David Park
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Greg, if you want to make 20 videos a month for $4,000, I would love it if you would work with us.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Oh, damn it. Okay. In the next life, maybe. But yeah, I mean, just one final thing to add is, you know, $4,000 for 20 vids, it sounds daunting, but you can tell the creator, like, look, these things can literally take you like five, 10 minutes a day.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 have 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 video sounds like a lot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I mean, I probably should have said this in the post, but the importance of frequency of posting is just you want to be exploring before you exploit. So if you're posting one video a week, you only have four tests per month to find a hook and content angle that really works. Whereas if you post one video a day, I said one plus, you could post even more than one video a day.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
You could continually kind of try, you know, different, like you could try like skits or memes or humor or educational content or straight up ads or, you know, like play with different angles, play with different hooks, text on screen. Like you could try different, like there's so many things you could kind of be experimenting with.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And if you at least post one video a day, you can kind of be like methodically X-ing out, okay, well, my product will, if I present it like this, it seems to flop. If I present it like this, it seems to do okay. If I present it 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And eventually you'll get, uh, It's 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 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...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, um, there are, there are many cases where you won't. And, um, the best way to get to that viral banger is to iterate towards it. And that's why I think she posts often.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So you said it way, way, way cleaner than me. Yeah. That's what I should have said. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 very, like, but I don't think that's actually how Most people work.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And the next part is 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 an example video series here if we want to talk about it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 it takes to hold his weight. And then he probably realized that went gigaviral.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 it 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 minimal effort and it just goes viral every time.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
one thing that's kind of going really crazy viral on reels uh it's kind of dying out 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 one dollar and like you have this video eventually this guy's gambling like two hundred thousand dollars on blackjack because he has 200 followers and it's the same thing right it's the same hand of blackjack he's you know gambling on 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 vow video every single, you know, just continuously. That's difficult to do. And for us at Jenny, we had like point of view, you have a paper or an essay due.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 cause it's not even spaghetti.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, uh, remove stress from my life. Right.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So, uh, it's the same thing where, uh, 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, um,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 zero to 5 million. And then I actually haven't written the 5 to 10 million revenue posts. So we'll be, I guess, writing that real time on this podcast and figuring out how I did that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 um yeah that's the idea of a viral series so i think uh what isn't said here and i want to talk about is
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Absolutely. That's a, 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 to, 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,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
almost had a negligible effect on conversions that day for Jenning. It was as if 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 what I talked about earlier. Eventually, you'll get a video that goes viral after enough experimentation.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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's 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, that 1.5, you will get a video that goes viral.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And then, like I said before, you want to experience something, turn that into a series. How can you just tweak this video over and over so that you could keep posting it and you can continue to get viewers that could convert to using your product? You want to start tweaking and posting the series. on multiple accounts.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So, you know, at our peak, we had probably seven different accounts, seven different accounts on each platform. So that was like 24 accounts, 24 videos posted every day. And these videos will, you know, even if they don't have that many followers, 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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... The conversions from the coupon codes from these like Chinese accounts, they do very well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
But yeah, I mean, if we want to just not waste people's time, we can literally just like jump right into it. If you want to just... If you want to just start getting to the post, I'm happy to do so.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And then once you kind of feel like you're at the tail end 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 priorities 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 have they won't reach the same heights as when
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
in the heyday when you're posting 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. And then the saddest part is eventually enough copycats will copy your video series. It will get played out. People will just stop responding to it because it's not something they want to watch anymore.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And then you're back to step one where you got to be You've got to be farming out hooks, farming out ideas, doing your research, and then running through the life cycle once more.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
It's a, I mean, I honestly think I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't aggressive enough when I wrote this out, you know, like, uh, you, you, you don't, you don't, you could, 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
You could like, I, I think that, uh, 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, multiple times a week 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?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Like, why would you reward accounts post 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Right. Right. Um, yeah, I mean, finding influencers, uh, it's, 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, uh, which goes back to the, you know, the very important, um, like one of the 10 commandments of YC that you have to talk to your users, which I feel like founders like avoid like the black plague.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
