guys and I'll kind of be adding more context as I explain things that we did to go from 0 to 5 million. And then I actually haven't written the 5 to 10 million revenue post. So we'll be, I guess writing that real time on this podcast and figuring out how I did that. But yeah, I mean if we, if we want to just not waste people's time, we could literally just like jump right into it. If you want to just, if you want to just start getting through posts, I'm happy to do so.
- [02:58]
A
Cool. Yeah. So yeah, let's start with number one. So organic short form content. You basically say you talk about the fresh account versus not fresh account and how you should think about the format, finding a face, craft a viral video series, multiplier accounts. What do you mean by this?
- [03:19]
B
Yeah, so I mean that traditionally on social media there was a lot of clout Associated with like a million followers or like check marks or just like I think there was this idea that the history of someone's channel meant a lot, but nowadays that's not really the case at all. Like there are many cases where founders will just make one video on their TikTok and that video will just immediately go viral, which, which you know, no matter how many times I say it, people don't really seem to believe it until they, it happens to one of their friends. But I mean, I'm sure you've had many guests that you know, say the same thing. Like you can literally just make straight up ad about your product. If the hook is good and the content is, you know, high quality, you have a good shot of getting, you know, 10, 100,000, a million views and that's obviously, you know, costs you very little or nothing to do. So this idea of like fresh accounts with you know, one follower, 10 followers versus an account with a million followers, it's not hyperbole. You know, we've had, we've done a lot of a B tests at January, you know, we've, we've posted the same, same content, literally the same content on, you know, our main account that has 70,000 followers and an account that had, I believe at the time like 50 followers. And it's not really that, you know, strange for the account with 56 followers to beat the amount of engagement or the amount of views with the account with more followers. I mean it's really just, you have a chance to really, we live in this very strange time where you can kind of, if your content resonates, it will just immediately be blasted to a million people. And I think that the startups, especially AI startups where you're inherently, your product is kind of a spectacle, you know, like magic is an API call way you can make something that's just pleasant to watch. You could just use that, make some content on it. And yeah, it's not like prior where there were gatekeepers where you needed, you know, lots of followers or anything like that.
- [05:17]
A
So you say here, I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week versus a YouTuber with a million subs if they had similar views. And I don't even think it's a controversial opinion.
- [05:30]
B
I don't think it's a controversial opinion.
- [05:33]
A
What do you mean by that?
- [05:34]
B
I mean if fresh accounts, first of all, like if you look at their, their history, if a fresh account is getting similar views with an account that has, you know, millions of subs, it's probably that the fresh account is just juiced by the algorithm right now and it's, you know, this creator, this type of content is just, it's doing well, it's resonating with people. Whereas this YouTuber with a million subs, they, you know, they're probably, I mean it's probably momentum, right? These fresh account is going up, there's getting a lot of views, they're getting a lot of attention and this million sub account is probably if they're at the same place on the downtrend and you know, they're maybe past their glory or maybe in their twilight years of their content career. And yeah, I mean that's just the high level. But then if you go into the granular details very clearly you should sponsor a fresh account because these fresh accounts, you can pay them literally 1/100th of the price to sponsor because these YouTubers, they've been spoiled by the NordVPN's and the Grammarlys and the, you know, the Sony sponsorships. They expect like $20,000 for a 30 second, you know, video. And the unfortunate part is, you know, you're never going to get an roi, you're never going to get the returns if you're forced to pay you know, 20,000, 30,000 for one social media post. But you know, on the other hand, if there's a new account, everybody wins. You know, this new person made this type of content that you think will also resonate with the people that use your product and they probably have never been paid via social media before. You could pay them something that you believe is fair and they believe is fair. They get paid to do something that they were undoing for free. You get your, you know, your content be seen by, you know, hopefully hundreds, thousands of millions of people. And yeah, I mean if you break it down like that, it's just cheaper. You're betting on something that seems to be on the uptrend versus betting on something that, you know, there's probably their million subs is going to be priced in to whatever you pay for it. So I really don't think it's controversial at all to go for the fresh account.
- [07:36]
A
Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co founders, they're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing, how do you build an audience, how do you go viral on Twitter, all these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to StartupEmpire Co and in the description and, and you say here. But rather than finding and sponsoring these new accounts in your niche, you can actually just create these accounts yourself. You just need to follow this basic format. Can you explain what the format is and just add some context to that?
- [08:43]
B
Yeah. So you could say there's somebody who's has like 10,000 followers and they're doing, you know, numbers on their content. You could either continue to pay them, you know, with partnership sponsorships, where you have to pay them per post. And the. The creator has a little bit of a worry that maybe their account is getting polluted by ads, which, you know, every creator kind of has to do that calculus of like, do I look like I'm selling out? Also I kind of want to pay my rent or there's a new iPhone I would like to get. But the happy middle ground what I found is that you can actually have a creator just make a completely new fresh account again and they can kind of be the face of your product and they'll kind of be telling your, telling the viewers about, you know, educating them about maybe some pain points that your product solves. Just helpful advice, tips, things like that. And like I said before, you know, follower, follower account doesn't really matter in this new age of social media. So, you know, the, I mean, the, the example I gave is like pretty ridiculous. But obviously if any famous person were to make a new TikTok account and they were to make new videos, it would not get 10, I'm trying to avoid saying because it was like the most cliche probably thing you could say, but yeah. So if they made a new TikTok account, it would not get 10 views, obviously. Right. Despite having zero followers, they would probably break the Internet and they will probably get millions upon millions upon millions of views. And that kind of phenomenon is going to happen on varying degrees based upon the creator they partner with. So in fact, you can kind of find this type of middle ground where the creator is not having to pollute their account with ads and you pretty much can get a similar view count. Maybe not initially, but over time the videos will just be pushed back to their original audience anyways, or, you know, other people that maybe aren't part of the original audience, but will also, you know, find their content satisfying because naturally this creator is getting views because they're creating things that have good retention that people want to see. So in that sense, you can find somebody new to be kind of the face of your account for vastly cheaper. You can never convince someone to make, you know, 30 ads, 30 sponsored posts on their main account. It's like, very difficult to kind of convince them to do that. But creating a new account with 30 videos, one video a day on a new account, it's like, it's. It's not that difficult of a sell because, you know, it's. It doesn't really feel like you're selling out at all. So.
- [11:17]
A
Yeah, and can you talk about Mang Meng, Duck, and just that your whole experience? Because I think people listening to this are kind of like, okay, how much do I pay? How do I think about, you know, reaching out to people? Just like, how do I actually do this?
