I Built a $10M AI Startup as a College Dropout (Exact Strategy That Worked)

David Park, founder of Jenny AI, details his step-by-step approach to building a profitable AI startup that reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue. He emphasizes starting with organic short-form content and influencer marketing before moving to SEO and paid advertising. Park attributes much of Jenny AI's success to finding viral content formats that could be repeated with variations, working with the right influencers regardless of follower count, and focusing on retention metrics as the company scaled. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 03:00 - Organic Short Form Content 08:25 - The Power of Fresh Accounts in Influencer Marketing 11:17 - Case Study: MengMengDuck and Influencer Partnerships 18:01 - New Creator Guidelines 25:57 - Order of Virality: Steps to Achieve Success 30:55 - Finding Influencers 36:21 - Outreach Strategies 40:34 - Negotiating with Influencers 44:50 - Content posting strategy 49:15 - Final UGC Tips 51:52 - SEO Strategy 57:00 - Paid Ads Playbook 59:53 - David's final advice: 01:02:08 - From $5M to $10M 1) ORGANIC SHORT-FORM CONTENT David's shocking truth: Fresh accounts with 1 follower can OUTPERFORM accounts with millions! The algorithm rewards quality, not history. 2) The "Fresh Account" Strategy: • Create new accounts specifically for your product • Find creators to be the face of these accounts • Pay them to create consistent content • Focus on hooks that resonate with your audience 3) The Viral Series Formula Find ONE format that works, then repeat it with slight variations. Example: "POV: You have an essay due" videos for Jenny AI generated 300M+ views and $500K+ in revenue! 4) INFLUENCER MARKETING Don't waste time with mega-influencers charging $20K per post. Instead: • Find creators whose audience matches your users • Create a new account with them as the face • Pay for consistent content (not one-offs) • Let them maintain their authentic style 5) How to find the RIGHT influencers: • Ask your users which creators they follow • Create a "scout" account that only follows relevant creators • Let the algorithm suggest similar accounts • Look for creators with high engagement (not just followers) 6) Outreach hack that WORKS: Send money via Venmo to influencers you want to work with! They'll get a push notification and respond out of curiosity. 7) Negotiation strategy: • Start by asking for their HIGHEST price point (all features) • Remove elements you don't need to lower the price • Negotiate bulk deals (20% off for multiple videos) • Split payment between upfront and performance-based NEVER pay based on follower count - that's outdated! 8) Content posting strategy: • Post 1+ videos DAILY to test different hooks • Trust creators to maintain their authentic style • Create systems that let influencers work autonomously • Don't be afraid of videos looking like ads - they convert BETTER Scale to a video every few hours! 9) David's final advice: "I'm a non-technical founder, a college dropout, not from Silicon Valley. If I can build this, YOU CAN TOO." - David Park "The truth? Only 1% of people reading this will implement these strategies for a full year." - David Park Notable Quotes "We had one video that got 20 million views that had almost a negligible effect on conversions that day for Jenny. It was as if we got zero views, like nothing really happened that day. And yeah, it's just important to create content for people that actually want to convert and want to actually use your product." - David Park "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... and I was able to kind of build this company." - David Park Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav) Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND DAVID ON SOCIAL Jenni AI: https://jenni.ai X/Twitter: https://x.com/Davidjpark96 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paviddark/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  David Park went from zero to $10 million with his AI startup in the last few years. And he's got this incredible growth tactic playbook. And we actually went through his playbook, paid ads, SEO, influencer marketing, you name it. And this is the most comprehensive, best playbook that I have seen of growth marketing for an AI startup to date. It is incredible and he just gives it to us. The people who listen to this episode to the end, this will actually change lives.

• 0:40Greg Isenberg?

  Like people will actually be able to take some of this playbook and implement it in their startups. I hope you enjoy this episode. People charge for this stuff, but it's free here on the Startup Ideas Podcast. Enjoy the episode.

• 1:05Greg Isenberg?

  We got David Park on the Startup Ideas Podcast. I learned about him through this post, how to go from zero to $5 million ARR profitably, step by step, went absolutely bonkers viral, 4.5 thousand likes. He talks about organic short form content, influencer marketing, SEO, paid ads. Now, this isn't just a clickbaity hook. He actually goes through exactly the playbook for how to grow. And he's grown himself, you know, he's done it himself. He's actually since then gone to $10 million ARR with his startup, Jenny AI.

