the story of getting banned in facebook (part 3 - the end at last)

-

Ok - we settled with an influencer. We let go of PHP50,000.00. I think it was 90% of our liquid cash after expenses at that time. Painful.

Celina, our head of marketing, partnered with this guy with a page called Joseph’s Blessing. The guy had 700k followers. It was our first time paying someone to make a video for us - so we really did not know what to do, what to provide him and worst, what result to expect.

But Celina was quite confident with him. In all honesty, my head of marketing was not really the best person with numbers, but she had strong gut which she follows most of the time. So we bet on it.

3 weeks left to run 2 projects from 2 big clients.

We had less than 20% of the base needed.

We spent all our liquid cash.

Celina went to brief the guy, which went quite smoothly. The influencer got the point immediately and with very little to no guidance, he made 5 minute video on how to use our app.

Quite interesting really how creative these influencers are, and how close to their viewers they are that they immediately know what to say and how to say it.

The video was released one day after the briefing.

I waited. The team waited. Some prayed, some just made fun of the video, but all of us were hoping.

Seems like the stars aligned because after a day, the video got 10k views immediately and 500 new users in the app. We were so excited. On the next day, 400 more and a day after another 200. Man, new users started to rain.

It was an elating moment as we saw our user base grow. We hit our target new user mark in a week. Joseph indeed was a blessing.

All in all - after 3 weeks of only one video running, we got around 1,500 new users. Not a bad ROI.

That was when all put our fists up and raised our middle finger. F*ck you Facebook for BANNING US TO PAY YOU. We have youtube influencers now.

Starting then, we continued growing our base by having a small network of Youtube content creators which we hire to bump up our acquisition. Some worked, some not as much, but the return was solid. Never really thought I would love influencers as much.

The only thing here though is to ensure that we find new content creators regularly as saturation points are quite easy reach, around the 3rd video and the returns are really not that good anymore. But still, quite a good turnout.

Moral Lesson of the three part story: Facebook sucks. (and never over rely on one channel of acquisition)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the story of when we "scared" a big player from launching in the philippines

-
Image
I believe in our product, I fully believe in my team's capabilities, but it is still cool to have someone else reaffirm that we are doing well. This is a story of one of those rare occasions we felt good about ourselves. So it was around Feb last year, we got this email from a foreign market research company, one of the biggest in Japan and in the world. They said they were visiting the Philippines and would love to visit our office to chat. Companies never reach out to us, mostly it is the other way around, specially big players like them, so we found it interesting. We ensured to have everyone in the office for starters. Note that we only rent a small room (fit 6 people comfortably) in a co-working space, so having all of us 15 was a challenge. We also reserved extra conference rooms and meeting rooms to look like we own the whole co-working office space. We were an insecure bunch of people meeting with a giant company with 3,000 employees - we kinda overcompensated a bit. So we ...
Read more

the story of almost not being able to pay salaries

-
Image
Culture is not the lifeblood of a company. It is not Ideas. It is not innovation or open communication. It is cash. Even with the best minds working hand in hand in complete harmony, churning out the best ideas, if you ran out of cash - the company is dead. So let us call a spade a spade, we all are (and need to) chase “the money”. May it be investment money or revenue money, we all need to hustle our way into ingesting as much to survive. It is true that most of us build our startups to change the world or at least solve a problem. We wake up each day in-love with that problem, hacking ways around it to solve it in hopes it would make the world a better place, or at least a little more live-able. I am not preaching, I am also convincing myself as I write this entry, and I do that personal conversation every morning. As much I hate to admit it, I am not (or at least not only) the savior of consumer data gathering, I am (also) a barren hearted-cold blooded-money hungry business person. ...
Read more

the story of our first pitch (but called the final pitch 1 of 3) The one where I luckily saw the ad

-
Image
Okay - this is a continuation of my previous post on having short funds to pay for salaries, and by some miracle (actually a result of my oversight) we were able to survive the month. But then, that was only for a month. After surviving by the teeth last May, I was set to balance the books. So I had two tracks: Get more contracts/projects + Get some seed investment somewhere. The whole team hustled on both tracks, but let’s just first talk about the journey for our first outside seed investment. It was late Thursday, I was at home drinking whisky with my wife while scrolling Facebook and I saw an ad: The Final Pitch Season 8 is open for applicants. After being rejected by different VCs I found in the internet (it is cool though that they reply), I just thought, why not. And this is no sh*t, Friday was last day of application, what are the chances? It said that I submit a pitch deck (done, we have that), answer some questions (done, easy) and create a 1 minute video of me explaining our...
Read more