Over the last decade, and especially the last three years, founders typically employed the same strategy:
Raise a lot of money, spend it on growth and hiring top marketing talent, and then cross your fingers that you reach product-market-fit before you run out of money.
But, here’s the hard truth… After a year or two, the founders often spent a few million bucks and had very little meaningful traction to show for it.
They still don’t really know their true unit economics, ideal distribution channels, or who their customer is. They never reach product-market-fit or product-channel fit, so they can’t raise the next round. And they fail.
But, that’s venture capital, right? Write a lot of checks and assume that the majority are going to fail? Sure.
Today, we’re living in a vastly different market. Raising money is much more difficult. The cost of growth is extremely expensive. Many startups have 12-months of runway and are unsure if they’ll be able to raise the next round. They quickly need meaningful traction, and they need to get it in a thoughtful and frugal manner.
Over the last year, I was the CMO at Day One, an EdTech startup backed by world-class investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Antler Global.
As the venture and consumer markets shifted and CPMs skyrocketed, I set out to test and prove a new strategy:
Step 1: Spend a little bit of money to create extremely high quality, organic video content.
Step 2: Turn every piece of long-form content into hundreds of pieces of short-form content. I wrote about that here.
Step 3: Ship and test dozens of pieces of content on every channel every week.
Our conversion rate increased by 280% and our revenue increased by 61%.
Our newsletter grew by 150% with a 40% open rate.
And we didn’t spend a dime on acquisition. It was 100% organic, resulting in a more resilient and sustainable business.
Who is our ideal customer?
Which channels should we use to reach them?
How do we speak their language, get their attention, and convert them on each channel?
What is our acquisition cost (CAC)?
What is our distribution-channel mix?
So why does all of this matter?
This strategy helped us build a rock-solid foundation for our marketing engine. We had created a recipe for success in a turbulent market.
We’re a new type of studio using this strategy as the core offering to early, venture-backed startups.
Our “SWAT team” will selectively partner with a handful of companies for 6-12 months and become your full time marketing team, but more flexible than an agency.
Through our studio, we design and build high-converting websites and lead pages, produce the highest-quality video and podcast content, run your blog and newsletter, and ship dozens of pieces of content on a weekly basis. This gives us actionable data around what styles, channels, hooks, and CTAs are driving conversion.
Find product-channel fit
Develop the ideal mix of distribution channels based on our learnings
Figure out and report on the true unit economics
We call this “building the marketing foundation”.
After we’re done, we’ll source, hire and train the right marketing director from our private network of CMOs to lead your internal team for the long-haul. We train them on our now-proven strategy and workflows and finally off-board ourselves.
To learn more, get in touch here.