• 1:47Greg Isenberg?

  So I had to have him here on the pod and we're gonna just, you know, by the end of this pod, what I, what I hope to get out of David is some growth tactics for you to do the same. So growth tactics to go from zero to $10 million ARR profitably. David Park, welcome to the pod.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  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 five million. And then I actually haven't written the five to 10 million revenue posts, so I will be, I guess, writing that real time on this podcast and figuring out how I did that. But yeah, I mean, if we, if we want to just not waste people's time, we could literally just like jump right into it. If you want to just, if you want to just start getting to the post, I'm happy to do so.

• 2:45Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Yeah. So yeah, let's, let's start with number one. So organic short form content. You basically say, you talk about the fresh account versus not fresh account and, and how you should think about the format, finding a face, craft a viral video series, multiply your accounts. What do you, what do you mean by this?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  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, I think there was this idea that the history of someone's channel meant a lot. But nowadays, that's not really the case at all. Like there are many cases where founders will just make one video on their TikTok and that video will just immediately go viral. Which, which, you know, no matter how many times I say it, people don't really seem to believe it until they, it happens to one of their friends. But I mean, I'm sure you've had many guests that, you know, say the same thing. Like you can literally just make a straight up ad about your product.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  If the hook is good and the content is, you know, high quality, you have a good shot of getting, you know, 10, 100,000, a million views. And that's obviously, you know, costs you very little or nothing to do. So this idea of like fresh accounts with, you know, with one follower, 10 followers versus an account with a million followers. It's not hyperbole. You know, we've had, we've done a lot of A B tests at Jenny where, you know, we've, we've posted the same, same content, literally the same content on, you know, our main account that has 70,000 followers and an account that had, I believe at the time like 50 followers. Not really that, you know, strange for the account with fifty six followers to beat the amount of engagement or the amount of views with the account with more followers.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really just, you have a chance to really, we, 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. 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.

• 5:03Greg Isenberg?

  So you say here, I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week versus a YouTuber with a million subs. If they had similar views and I don't even think it's a controversial opinion.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I don't think it's controversial opinion.

• 5:19Greg Isenberg?

  What do you, what do you mean by that?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I mean, if fresh accounts, first of all, like if you look at their, their history, if a fresh account is getting similar views with an account that has, you know, millions of subs. It's probably that the fresh account is just juiced by the algorithm right now. And it's, you know, this creator, this type of content is just, it's doing well. It's resonating with people. Whereas this YouTuber with a million subs, they, you know, they're probably, I mean, it's probably momentum, right? These fresh account is going up, 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. And yeah, I mean, that's just the, the, the high level.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  But then if you go into the granular details, very clearly you should sponsor a fresh account because these fresh accounts, you, 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, they expect like twenty thousand dollars for a thirty 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,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  this type of content that you think will also resonate with the people that use your product. And they probably have never been paid via social media before. You could pay them something that you believe is fair and they believe is fair. They get paid to do something that they were undoing for free. You get your, you know, your content seen by, you know, hopefully hundreds, thousands, millions of people. And yeah, I mean, if you break it down like that, it's just cheaper. You're betting on something that's seems to be on the uptrend versus betting on something that, you know, there's probably their, their million subs is going to be priced in to whatever they pay for it. So I really don't think it's controversial at all to go for the fresh cash.

• 7:23Greg Isenberg?

  Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas. Or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need.

• 8:07Greg Isenberg?

  So you can check out the link to startupempire.co in the description.

• 8:14Greg Isenberg?

  And you say here, but rather than finding and sponsoring these new accounts in your niche, you can actually just create these accounts yourself. You just need to follow this basic format. Can you explain what the format is and just add some context to that?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you could say there's somebody who has like 10,000 followers and they're doing, you know, numbers on their content. You could either continue to pay them, you know, with partnership sponsorships where you have to pay them per post and the creator has a little bit of a worry that maybe their account is getting polluted by ads, which, you know, every creator kind of has to do that checklist of like, do I look like I'm selling out? Also, I kind of want to pay my rent or there's a new iPhone I would like to get. But the happy middle ground, what I found is that you can actually have a creator just make a completely new fresh account again, and they can kind of be the face of your product and they'll kind of be telling