But the good news is, um, 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 can ask leading questions or you maybe like they might lie to you in an interview to make you feel good. or they don't want to hurt your feelings.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, um, that they go to for advice that the influencers that actually influence, like that's that, those are the people that you actually want to go for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Not the influencers with like followers, like, like you said, where, um, 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 it to like, who are the people that they, you know, that doesn't show up on their feed.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
That's the people that they have some affinity towards. So anyways, you could go to your user Instagram, see which influence they're following. Um, And then you can basically do this for several users. 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Like, for example, once you like, you know, there's ways that you could click the influencer profile, click suggest similar accounts. You kind of like do a little...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 their 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 influencers as well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
like like it's a great way to find influencers and i don't know too many people to do it is once you have a list of influencers uh you could create a new instagram or tiktok account manually follow all these influences 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 uh you know in the same bucket so the algorithm goes out and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
There are people that pay agencies tens of thousands of dollars to go out and do this influence marketing for them. You can just not do that. You can just take your influence that you have, make a new TikTok or Instagram account, just watch these influences. It's great because you also become your user in a way. You start to see what they see and you start to be in their shoes a little bit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And you can see the craziest... you'll find the craziest deals if you 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, eventually your intuition just gets so good. You're like, oh, this person, Five videos from now, it's going to go viral.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So it's just like a great win-win for everybody. And obviously... If an influencer video shows up on your For You page as you swipe it through the algorithm, it's just like an amazing, amazing thing because what's the worst thing that happened is you pay for it and done. You pay for a video where it's just not pushed to anybody. It gets like 100 views.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
uh but that they'll take us 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 your downside it increases your upside where like this per this account um sorry it does both you have the upside of it could go viral and that 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
a lot of followers and you know they happen to like but 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 uh apathy like the instead you you've sponsored somebody where it's being pushed to people that um are not their followers so yeah that's a you know that's one um method that we use that's really
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
There are many cases where founders will just make one video on their TikTok and that video will just immediately go viral, which, you know, no matter how many times I say it, people don't really seem to believe it until 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
beneficial to us and 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 I like it okay so here you have the playbook on reaching out to influencers let's let's let's run run it through
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
yeah so um yeah when you reach out to influencers um 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 um if they have like you know i've done very strange things where i found that they had like a blog or like a tumblr or something and i'll dm them on but could the the thing that keeps me going is like
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
wow, that was really difficult for me to find this person's email. Or wow, that was really difficult for me to find out what this dude's Tumblr was from 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 I'm not just a person shotgunning emails to tens of thousands of people, which we don't do.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I try to find people that I think really resonate with the people that we're also trying to
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 you know dude like they probably got like 50 emails just today and your email was probably 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 want to just talk to them like a human
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
But so yeah, I guess that dovetails into the next thing, which is like, you want to be very detailed.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Right. Ironically, as we are reading paragraphs here. Only we read paragraphs. I was so surprised this did well because it was just such a dense piece of content. Anyways, when you send them, you want to demonstrate you're a fan of their content.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
they're excited to partner up um why should they partner with you why will their audience love you don't talk about weird stuff about a number of employees or what funding round you're at uh make sure to in the oh this is pretty big make sure to indicate somewhere that this is a paid promotion because influencers are constantly inundated with like um oh like it's gonna be great we'll send you like free product or like you'll get a free sub but like um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
a 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 one follower, 10 followers versus an account with a million followers, it's not hyperbole.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
accept that 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 like unknown products could be risky or scams.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
If you DM them and you have like 70,000 followers and blue check mark, then it's much more likely they'll respond versus if you have like 10 followers. That's maybe the only thing left that's like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 upfront because you immediately lose leverage
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
uh like your side of leverage if you pay pay for everything and uh they they uh they just have to post afterwards um obviously i love influencers most influencers are fantastic people but some will try we'll just take the money and um some of them will actually just not post any videos and others will drop a half-assed video um because they already got their bag
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