- [11:35]
B
Yeah. So I'll talk later about how to reach out to influencers and how to get partnerships. But unfortunately, there was a bit of nepotism here where Mangmae and Duck and I were part of the same fraternity. So I was able to just kind of like DM him and have him join us at Jenny. I paid him $4,000 a month for 20 videos. We had a pretty good overlap at, at the time, Jenny wasn't really as much ed tech. We're more just like a more broad writing tool. And obviously he was teaching people how to write emails. Like, he was teaching people how to, like, you know, speak to their boss or how to, you know, send a cold email or, you know, anything where it's important to be precise, important to have high quality written content. So when he was the face of our account, you know, like. Like I said before, it started with zero followers. It started completely from scratch. And that same account is now at 70,000 followers. It's probably had half a billion views altogether on that account and other accounts that he posted on. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm reading this. I haven't read this in a long time. Yeah, in our first month, we got 7 million impressions in our first month, which is. It's pretty nuts. Even a video that can get 1 million views, it can add thousands in MRR to your product, depending on, you know, how. How good your product is at converting, depending on if it was pushed to the right Countries where, you know, you have higher conversion rates depending on, you know, if the video is more straight up a sponsorship or if it's more blatantly just telling you about why this product is good. But you know, there's a lot of factors, but like 7 million views that you can essentially get for, if you record yourself for, for free or if you partner up with a someone like Mang ming duck for $4,000, like that's, you know, quite good ROI, I would say.
- [13:23]
A
And when you, when you reached out to Mang Mang Duck, I don't know if you remember, but approximately how many followers did he have?
- [13:33]
B
I want to say he had 300,000 on TikTok. And I, when I say that people are like, well, I could never convince someone with that many followers to do it for $4,000. But I don't know, I think that there's kind of this cognitive distance a little bit where, oh, this person is so famous, this person is so famous. He has so many followers, he has so much influence. They must be raking it in insane amounts of money. But that's not always the case. There are people that just love to create and maybe they either aren't focusing on monetizing or maybe the type of content they make isn't. The type of product that can monetize. Their type of content hasn't reached out to them yet. So I would say that I think this is somewhat of a deal, but within this price range, I would say that's possible to find somebody where you get a similar deal even today. And like I said, if you have somebody that you know, creates good content that's getting similar views, like let's say Meg meng duck has 300k followers and then there's like Mingmeng Bear over here that has 20k followers and they both have similar views. You know, like you could probably get Meng Ning Bear for like a, you know, probably cheaper and the results would probably be the same because they're, it's going to get pushed the same audiences of the people watching them. And if the views are the same for both, it's doesn't really matter. So yeah, at the time I would say he was big, but that doesn't, that shouldn't be a barrier for anybody. Like it doesn't matter how big the creator is. If they have good, if you believe that you guys have good synergy together, then just send the email. You never know what might happen.
- [15:11]
A
And did you have to commit for like a long period of time, like six months or nine months to get this deal, or was it sort of month by month?
- [15:19]
B
I remember we committed, I think three months. Three. We didn't commit for very long. The memory is kind of hazy. It was like three, four years at this point. But it wasn't like a ridiculous lock in or anything. I really think that we both enjoyed working together and that it was a good deal for both of us at the time. And obviously he's off doing crazy, amazing things. And Jenny, he really helped set the bedrock for us in terms of like, you know, we wrote the content blueprint kind of together and I'm really grateful to him. And you know, now we're doing our thing, he's doing his thing. But yeah, it was not like a crazy deal where I had to lock in for 36 months or something like that.
- [16:01]
A
I get, I guess my, my point there is. Well, for you, you didn't have to lock in for a year or more. So that's like amazing. You get to test this channel. But for someone like him, this isn't a one off brand deal. Like getting three or six months of monthly revenue like that. Consistent revenue is interesting. So someone like Mang Mang Duck would rather take $4,000 over $4,000 a month over three to six months than maybe a one shot brand deal for 8,000.
- [16:35]
B
Right?
- [16:36]
A
But you know, it's.
- [16:39]
B
But those come and go, you know.
- [16:40]
A
Those come and go. So I hear that a lot from Create. I hear that a lot from creators. And by the way, I know someone's gonna listen to this and they're gonna be like, you're a creator. It's like, dude, I don't have any ads on this podcast. Like, you know.
- [16:56]
B
No, Greg, if you want to make 20 videos a month for 4000, I would love it if you would, if you would work with us, Jay.
- [17:03]
A
I don't do short form, bro. I don't do short form.
- [17:05]
B
Oh, damn it. Okay, next. In the next life maybe. But yeah, I mean, it's just one final thing to add is, you know, $4,000, 20 vids. It sounds daunting, but you could tell the creator, like, look, these things can literally take you like five, ten minutes a day. It could be really, because you just record maybe a new hook and we'll supply you with like the screen grabs and the videos of our products that we know look pretty, that we know will convert. So every day you kind of have to brainstorm, think about a new hook, record yourself doing a new hook, you know, edit it, post it on, you know, reels, shorts, TikTok and you make $4,000 a month with just very little time spent per day. In some cases we allow them to even, like if it's been a month, you could reuse one of your old hooks that you know did well and you could just maybe you do a little bit of different editing and repost it again and probably go viral again. And it's really 20 videos. Sounds like a lot, but if you think about it as like just three hours to six hours of time in a month, like it's really not that much.
- [18:03]
A
So you say here, when you get a new creator, just follow this basic guideline. Repost vids on all platforms. Reels, TikTok, shorts. Post one plus videos per day. Initially post vids similar to what the influencer posts on their main account. Then start experimenting with videos that feature your product. You can get someone cheaper for similar results. How important is the daily post?
- [18:29]
B
I mean the, the. I probably should have said this in the post, but the importance of like frequency of posting is just you want to be exploring before you exploit, you know. So if you're posting like one video a week, you only have four tests per month to find a hook and like content angle that really works. Whereas you post one video a day, I said one plus, you could post even more than one video a day. You could continually kind of try, you know, different. Like you try like skits or memes or humor or educational content or straight up ads or you know, like play with different angles, build different hooks, text on screen. Like you could try different. Like there's so many things you could kind of be experimenting with and if you at least post one video a day, you can kind of be like methodically xing out, okay, well my product will, if I present it like this, it seems to flop. Like this seems to do okay. Present like this, it seems to flop. Get the winners of your content kind of coliseum and then the next week try with the winning variants and try more things. And eventually you'll get one thing that like one mega banger where it gets like a million to 10 million views. And it's like the most euphoric kind of crazy feeling that you have to kind of like you have to really experience it to put it into words, but you cannot get to that. Sorry. I mean, look, there are going to be like savants out there that they can just, you know, they, they know exactly how to, how to do it from the get go. Like I said, some people can just go viral from the first video. You know, but there are. There are many cases where you won't. And the best way to get to that viral banger is to iterate towards it. And that's why I think you post often.
