How We Grew Our App to $1M ARR with Zero Paid Ads

0:01[music] Let's dive into growth. How did you promote the launch and and like what did attraction look like out of the gate? Yeah. On So, on the growth marketing side, we as I mentioned before, we wanted to get traction. There's a great quote by I think Sam Altman, right? Which is momentum is like oxygen for a startup. So, you want to get as much momentum as soon as possible. And I know in some way I'm stating the obvious, but

0:27there are very clear tradeoffs. Right? In some cases, you delay a launch. In some cases, you want to perfect certain flows or perfect this and that. Maybe you delay your launch because of hiring, whatever. I think the thing that we got really, really right from the start is we wanted to get as much momentum as possible as quickly as possible because momentum is like oxygen. You just feed off of that momentum and and it lets you put more and more energy and more and more cash, if you need to, into the company to keep it growing. So, in the early days, it was very obvious that we were going to

1:00use social media to grow. I think we live in this really interesting time where it does not matter, generally speaking, how many followers you have on short-form video. It just matters if you make great content. And so, we were trying everything in the beginning. I have some interesting stories. I don't know if I should share them, but maybe

1:19we can circle back to those early days. I mean, it is like a true grind, right? And it felt It feels good, right? To be part of that game. But we were trying everything we could and then I would say we worked with, you know, easily 30 content creators of various types in the early days. I would say in

1:37the first 2 months. And really three of them ended up making a huge difference. One of them in particular ran the main coconote.app account and generated hundreds of millions of views. And I think I can speak for Brett on this. We were very lucky to have worked with him and started working with him very early on

1:54because he was a key part of our growth. I know you guys don't want to say it, but that was Mr. Beast. If you're listening, we'd love to work with you. Uh I was so I was going to ask the model there. Did Were Were you two ever dancing on a Tik Tok? Did you like try any first party stuff yourself? Or did you go straight to like, "Hey, we're just going to like identify creators and have them run?" And like that's in itself a process, right? You're like trying different creators and seeing who's good. How did you Did How did you

2:19do it? I think Brett danced on Tik Tok a couple times and we got banned. And so then we had to figure out what to do. It was that good? Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Um so we were not dancing on Tik Tok, but we were definitely talking to a lot of creators and studying like what's

2:36working in the market. Um Plenty of learnings I'd say on the on the growth side. I don't know if this is exactly relevant, but some some timeline there. Within 45 days we had crossed 100,000 ARR. Within 4 months we crossed a million. And then within 5 months we had crossed 2 million. And so we just had more and more capital, more and more confidence to reinvest into the company to keep growing and keep working with

3:00creators. So that's what you meant about content creator. And you I I noticed you chose your words very carefully there. Content creator, not influencers. So the strategy wasn't to find an influencer hot an audience. The strategy was find a content creator who produces great content. 100%. Yeah. Couldn't have said it better myself. One of the struggles with with UGC and this playbook is generating content that converts versus generating content that just gets a bunch of views. And then depending on how you're paying the creators, you know, if you're paying on a view basis, they can really rack up the bill, you know, doing just funny Tik

3:37Toks that get attention, but then don't convert. How did you address that both, you know, financially and then also in kind of learning what did convert and kind of incentivizing that kind of content? Yeah, a couple things come to mind. One is being hands-on with the content creation team. So, today our content team is about 25 people, 25 part-time

4:01creators that are all contractors. Throughout the the lifespan of Coconut pre-acquisition, we were between five and 10, maybe at the very most we had 12 content creators. And so, we kept a very small team. I worked with everyone closely. I met with everyone one-to-one. I would say some of our competitors and some people or some, you know, founders that are building out similar creator programs approach it very, very differently. So, we always had the mentality, great quote by Brian Chesky who I look up to very much as like a design background CEO. He says, we want to build the the Navy SEALs, not the Navy. And we had that approach with our

4:41team overall and especially on the content team. So, get to know every single one of the creators. Make sure you spend time with them. Make sure you're enabling them with what creative actually works and letting them know what converts. And it's not a perfect science, but when you have a video getting 20, 30 million views, you know what impact it has, right? Cuz you know exactly when it's going viral and then you can measure on those couple days that it's going viral, what impact did it have down funnel. And so, I think it's just a matter of like spending time with the content team, making sure they

5:12know what converts, what doesn't convert. And at the end of the day, what we found is that if you frame your product as a novel toy, people are going to treat it like a toy. They do not want to pay for that thing. They are, you know, for better for worse, I think people are very entitled that if

5:26something digital, it should be free. Right? Which is probably subsidized by a lot of the venture stuff built in the last 10, 15 years. But if you frame it as a solution to a problem, then people are much more willing to pay. It attracts a higher willingness to pay customer.

5:56Mhm.