You want to try to split some of the payments so that a 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 mean, something that I do is I try to be like really straightforward with them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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. Um, and then they are transparent with like their demographics and help their previous sponsor reviews go.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So, um, yeah, I mean, I try to try to negotiate with like, um, like transparency of like, okay, like the video needs to do this much to really get us this much ROI. Like this is the breakeven point. Would you be down to like do this? And then we can have this much as bonuses, uh, if we both do, if the video does well and we can both be happy, things like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, and yeah, there's other things that I didn't, I might've written it later, but, um, you know, what you want to do in the beginning is you want to pay for it. 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 Lincoln bio comes with an Instagram story posted all of your short form accounts.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, and it's, uh, 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, $1,000. You know, and you can think about it and be like, well, what do I actually really want?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Like, do I really want the usage rights in this case? Is it 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 and buy it. Let's say I remove that. I don't really want the story. Let's say you're popping on Instagram, TikTok, but now YouTube Shorts. Let's just remove that part of the deal.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And eventually, you get the true price, the non-inflated price. You get the true price of one video. And then you could say, OK, well, let's say it's now down to $800, $700. You could say, OK, how about now we do a bulk deal?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
We've done a lot of A-B tests at Jenny where we've posted the same content, literally the same content on 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 strange for the account with 56 followers to beat the amount of engagement or the amount of views with the account with more followers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
instead of us having to do negotiations every time maybe do three videos per month on your account um 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 um tailor to what your needs are you end up getting like a pretty fairly priced uh 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 um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 various companies around the world.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 them this much. And which has maybe even hurt an influencer too. So yeah, don't listen to those garbage articles. And that's how we negotiate, Jenny.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Yes. Okay. So when it comes to posting content, you can't use like a 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
the retention will be terrible and the hook will be terrible and you're basically paying for something that's not going to convert. If you don't have much experience, you can err on the side of just trusting the influencer to be like, okay, just make something very similar to what you're already posting.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Like, hey, you post this shit, just remake this video and just use the product halfway through the video at this timestamp. And then here's what you do with the product. You kind of just...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 you post this video just say it's sponsored for number one say jenny and you know see how it goes
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 metrics and you can just go cook. And then you just kind of set and forget. Once you have enough of these people on autopilot, that's how you can actually start scaling your influencer marketing strategy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 away.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
For us, we only have two people running influence marketing, even though we spend 50 to 100s of thousands per month. And it's just two people running it. It's myself and one other person.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
uh very talented individual named shane so um yeah uh i guess the other things i wrote is uh views are irrelevant i talked about that earlier you should make excited um forget about the second yeah when in doubt oh yeah when in doubt also don't be afraid of your video looking like a straight up ad um even if it gets less views it will convert better
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, I can't tell you how many times I've paid for a part or for a sponsorship where like, it's an aesthetic person studying and then it's like a 30 second ad, like kind of ad in the beginning or in the middle where they're just like open and they show Jenny AI and they just go about their day and then they'd start talking about, you know, how tasty the...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, you're out the other, you're very likely to kind of waste your money. Whereas if someone just hits you with like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 checking out your product or more likely to share your products.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Yeah, I mean, I think that when it comes to influencer, when it comes to UGC, I think that a lot of it is just, you kind of feel like, Like, you have to rely on so many people. You know, you have to rely on, like, influencers. You eventually have to rely on somebody to, like, help you manage all these influencers. You have to rely on, like, these UGC creators.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 creative content, people think it's like a 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, you know, really notate, you know, why are they winning? Why are they losing?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 like both sides of your brains where you have to be working with so many people and kind of
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
the managerial uh skill set the organizational skill set is quite difficult and you also have to use the other side of like you're working with these like creators these artistic people in in some ways and you have to be willing to talk human to human like develop you know real relationships with these people otherwise um you know it's difficult to kind of break through the noise so that would be like my final tip totally yeah i mean you you know you talked about nepotism
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I'll 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 when our general philosophy is like, when we meet somebody we feel is like spectacular and we'll raise our bar of excellence, like we'll do anything to kind of work with them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
they only work for jenny so yeah i mean uh the first thing i'll say is that uh you should never start with seo because as everyone knows seo is kind of like um 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 um for the most part you can easily get you know um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So it might be difficult for you to actually go from the sixth spot to the first spot. But if you notice that there's a featured snippet of that exact query,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, sometimes you can find that if you like basically, um, create the perfect answer to that featured snippet, you can kind of leapfrog over all of the, all of the spots, um, between, you know, seven to one, and you can just take that feature snippet. And there, there are a few times we've actually done that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, and it's led to obviously, uh, more, more traffic to, uh, that article or, and then, and the more conversions. Um, yeah. We go technically into it here, but I think we should just breeze through this so we get to 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 they see your content on TikTok.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So they don't actually say, oh, wow, Jenny, so interesting. And then go to the video, 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. 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 product.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, they, they click your product. And, um, that's one, I mean, 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, uh, makes you more legit in the eyes of Google. But, uh, the great news is if you do the influencer and UGC first, you kind of already get that, um, get that boost because people will be searching your, um,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I don't think it's a controversial opinion.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