- [20:09]
A
Yeah, it makes sense. It's just like, shots on goal, right?
- [20:13]
B
You said a way cleaner than me. Yeah, that's what I should have said.
- [20:19]
A
I'm Canadian, so I just think of things in hockey references. You just got to hit it top shelf.
- [20:27]
B
Exactly.
- [20:28]
A
So then you say the entire goal when working with your creator is to find a viral series, because a video that goes viral once will go viral again. So can you talk more about this strategy and why this is the goal?
- [20:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that oftentimes we as humans try to act like we're very complicated, complex people, and we, like, you know, we love all these. We have such eclectic taste, and we want to see all this, like. But I. I don't think that's actually how most people work. I think actually we're kind of creatures of habit, and we always want to see those things that bring us our creature comforts over and over. It's why people always complain that, like, the YouTube algorithm is so shit. They're like, oh, I just get the same videos on my front page every time, you know? But really, it's probably because the behavior of everybody is they just watch the same videos over and over in that same sense. You know, once you have a viral video, that's like, you know, a lot of the difficulty is finding that viral video, and the next part is finding turning that viral video, like, being able to kind of squeeze as much of the upside as you can out of that viral video over and over. So, you know, like, it's not that difficult. I mean, I could give you, like, I have example video series here if we want to talk about it. So I'm sure many people have seen, like, the. The video of, like, a guy is hanging from, like, a pole with, like, sticks of spaghetti, and he sees how many sticks of spaghetti takes to hold his weight, you know, and then he probably realized that went giga viral. So he's like, okay, I could either spend another month, like, workshopping, trying to think of a new idea or execution, or I could literally film the exact same thing but do with coat hangers. That's what he did, and that went viral again. Then he does it with sheets of paper and does it again. And then maybe he gets a little ambitious and he buys, like, broken iPads. He tries with iPads, and that one goes, like, really viral, right? But the end of the day, it's like, it's all literally the same video. It's a minimal effort, and it just goes viral every time. One thing that's kind of going really crazy viral on reels, it's kind of diagnosed lately, but it's someone who says, like, for every follower I have, I'll do X. So for every follower I have, I'll gamble $1. And, like, you have this video. Eventually this Guy's gambling, like, $200,000 on blackjack because he has 200,000 followers. And it's the same thing, right? It's the same hand of blackjack he's, you know, gambling. Every single video I put here, like a guy drinks a cup of milk for every thousand followers he has. You know, it's like, it's slightly more laborious to drink, like, five cups of milk versus one cup of milk, but it's like, you know, it at least saves you the time of having to think of a new viral video every single, you know, just continuously. That's. That's difficult to do. And for us at Jenny, we had, like, point of view, you have a paper or an essay due, and it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realizing that they have an essay due while they're taking a shit or right before they sleep or whatever. And it always ended with the second half, which is exactly the same, which is just either the milk gets chugged, the guy falls because it's not even spaghetti. And in this case, they figure out, oh, Jenny could help me, you know, write my paper faster while, you know, I'm still in the driver's seat. And, you know, it's. That makes me a better student and makes me just, like, remove stress from my life, right? So it's the same thing. Where is it really that much more difficult of you recording five seconds of you, like, in the bathroom and then realizing you have a paper due, or you're walking your dog and you have paper due. It's kind of like once you have something that, you know, people resonate with, you know, it's people like. It's just. It's just something that no matter what you put in front of the hook, as long as it's relatable, it'll always go viral. And you can kind of do it for however long you. You can really do this on many different levels so frequently until the. The market and the audience gets kind of bored of it, which usually happens when the competitors start to copy you and it just gets kind of dull. Then you kind of have to go back in the lab and find something else. But yeah, that's the idea of a viral series.
- [24:21]
A
So I think what isn't said here and I want to talk about is you need to have format, product fit. So don't, don't, you know, this makes sense for you point of view. You have an essay due. If you're building Jenny AI, that makes complete sense. Now if you would have done the a guy drinks a cup of milk for every thousand followers he has and then you're like, okay, sign up to Jenny AI. Doesn't work. Right. But maybe if you're like selling, you know, milk, you have a milk company or something like that or dairy company, that might work. Right. So I think that.
- [24:57]
B
Exactly.
- [24:58]
A
You don't want to, you know, going viral for the sake of going viral is empty calories. You don't really want to do that. Like you have to, you want to go viral with, with a series, with a format, and then you want your product to, to just buckle right in there.
- [25:18]
B
Absolutely. That's. I should have added as well. I mean one to add more color to that. You know, we've had videos where it got 50,000 views and it's converted. So it's literally brought us in hundreds of thousand dollars in revenue. And I remember the saddest time ever was we had one video that got 20 million views. One video. And it, it almost had a negligible effect on like conversions that day for Jenning. It almost. It was as if it. We got zero views, like nothing really happened that day. And yeah, it's just like you said, it's important to create content for people that actually want to convert and want to actually use your product.
- [25:58]
A
Okay, so before we get into number two, influencer marketing, let's just go through this order of virality.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah. So the order of virality. I wrote this a while ago. I'll probably tweak it a little bit. Instead of having one account on each platform, I'd be farming multiple accounts on each platform. I experiment with tons of hooks and video ideas. Different creators. Kind of want to talk about earlier? Eventually you'll get a video that goes viral. After enough experimentation, there's probably step 1.5 where you'll get videos that completely flop. Videos that do. Well, you should probably do some a little snooping, see what your competitor is doing, maybe see in general what's happening in other industries, what's really catching people's attention and then experimenting eventually after all those things. One point that 1.5, you will get a video that goes viral and then like I said before, you want to experience, somehow turn that into a series. How can you like just tweak this video over and over so that you could keep posting it and you can continue to get viewers that, that could convert to, to using your product. You want to start tweaking and posting the series on multiple accounts. So, you know, at our peak, we had probably seven different accounts. Seven different accounts on each platform. So that there's like 24 accounts, 24 videos posted every day. And these, these videos will, you know, even if they don't have that many followers, they, they could, they have a chance of going viral on each of these accounts, which just gives you so much, the surface area of luck just gets so large. Then you could actually translate and create the same video with creators that speak Chinese, Spanish, etc. We approve videos completely in Mandarin. I don't speak Mandarin. So sometimes it's hard to do quality control for these videos. But they convert. We track the UTM clicks, we track the conversions from the coupon codes from these Chinese accounts. They do very well. And then once you kind of feel like you're at the tail end of the, of the cycle, you could take these viral videos, you could sponsor other pages to repost them. You know, there's like this kind of underbelly of Instagram specifically, where there's just like these meme pages that have just insane reach, but they're run by like 17 year olds or like 20 year olds, and you could just pay them like $50 to repost your content. They will take like two weeks to respond because they, they don't, they just like they have other parodies probably just like having social life and stuff, but you basically can just take these videos, repost them on meme pages, they'll have a second life again. They won't reach the same heights as when in the, in the heyday when you're closing them on your accounts, but they'll probably just go viral again to a lesser degree. And then you could always use the mega viral content for paid ads. Um, and then the, the saddest part is eventually enough copycats will copy your video series, it'll get played out, people will just stop responding to it because it's not, it's not something they want to watch anymore. And then you're back to step one, where you gotta be, you gotta be farming out hooks, farming ideas, doing your research, and then running through Lifecycle once more.
- [29:06]
A
Beautiful. On point, on point and very Cool to see. Pov, you have an essay due. That video series has generated 300 plus million views overall. Essentially the same video over and over multiple times a week consistently went viral. And one thing you know, you said that one series, one video series made us half a million dollars. That's one point of it. It's made you half a million dollars in revenue. But you know, for every $1 of revenue, especially in the AI world, you're looking at at least 5, 10, 15, 20x of enterprise value to the business, which is insane. Right? So if you bring in $100,000 of revenue, that might mean your company's worth 500,000. I mean, I'm making things up numbers, but it could be 500,000amillion 1.52. Right. So it's, it's, this is, this is a big deal.
- [30:04]
B
Yeah, it's, I mean, I honestly think, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't aggressive enough when I wrote this out. You know, like you, you, you don't, you don't, you could, you, it's not even. You could post the same video over and over multiple times a week. You could probably post it multiple times a day. You could, like, I, I think that I just, I was pushing the, pushing the amount of times you just repost a similar video over and over. And I guess for some reason multimedia felt right, but I've seen competitors that really just crank it out like five videos a day. I didn't believe that this possibly could be rewarded by the algorithm. Like, how could you possibly want accounts, like why would you reward accounts posting the same videos like five times a day? But the views don't lie. I think that you could crank it up, you could take what I've done to the next level and that could even bring you even more fortune.
- [30:56]
A
Cool. Let's move on to how you actually find influencers because I think this is a black box for a lot of people. They're kind of looking at this and they're like, yeah, cool, but how do I actually get creators on board?
- [31:09]
B
Right, Right. Yeah, I mean, finding influencers, it is kind of a black box. Unfortunately, the non sexy answer is you need to find the influencers that your users watch. Which is, which goes back to the, you know, the very important, like one of the 10 Commandments of YC that you have to talk to users, which I feel like founders like avoid like the black plague. But the good news is if you talk to users, you can really easily see just like the influencers that they follow. You Just ask them, hey, would you mind like, you know, telling me your Instagram handle or telling me like who you follow that has to do with like my product that teaches you about, you know, education or how to be a better student, whatever. And then from there, once you have their handle, you can just like look at who they're following, right? Like that's the best thing about user interviews is a lot of times like you could ask leading questions or you maybe like they might lie to you in the interview to make you feel good or they don't want to hurt your feelings, but if you just ask for their handle, you know, like that, that's, that's they're not lying about who they're following, the people that they're interacting with. So you can just see who are the people that, that they go to for advice that the influencers that actually influence. Like, like that's that those are the people that you actually want to go for, not the influencers with like followers. Like, like you said, where, oh, it'll get you a million views. But you know, if it's just like they follow them because they just like to see a person drink a bunch of milk, like that doesn't do you any good. You want to like who are the people that they, you know, that doesn't show up on their feed? That's the people that they, you know, have some affinity towards. So anyways, you could go to your user Instagram, see which influence they're following and then you can basically do this for several users and, and you have like a pretty good list of people that you could immediately start following or immediately start sponsoring on day one. But there's a lot of other things you could do. Like for example, once you like, you know, there's, there's ways that you could click the influencers profile, click suggest similar accounts view kind of like do a little, you know, look at the current influencer crop that you have that users follow, click suggest similar accounts, see if those influencers, when you go through the content, go through there messaging, does it kind of fit into what you feel like is a similar bucket? Then it's probably not a terrible bet to go after these influences as well. But we have like a pretty interesting kind of. I don't know if it's a hack, but it's what we do for finding influencers. Like, like, like it's a great way to find influencers and I don't know too many people that do it is once you have a list of influencers, you could Create a new Instagram or TikTok account, manually follow all these influencers. You don't follow anybody else. You manually follow these influencers, watch their videos all the way through and the algorithm will start automatically showing you like other influencers that are, you know, in the same bucket. So the algorithm goes out and you know there are people that pay agencies like tens of thousands of dollars to go out and do this influence marketing for them. You can just not do that. You just take your influence that you have, make a new TikTok or Instagram account, Just watch these influences. You kind of be. You kind of like, it's great because you also become your user in a way. You start to see what they see and you start to like, like be, be in their shoes a little bit. And you can, you can see the craziest steals. You'll find the craziest deals if you do this, do this strategy because occasionally you'll find someone with like 10 followers with like their first reel and it's just amazing content. And you just, you know what, eventually your intuition just gets so good, you're like, oh, this person. Five videos from now it's going to go viral. I want to just message this person, befriend this person, maybe sponsor them immediately and you'll end up getting like really, really great deals. And they obviously are stoked because they're like, wow, I just started, I got over the itch, the insecurity of posting. This person is now a huge believer in me. He wants to pay me to post the same type of thing I'm already posting. So it's just like a great win, win for everybody. And obviously if a influencer video shows up on your for you page as you're swiping through the algorithm, it's just like an amazing, amazing thing. Because what's the worst thing that happened is you pay for a dud, you pay for a video where it's just, it's just not pushed to anybody. It gets like a hundred views. But if you sponsor somebody because they appeared on your for you page when you're not following them, you know, this person at the very least has the capacity to be pushed to non follower accounts to be. You know, the TikTok's trying to push and test their, their content to larger audiences and that really lowers the, their downside of like okay, well at the very least this person. Oh, sorry, it, it doesn't lower downside, it increases your upside. Where like this per this account, sorry, it does both. You have the upside of it could go viral. And the downside of like, it's not going to be, it's not guaranteed to be a dud where they just happen to have like a lot of followers and you know, they happen to like, their, their view count is really just being recycled through their legacy. Followers that just watch them maybe out of hate or out of like apathy, like the, instead you, you've sponsored somebody where it's being pushed to people that are not their followers. So yeah, that's, you know, that's one method that we use that's really beneficial to us. And if, if more people do it, I think it's just great for the ecosystem. I think a lot of these new accounts, these new influencers will get more deals, there'll be more cool partnerships made and startups can obviously grow faster once they use this strategy.