searching your account or searching your website or your tool, and then you'll be getting 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?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 last year to this year, but we're ranking for all these kind of
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
useless keywords or not useless, but, um, obviously if you could choose between ranking for like, uh, like free and then your tool, whatever 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, uh, actually convert and pay for your tool versus the other people are just looking for the best tool possible on the market.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I mean, if fresh accounts, first of all, if you look at their history, if a fresh account is getting similar views with an account that has millions of subs, it's probably that the fresh account is just juiced by the algorithm right now. And this creator, this type of content, it's doing well. It's resonating with people. Whereas this YouTuber with a million subs...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Um, so, um, you want to accurately estimate the ROI from your search engines and, um, Yeah, I mean, 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
You can kind of take that money and you could go out and buy your own SEO agency if you'd like.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
How to paid ads. Yeah. So this is another. The reason that I put SEO and paid ads at the end 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 iterative 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And so you could do that with 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, it's its own kind of beastly have to go after.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 one-to-one, uh, cacti LTV or like 1.5 to one. And, um, they are some people, a lot of people just stay on profitable and a lot of like the money that they ended up raising or maybe their own personal money, they ended up using paid ads.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
The good news is if you do, you just see your influencer first. Um, uh, Uh, you, you can actually get content that, you know, people will resonate with organically and you could reuse that in terms of paid ads. You can use data from your social media partnerships have better target rather than day one. Um, oh yeah, this is big. Like what countries convert better? What's the LTV of each country?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
What type of users are ideal to market to? And, um, Yeah. In the early stages, your budget won't be big enough and you won't 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 and Um, today.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And once we kind of had that feeling, then we started getting to paid ads. Um, and you know, the numbers kind of speak for themselves. Uh, we try to aim for like a three to one, um, tax to LTV or three, one LTV tax. Um, and, um, we try to get a short payback period. So, um, I think right now we make our money. like within the first two months of acquiring a user.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 at a time. Whether that's getting more UGC influencers or doing more mini tools for SEO or putting more into paid ads. I personally think it's the most boring growth channel.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
they, you know, they're probably, I mean, it's probably momentum, right? This fresh account is going up. They're 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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. If you want to know more, we could link like my SEO guy is also on Twitter and stuff. you could look at his post as well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
uh that none of no one's actually gonna do any of this shit yeah yeah yeah so my final thing was like just uh trying to egg people on to actually like make their startup better because i put so much time in 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 and count the bookmarks um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 their product? Probably like 1% of that. Like it's very difficult to like try for a year and get gut punched for a year.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And so, you know, I probably sized 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 person reading is that person. I guess I'm cheating now because I'm like rehashing it on a podcast. So maybe that number will go up now, but...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Yeah, it was read by 700,000. If we do the 10%, 100%, 100%, 100%, whatever, it's probably like seven, 70 people, something like that, that probably actually implemented this and made a big business from what I posted. And if you're one of those people, you should definitely message me and that would bring me immense dopamine if you told me that this post helped you out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
But yeah, that's the whole thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So also comment to 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, that would be, I would like to know that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 you know, literally one one hundredth of the price to sponsor because these YouTubers, they're kind of they've been spoiled by the Nord VPNs and the Grammarly's and the, you know, the Sony sponsorships.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
This showed up on my feed. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I mean, I'll say some of the sauce is like, uh, 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 five to 10 million. It's not like, oh, once you reach 5 million, you have to kind of rebuild the playbook and you could use it for 5 to 10. You have to rebuild some of it for scaling issues.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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... like the granular things obviously change as things scale, but everything on this list, we still use to this day. Um, we added a lot of like affiliate, like a lot of our revenue comes from affiliate, um, um, marketers now.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
So people that, um, enjoy Jenny and now champion Jenny and do marketing and they get some cut of whatever they'd like to do. Um, when marketing Jenny, um, we've gone into like acquisitions, which I think is pretty rare. So we've like acquired a few startups. Um, and yeah, I think that it's a good hedge. Like, I think that You know, we get to zero to 10 million revenue a year.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 probably do that again. So, you know, we do have a little bit of bets on the side of like, OK, we could probably go from 10 to 20. I'm pretty confident about that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 we didn't put any marketing budget into it. Really, it's just like, oh, these are the things that...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 should probably write a post about that, but I feel like it's so niche.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, I feel like if you were going on acquiring startups, like, yeah, I don't know how much a post like that would be helpful. But yeah, those are some new things. I think another kind of non-sexy answer is we kind of went back to the basics.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