- [36:22]
A
I like it. Okay, so here you have the playbook on reaching out to influencers. Let's run, run it through.
- [36:32]
B
Yeah. So yeah, when you reach out to influencers, you want to try like all avenues of attack, which is DMs, emails. If they have a LinkedIn, you can hit them up on LinkedIn if they have like, you know, I've done very strange things where I found out they had like a blog or like a Tumblr or something and I'll DM them on. The, the, the thing that keeps me going is like, wow, that was really difficult for me to find this person's email. Or wow, that was really difficult for me to find out like what this dude's Tumblr was from like five years ago. That probably means that very few people are messaging this person. So they'll just be even more impressed and more happy that, you know, I'm not just like a person shotgunning emails to like tens of thousands of people, which we don't do. I, I try to find people that I think really resonate with the people that we're also trying to help. And yeah, so, you know, you want to be not relegated to just email. I feel like a lot of founders, they send one email and they're like, oh, wow, these influencers suck. You know, they think they're so much better than me. They don't respond to me. You know, dude, like, they probably got like 50 emails just today and your email is probably in like the lowest 10th percentile of like actually trying to connect with them on a human to human level. Like they don't care what series round you're at. I don't know why you added that in Your email or like, you know, like you, you want to just talk to them like a human. But so, yeah, I guess that dovetails into the next thing, which is like, you want to be very detailed.
- [37:54]
A
And by the way, I have a hack. I have a little hack on that. Someone did this to me. Actually, a few people actually did this to me. They would just Venmo me. Like, they found my Venmo username and I get a push notification. Like people get push notifications on Venmo. So it's like, who the hell is David sending me $50 or whatever. And you're going to respond, you're going to respond to those people. Right? So I actually think that one quick hack is, you know, put a little budget together and start just sending them like a few dollars, see what happens. So, you know, all messages need to be detailed and as tailored as possible, but be concise. I agree. By the, you know, no one's reading like, paragraphs. It's just not happening.
- [38:48]
B
Right, right.
- [38:49]
A
Yeah.
- [38:49]
B
Ironically, as we are reading paragraphs here, but yeah, only we read paragraphs, you know. Yeah. I was so surprised this, like, did well because it's like, it was just like such a dense piece of content. But anyways. Yeah. So when you send them, you want to demonstrate you're a fan of their content. They're excited to partner up. Why should they partner with you? Why will their audience love you? Don't talk about weird stuff about number of employees or what funding round you're at. Make sure to IND oh, this is pretty big. Make sure to indicate somewhere that this is a paid promotion. Because influencers are constantly inundated with like, oh, like, it's going to be great. We'll send you like, free product or like, you'll get a free sub. But like, you know, obviously they don't really care about these things at all. So if you really make it clear it's a paid promotion, they're more likely to take it seriously. And then no matter how good your. Your messages are, you kind of assume that a majority of them will not respond, especially in the early days. The sooner you kind of get that, accept that and, and get more tougher skin, the more you'll be actually able to optimize your outreach versus get butt hurt every time that they don't respond. And the good news is, as more people talk about your product, it gets easier and easier to convince other people in the ecosystem to talk about your product for many reasons. One, because unknown products could be risky or scams. If you dm them and you have 70,000 followers and blue check mark, then it's much more likely to respond versus if you have 10 followers. That's maybe the only thing left that's like actually helpful with follower numbers is like if you want to talk with other creators or if you want to like do outreach like this. Otherwise the followers number doesn't really matter that much in terms of like actual reach for content. So yeah, that's the how we reach out to influencers.
- [40:35]
A
Cool. And then how do we negotiate with influencers?
- [40:40]
B
Yeah, so when you negotiate with influencers, you want to basically align the incentives between you and the influencers. You should both want a video that converts and one way to do that is you don't want to give them all of the money up front because you immediately lose leverage. Like your side of the leverage if you pay for everything and they just have to post afterwards. Obviously I love influencers. Most influencers are fantastic people but some will just take the money and some of them will actually just not post any videos and others will drop a half ass video because they already got their bag. You want to try to split some of the payments so that a percent of it, percentage of it comes from like the number of conversions they bring if you give them their personal coupon code or maybe like the number of views that they get. Also when you negotiate, I don't, I mean something that I do is I try to be like really straightforward with them. Like oh, you know, like we have, we usually do well in these countries and we usually like for these types of partnerships we usually have this sort of budget and just being fully transparent and then they are transparent with like their demographics and help their previous sponsor views go. So yeah, I mean I just try to negotiate with like transparency of like okay, like the video needs to do this much to really get us this much roi. Like this is the break even point. Would you be down to like do this and then we could have this much as bonuses if we both do, if the video does well and we could both be happy, things like that. And yeah, there's other things that I didn't, I might have written it later. But you know what you want to do in the beginning is you want to pay for, you want to get the price point, you want to get the most expensive price point, you know, so you want to get like how much is it? If it's like link in bio comes with an Instagram story post on all of your short form accounts and it's you know, not, it's a complete, it's like a totals partnership where the entire video is just about the product. And you know, for one video, how much would that be? Like full usage rights, all these things and you want to put it on the table and they're going to say, you know, a thousand dollars. You know, you can think about it and be like, well, what do I actually really want? Like, do I really want the usage rights in this case? Is it that it's too expensive? All right, let's remove that. How much can we get if we remove that? Or let's say I really want the link in bio. Let's say I remove that. I don't really want the story. Let's say you're popping on Instagram TikTok with now YouTube shorts. Let's just remove that part of the deal. And eventually you get like the true price, the non inflated price. You get the true price of one video. And then you could say, okay, well you know, let's say it's now down to 800, 700. You could say, okay, how about now, you know, we do a bulk deal instead of us having to do negotiations every time, maybe we do three videos per month on your account and we do like a 20% off for each of the videos. And then as you kind of negotiate down from the top where it's the most expensive and you kind of tailor it to what your needs are, you end up getting like a pretty fairly priced video for both sides. And that's one thing that we do to negotiate, which I'm surprised I didn't write on here, but I definitely should have written that. And the last thing is like, I guess I'll stop saying it after this time. But I've said it I guess a few times now. But you know, there's, I'm flabbergasted. You could literally Google like how to pay influencers. You could Google it. Like everyone viewing can Google it right now. And all of the top articles will tell you to pay based on followers. They will tell you straight up, like they will give you a chart. The top article has a chart of like if they have this much, then they're a micro celebrity. You pay 1,000. If they have this much, they're a celebrity celebrity. You should pay this much. It's like the most craziest misinformation that's probably causing like junior social media people at like very various companies around the world to just really pay influencers like insane amounts of money that they will never get an ROI on and which is maybe passively hurting startups because they maybe have this expectation that if you have a million followers, you have to pay me this much and which is maybe even hurt the influencer too. So yeah, don't listen to those garbage articles. And that's how we negotiate. Jenny.
- [44:46]
A
Cool. I agree with you 100%. 100%. So posting content, and then we'll end it with some final tips and then we'll move on to SEO, I think.
- [45:00]
B
Yes. Okay, so when it comes to posting content, you can't use like one size fits all strategy for all the partnerships because every influencer has cultivated their own people that love them for what they post. So your sponsored content can't deviate too far from it or else it'll have like, you know, the retention will be terrible and the hook will be terrible and you're basically paying for something that's not going to convert. Like if you have don't have much experience, you can err on the side of just like trusting the influencer to be like, okay, just make something very similar to what you're already posting. Like, hey, you post this shit, just remake this video and just have like, you know, use the product halfway through the video, you know, at this timestamp. And then, you know, here's what you do with the product. Like, you, you kind of just manage the part where the product is in, where the product shows up. And you can kind of like let the influencer cook and let them do what they've already been doing in the past. Like in actionable terms. Like, for example, like some influencers already have their own series, you know, like some influencers will have a series like top 10 AI tools that feel Illegal to Know, you know, and like, that's their series, right? Like, you don't want to just. It would be great if you could just be inserted into that series because you know that their audience loves to see these top 10 tools. So you don't actually have to do any creative work. You say, okay, just next time he posts this video, just say it's sponsored for number one, say Jenny. And you know, see how it goes. I was going to add one more thing I don't want to forget. Oh, and the big thing is with influencer marketing, you want to scale. Like, the big thing is you eventually want to have like a video going out every few hours. You know about your products once you get to that point. And you physically cannot be micromanaging so many influencers at the same time. Right? So you eventually need to kind of be Trusting these influencers, giving them this blueprint of like, okay, we want the product to be spoken about in this way. We want the product to be portrayed and at least this amount of time we like when you make videos about this, this and this and we expect like this amount of views or this amount of engagement and you know, four videos a month, we buy a package deal, we won't even bother you for the next like month until we come back and kind of assess like the, the, the, the metrics and you can just go cook and then you just kind of set and forget once you have enough of these, like these people on autopilot, that's how you can actually start scaling your influencer marketing strategy. And yeah, unfortunately you have to learn this early on or you will drive yourself crazy and you'll just have to be continuously hiring more and more people to be managing all these influence partnerships which obviously it'll hurt into your profits if you have to keep expanding your team. You know, like for us we only have two people running influencer marketing even though we spend, you know, 50 to hundreds of thousands per month. And it's just two people running it. It's myself and one other very talented individual named Shane. So yeah, I guess the other things I wrote is views are relevant. I talked about that earlier video should make it cited. Forget about the second. Yeah, when in doubt. Yeah, when in doubt. Also don't be afraid of your video looking like a straight up ad. Even if it gets less views, it will convert better. I can't tell you how many times I've paid for a part or for a sponsorship where like it's an esthetic person studying and then it's like a 30 second ad, like kind of ad in the beginning or in the middle where they just like open and they show Jenny AI and they just go about their day and then they start talking about, you know, how tasty the, the waffle they had that day is. You know, it's like, it's just so easy. People are hit with so many ads, like everyone's buying so much for attention, so much for your attention that you know, if it's kind of subtle and it's not really blatant and it's just kind of in one year out the other, you're very likely kind of waste your money. Whereas if someone just hits you with like, dang, don't you hate when this happens? Has this happened to you? Or like, are you afraid of this or do you want this? This will solve your issue. You know, it's a very like, even if maybe it goes less viral, the people that actually have that pain point will remember it more and they will, you know, be. Be checking out your product. They're more likely to check out your.
- [49:15]
A
Products with the final tips. Just conscious of time, because I want to go through SEO and paid ads, but I also want to go through, what have you learned since posting this? And how did you get from 5 to 10 million ARR. Can you. Can you, you know, pick one or two final tips that you want to leave people with?
- [49:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that when it comes to, like, influencer, when it comes to ugc, I think that a lot of it is just you kind of feel like you have to rely on so many people. You have to rely on influencers. You eventually have to rely on somebody to help you manage all these influencers. You have to rely on these UGC creators. So a lot of it is just. Can you facilitate these partnerships? Well, some of it is like you would think, when it comes to creating content, people think it's like creative endeavor, it's like an art form type of thing. And it definitely is for some people. They just can't seem to differentiate between a good video and a bad video. I don't know, maybe it's just like some of it's innate, but a lot of it is not creative. A lot of it is a science. Or can you manage 100 campaigns efficiently? Can you really track all the data and find out ways to find the winning influencers and the losing influencers and really notate why are they winning, why are they losing? How can you kind of refine your mental model of which influence to go to next? So, yeah, my final tip would be you kind of have to use both sides of your brains where you have to be working with so many people and kind of the managerial skill set, the organizational skill set is quite difficult. And you also have to use the other side of, like, you were working with these creators, these artistic people in some ways. And you have to be willing to talk human to human, develop real relationships with these people. Otherwise it's difficult to kind of break through the noise. So that would be like my final tip.
- [51:13]
A
Totally.
- [51:14]
B
Yeah.
- [51:14]
A
I mean, you talked about nepotism because with that creator, right, you went to that fraternity. I mean, use whatever advantage you can. You can get. I mean, when someone reaches out to me, for example, and they say, you know, I grew up in the same neighborhood as you, for example, I'm a thousand times more likely to. To respond to it. You know, so it doesn't need to necessarily be like you went to some fancy Ivy League school or something like that, or you worked at Google. Just find some common ground with the influencer if you can.
- [51:51]
B
Out of putting.
- [51:52]
A
Okay, so how to do SEO. What do people need to know here? How to do SEO in two minutes or less?