We have all this traffic coming in. We have all these different distribution channels. We worked a lot on retention, conversion, Like, uh, the, like, you know, the funnel really. And once we kind of improve those funnels, um, it allows us to capitalize more on the traffic.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And, um, that's something that you can do at any point, but obviously for each, each percentage point that you decrease for churn, it matters way more as the scale of your start gets larger. So we, we really, as we got larger from five to 10, we got, we really laser focused on it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I mean, that's one of the really proud things that we've done is we went from like 20% churn to like nine to like around 9.8% churn. We more than halved 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 halving churn can literally make your startup so much larger.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
It just makes it so much easier for it to grow because the leaky bucket is just not torrential anymore. It's just manageable at some point. I don't know how much time we have. I'll just say one open secret about AI tools, these B2C AI apps, is the churn can be insane, right? Like you'd have 50% monthly churn. That's like not unheard of. 40% to 30%, that's like kind of normal.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
They expect like twenty thousand dollars 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, you know,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And then, you know, 20% is like if you're really focused on your customers and 10% for a B2C AI, it's just an ed tech. I don't know too many other startups that have been able to get it down that much. And yeah, you know, that's not a testament.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
That's a testament to like my team, you know, shout out to Mark, shout out to Shelesh, shout out to Heymont, Dandy, Justin, Luke, everybody on the team, Shane, everybody that's just killing it. And we were able to get these numbers down. So that's really five to 10.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Right.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Anything 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 beating 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 SF. I am not of that world. And like, I was able to kind of build this company, obviously not just because of me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Thanks to like really brilliant and like, People I'm really grateful that took a bet on me. But this is the time that I ran. I think a lot of you watching could also run this time if you really locked in. You don't have to send me $50 on Venmo. You could also just DM me on Twitter. If I think that I can help you and you seem like a cool person, I'm pretty easily reachable.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And, um, yeah, I got, I went on this fantastical, crazy journey. I feel like I'm not, I'm still close to the beginning than the end. And, um, I'm, I'm really grateful that it happened to me and I'm, I would love it if other people got to experience this journey as well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Thank you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 content seen by hopefully hundreds of thousands of millions of people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Yeah, so you could say there's somebody who has like 10,000 followers and they're doing numbers on their content. You could either continue to pay them with partnerships, sponsorships, where you have to pay them per post.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And the creator has a little bit of a worry that maybe their account is getting polluted by ads, which every creator kind of has to do that talk to list 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 the viewers about, you know, educating them about maybe some pain points that your product solves. just helpful advice, tips, things like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And like I said before, you know, follower account doesn't really matter in this new age of social media. So, you know, I mean, 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 it because it was like the most cliche probably thing you could say.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 would probably get, you know, millions upon millions upon millions of views. And, you know, that kind of phenomenon is going to happen on a, you know, varying degrees based upon, you know, the creator they partner with.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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, you know, over time, the videos will just be pushed back to their original audience anyways. Or, you know, other people...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 MengMengDuck 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 the time, Jenny wasn't really as much ed tech.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
Yeah, in our first month, we got 7 million impressions in our first month, which is, you know, it's pretty nuts.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
even a video that can get 1 million views, it can add thousands in MRR to your products, depending on how good your product is converting, depending on if it was pushed to the right countries where you have higher conversion rates, depending on 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 there's a lot of factors, but
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
like seven million views that you can essentially get for um if you record yourself for for free or if you partner up with a uh someone like naming duck for four thousand dollars like that's you know quite good roi i would say and when you when you reach out to mang mang duck i don't know if you remember but approximately how many followers did he have i want to say he had 300,000 on TikTok.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And 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 dissonance 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
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 The type of product that could 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.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
But within this price range, I would say that it's possible to find somebody where you get a similar deal even today.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
like I said, if you have somebody that you know creates good content that's getting similar views, like let's say MengMengDuck has 300k followers and then there's like MengMengBear over here that has 20k followers and they both have similar views, you know, like you could probably get MengMengBear for like a
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
know probably cheaper and the results would probably be the same because they're it's gonna 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 um yeah at the time i would say he was big but um 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
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
I remember we committed, I think three months, three, six, three. I, I, we didn't commit for very long. Like the memory is kind of hazy. It was like three, four years at this point, but you, it wasn't like a ridiculous lock in or anything. It was like a, I, I really think that we both enjoyed working together and that it was a good deal for both of us at the time.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)
And obviously he's off doing crazy, amazing things. And Jenny, he really helps 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.