- [52:01]
B
How do I do a funny story with SEO. SEO honestly, is not one of my fortes, but we basically churned through so many different SEO agencies and there's one agency I really liked and we did something super unorthodox, which is we acquired the entire SEO agency so that we could become their main client and they only did SEO for us. And yeah, we work together and we have some tips for you today. But maybe that's. I've never heard of anyone that's done that. I mean, maybe other people do, but they don't talk about it. But our general philosophy is like, when we meet somebody who we feel is like spectacular and we'll raise our bar of excellence, we'll do anything to kind of work with them. And so yeah, this is the blueprint written by the agency that is now an in house agency at Jenny, where they used to have multiple clients and now they only work for Jenny. So yeah, I mean, the first thing I'll say is that you should never start with SEO because as everyone knows, SEO is kind of like it has delayed gratification. So it could take like a long time for you to even get traffic from SEO. I know some people dispute that, but for the most part you can easily get, you know, orders of magnitude more traffic from the earlier things like influencer marketing or UGC content versus investing in SEO. But if you do want to, you're more than welcome to some of the hacks that we have is if you find pages with feature snippets, that's one way to easily get a lot more eyeballs on your website. So it might be difficult for you to actually, you know, go from like the sixth spot to the first spot. But if you notice that there's a featured snippet of like that exact query, sometimes you can find that if you basically create the perfect answer to that featured snippet, you can leapfrog over all of the spots between seven to one and you can just take that featured snippet. And there are a few times we've actually done that and it's led to obviously more traffic to that article and the more conversions we go technically into it here. But I feel like we should just breeze through this. So we get to the, the 5 to 10. The good part about if you do the influencer and UGC first is that very few people actually, actually click the link when, when you, when they see your content on TikTok. So they don't actually say oh wow, Jenny AI so interesting. And then go to the video, go, leave the video, go to the profile, go to the link, click the link. Are you sure you Want to leave TikTok? Click TikTok Open Safari. Do they, they usually don't do that. What they do is they watch the video and they just swipe up on their phone, go to Google and search up the name of your, your product and then they, they click your product. And that's one, I mean the, the tip here is you want to increase your brand name searches and that what that does, it'll make, it'll make you more like, makes you more legit in the eyes of Google. But the great news is if you do the influencer and UGC first, you kind of already get that, get that boost because people will be searching your account or searching your website or your tool and then you'll be gaining legitimacy kind of passively without even doing much SEO work. We spend a lot of time thinking about how valuable is the traffic that we're getting from SEO, how much traffic are we getting? Which are the juicy keywords that we actually want to be ranking for versus vanity metrics, where, oh, it looks like our traffic tripled from you know, like last year, this year. But we're ranking for all these like you know, kind of useless keywords or not useless. But obviously if you could choose between ranking for like, like free and then your tool, whatever your tool does, or just like what your tool does, you would much rather choose to rank for the non free version. Because everyone who's searching for free, they don't have really a buying intent to actually convert and pay for your tool versus the other. People are just looking for the best tool possible on the market. Say you want to accurately estimate the ROI from your search engines. And yeah, I mean I, I would say that SEO is one of the main pillars now that we spend a lot of money on SEO. We probably spend like we spend tens of thousands of dollars per month just on increasing our SEO. We do interesting things like making mini tools, we've made some free tools, we have landing pages in different languages, we obviously write a lot of content and it's been pretty fruitful for us. But like I kind of said in the beginning, I would not Especially AI startups. I would not suggest you do this on day one. This is more something you have like a steady income stream. You have a little bit of PMF and you kind of take that money and you could go out and buy your own SEO agency if you'd like.
- [56:52]
A
There you go. And this is the strategy that worked for you and might work for other people. So thank you for talking about it now. Paid ads.
- [57:02]
B
Paid ads.
- [57:04]
A
Let's, let's get into it. How to paid ads.
- [57:08]
B
How to paid ads. Yeah, so this is another, the reason that I put SEO on paid ads at the end is, is I kind of feel like in many ways they're both a trap. When you're an early stage entrepreneur, you want really fast iter cycles, right? So you want like, you want to be able to test something, see if it resonates and then change up how you're doing it. And so you could do that with like, like UGC Influencer. You can't really do that with SEO. Paid ads is kind of a middle ground where you could do it a little more. But even then like, you know, you have to spend time in the learning phase. You have to spend time creating creatives. You have to like, it's its own kind of beastly have to go after. And I know many people that have kind of got stuck in this paid ads trap of like they, they're, they're perennially stuck in this like 1 to 1 cact LTV or like 1.5 to 1 and they, or some people, a lot of people just stay unprofitable and a lot of like the money that they end up raising or maybe their own personal money, they end up using paid ads. The good news is if you do UGC your influencer first, you can actually get content that you know, people will resonate with organically and you can reuse that in terms of paid ads. You can use data from your social media partnerships that better target growth on day one. Oh yeah, this is big. Like what countries convert better, what's the LTV of each country, what type of users are ideal to market to. And yeah, in the early stages your budget won't be big enough and you'll be able to spend enough on meta to get enough data for targeting based on purchase conversions. So we really only got into paid ads after we got some semblance of pmf. Unclear if we have like PMF pmf, but like there are people that like our products today and once we kind of had that feeling then we started getting to Paid ads. And you know, the numbers kind of speak for themselves. We try to aim for like a 3 to 1 tax to LTV or 3, 1 LTV tax and we try to get a short payback period. So I think right now we make our money like within the first two months of acquiring user. And so that's always, I mean that's helpful because the reason that's helpful is because then you can take that money, just funnel it back into your best performing acquisition channel.
- [59:24]
A
Exactly.
- [59:24]
B
Whether that's getting more UGC influencers or doing more mini tools for SEO or know, putting more into paid ads. Um, I personally think it's this, the most, most boring growth channel. So don't deprive yourself of the joy of figuring out the other fun ones first. So that's the quick breeze of the last two kind of pillars. Um, if you want to know more, you could, we could link like the, my SEO guy is also on Twitter and stuff and we could, you could look at his post as well.
- [59:54]
A
I want to, I, I have to hear the conclusion. It's such a, the final tip is too good. Like it's such a catchy line. Do you remember what was that?
- [60:04]
B
None of. No one's actually gonna do any of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my final thing was like just trying to egg people on to actually like make their startup better because I put so much time into the article, it would be so bad if it flopped and like it didn't actually help anybody. So I was just trying to like challenge people. So I basically just said like, since you made it all to the, all the way to the bottom, I'll tell you one final secret. If you look at the bottom right of this tweet account, the bookmarks, there's probably like, like how many people will actually read this whole thing? 10%. I would actually try to implement some of the strategies. 10% of that. How many will continue to try one year from now when these marketing taxes help them uncover deep flaws in product? Probably like 1% of, of that. Like it's very difficult to like try for a year and get gut punched for a year. And so, you know, I, I, I prophesized it pretty correctly where I said like hundreds of thousands of people will read this, but ultimately it'll only properly be utilized by, you know, one or two people. And I hope that, you know, the, the person reading is that person. I guess I'm cheating now because I'm like rehashing it on a podcast, so maybe, maybe that number will go up. Now, but yeah, I was read by 700,000. If we do the 10%, 10%, 1%, whatever, it's probably like 770 people, something like that that probably actually, you know, implemented this and made a big business from what I posted. And if you're one of those people, you should definitely like message me and that would bring me immense dopamine if you, if you told me that like this post helped you out. But yeah, that's the, that's the whole thing.
- [61:37]
A
And just comment, comment on the YouTube. Just so we just, if you're committing to the act of let's do this.
- [61:45]
B
So also comment on the YouTube. If you read it and you tried it and like you're now severely in debt, I've ruined your life and like it's just nothing worked. You could also comment that too. That would be, it's like, that would be. I would like to know that it's.
- [61:57]
A
Like your one comment from jail. Like you're in the, they're giving you like instead of a phone call, they're like, you know, you can comment. Oh my God.
- [62:05]
B
Right? All right, David, this showed up on my feed.
- [62:07]
A
Yeah. So now you're at 5 million ARR. And then all of us, you know, it takes, I don't know, six, nine months and then you zoom by 10 million ARR. What, what have you learned since then? Is it more of the same? Have you figured out new channels? Give people some of the sauce?
- [62:31]
B
I mean, I'll say some of the sauce is like, I'll tell you the non sexy sauce first is that, honestly, everything I wrote here, you could still do some form of it from going to 5 to 10 million. It's not like, oh, once you reach 5 million, you have to, you know, kind of rebuild the playbook and you have, you could use it for five to 10. You have to rebuild some of it for scaling issues. You probably need to get better at hiring. You probably need to get better at building out teams. You probably need to get better at the granular. Things obviously change as things scale. But everything on this list we still use to this day. We added a lot of affiliate. A lot of our revenue comes from affiliate marketers now. So people that enjoy Jennie and now champion Jennie and do marketing and they get some cut of whatever they like to do when marketing. Jenny, we've got into like acquisitions, which I think is pretty rare. So we've like acquired a few startups and I think that it's a good hedge. Like I think that, you know, we get to zero to 10 million revenue a year. Can we get to 20 million revenue? I believe I can, but you know, that's obviously anybody's guess. Every probably arrogant founder thinks that they can. But what I do know for sure is I've gone from zero to five. I'd probably do that again. So, you know, we do have a little bit of bets on the side of like, okay, we could probably go from 10 to 20. I'm pretty confident about that. But just in case, we're also incubating other startups kind of within the Jenny group. We have one startup doing like 1.5, 1.2, 1.5 million a year in revenue. We acquired them when they were like half that and we've doubled that startup in like five months. And, and we didn't put any marketing budget into it really. It's just like, oh, these are the things that we clearly learned while running Jenny that we could transfer these learnings over. And immediately the conversion rates went up, retention went up, Churn went down, all these things. So that's kind of interesting. I, I should probably write a post about that. But I feel like it's so niche, like once you kind of get to the level of like, you can acquire startups, you're probably, I probably have something to learn from you, you know. So like if, if you were going on acquiring startups, like, I don't know how much like a post like that would be helpful, but yeah, those are some new things I think. Like the another kind of like non sexy answer is like we kind of went back to the basics, you know, like we have all this traffic coming in, we have all these like different distribution channels. We worked a lot on retention conversion, like the, like, you know, the funnel really. And once we kind of improve those funnels, it allows us to capitalize more on the traffic. And that's something that you can do at any point. But obviously for each percentage point that you decrease for Churn, it matters way more as the scale of your start gets larger. So we really, as we got larger from 5 to 10, we really laser focused on it. I mean that's one of the really proud things that we've done is we went from like 20% churn to around 9.8% churn. We more than half it. Which you know, for people who don't know about how terrible and like nightmarish Churn can be and how it could keep you up at night and stuff, like having Churn can, can literally make your startup, you know, so much larger. It just makes it so much easier for you to grow because the, the leaky bucket is just not torrential anymore. It's just like, you know, manageable at some point and you know that's like, yeah, I don't know how much time you have. I'll just say like one open secret about AI tools, these B2CI apps is like the churn can be insane, right? Like you could have 50% monthly churn. That's like not unheard of. 40% to 30% it's like kind of normal and then you know, 20% is like if you're really focused on your customers. And 10% for a B2C AI, especially in edtech, I don't know too many other startups that have been able to get it down that much. And you know that's not a testament, that's a testament to like my team, you know, shout out to Mark, that's Shalesh, Hemant, Dandy, Justin, Luke, every, everybody on the team, Shane, everybody that's just killing it. And we were able to get the, the these numbers down so that's really five to 10. It's just like getting back to the basics, tweaking the, making the funnel cleaner, scaling out what's already working, doing some acquisitions along the way and adding you know, one or two more channels when you have the chance.
- [66:48]
A
I loved how you just thanked a bunch of people. It felt like I was, it felt like we were in the Oscars for startups and I got goosebumps. I got goosebumps because I was like, I could tell that you all worked really hard on dude, my team worked so hard. Yeah, it's crazy. That's awesome. Thank you. David, you have been extremely generous with your time but also your brain, your lovely, lovely brain. This audience is going to eat this up and appreciate you for it. We are going to include the links to Jenny AI in the show notes as well as your social. But is there anything else you want to leave people with at all or anything?
- [67:37]
B
I want to leave people with, I think like, I mean my, I'm going to butcher this but like basically there was some, I think it's like three hours, some marathon time of like it was never beaten and then one person beat it and then like the next fucking marathon or the next year like seven people, like a bunch of people were able to like run that marathon time. So you know, I'm a non technical person. I'm a non technical founder doing an AI startup. I am a college dropout. I would not say I'm like one of those cracked people. I'm not from Silicon Valley. I was. I stayed there once before my flight out of Silicon Val. Sf. I'm not of that world. And like, I was able to kind of build this company. Obviously not just because of me. Thanks to, like, really brilliant and like, you know, people. I'm really grateful that took a bet on me, but, like, you know, this is. This is the time that I ran. I think a lot of you watching could also run this time if you really, like, locked in. I'm not, you know, you don't have to send me $50 on Venmo. You could also just DM me on Twitter if it's. If I think that I can help you and like, you're like, seem like a cool person. I'm pretty easily reachable. And yeah, I went on this fantastical, crazy journey. I feel like I'm still close to the beginning than the end. And I'm really grateful that it happened to me and I would love it if other people got to experience this journey as well. So, yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast.
- [69:00]
A
Yeah, dude, you gotta come back again. This has been incredible. David Park. Thanks. And I'll see you. I'll see you on the Internet.
- [69:08]
B
Thank you.