• 9:13Speaker 01

  your, telling the viewers about, you know, educating them about maybe some pain points that your product solves, just helpful advice, tips, things like that. And like I said before, you know, follower account doesn't really matter in this new age of social media. So, you know, the, 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. Right, I'm trying to avoid saying it. I'm trying to avoid saying it because it was like the most cliche, probably thing you could say, but yeah. So if they made a new TikTok account, it would not get 10 views, obviously, right? Despite having zero followers, they would probably break the internet

• 9:57Speaker 01

  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. So in fact, you can kind of find this happy 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 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.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So in that sense, you can find somebody new to be kind of the face of your account for vastly cheaper. You can never convince someone to make, you know, 30 ads, 30 sponsored posts on their main account. It's like very difficult to kind of convince them to do that, but creating a new account with 30 videos, one video a day on a new account, it's like. It's not that difficult of a sell because it doesn't really feel like you're selling out at all. So yeah.

• 11:05Greg Isenberg?

  And can you talk about Ming Ming Duck and just that your whole experience? Because I think people listening to this are kind of like, okay, how much do I pay? How do I think about, you know, reaching out to people? Just like, how do I actually do this?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll, I'll talk later about how to like reach out to influencers and how to get partnerships. But unfortunately, there was a bit of nepotism here where Ming Ming Duck and I were part of the same fraternity. So I was able to just kind of like DM him and have him join us at Jenny. I paid him $4,000 a month for 20 videos. We had a pretty good overlap. At the time Jenny wasn't really as much at tech, we're more just like a more broad writing tool. And obviously he was teaching people how to write emails, like he was teaching people how to like, you know, speak to their boss or how to, you know, send a cold email or, you know, anything where it's important to be precise, important to have high quality written content.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So when he was the face of our account, you know, like, like I said before, it started with zero followers. It started completely from scratch and that same account, you know, 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, um, yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm reading this. I haven't read this in a long time. Yeah. In our first month, we got seven million impressions in our first month, which is, um, you know, it's pretty nuts. Even a video that can get one million views, you know, it can add thousands in MRR to your products, right? Depending on, you know, how, how good your product is at converting, depending on if it was pushed to the right countries where, um, you know, you have higher conversion rates.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Depending on, um, you know, if the video is more straight up a sponsorship or if it's more blatantly just telling you about why this product is good. But, you know, there's a lot of factors, but like seven million views that you can essentially get for, if you record yourself for free or if you partner up with a, uh, someone like Ming Ming Duck for $4,000, like that's, you know, quite good ROI, I would say.

• 13:10Greg Isenberg?

  And when you, when you reach out to Ming Ming Duck, I don't know if you remember, but approximately how many followers did he have?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I want to say he had.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Three hundred thousand on TikTok. And I, when I say that people are like, well, I could never convince someone with that many followers to be viewed for four thousand dollars. But I don't know, I think that there's kind of this, uh, this cognitive distance a little bit where, oh, this person is so famous, this person is so famous, he has so many followers, he has so much influence, they must be like raking it in like insane amounts of money, you know? But that's not always the case, right? There are people that just love to create and maybe they either aren't focusing on monetizing or maybe the type of content they make isn't the type of product that can monetize their, their type of content hasn't reached out to them yet.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  So I would say that like, I think this is somewhat of a deal, but within this price range, I could, I would say that's possible to find somebody where you get a similar deal, you know, even today. And like I said, if you, if you have somebody that you know creates good content that's getting similar views, like let's say Ming Ming Duck has three hundred K followers and then there's like Ming Ming Bear over here that has twenty K followers and they both have similar views, you know, like you could probably get Ming Ming Bear for like a, you know, probably cheaper and the results would probably be the same because they're, it's going to get pushed to the same audiences of the people watching them and if the views are the same for both, it's, it doesn't really matter. So, um, yeah, at the time I would say he was big, but, um, that doesn't, that shouldn't

• 14:48Speaker 01

  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 this energy together, then just send the email, you'd never know it might happen.

• 14:57Greg Isenberg?

  And did you have to commit for like a long period of time, like six months or nine months to get this deal or was it sort of month by month?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  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 I really think that we both enjoyed working together and that it was a good deal for both of us at the time. And obviously, he's off doing crazy, amazing things. And Jenny, he really 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, um, yeah, it was not like a crazy deal where I had to lock in for thirty six months or something like that.

• 15:48Greg Isenberg?

  I guess my, my point there is, well, for you, you didn't have to lock in for a year or more. So that's like amazing. You get to test this channel. But for someone like him, this isn't a one-off brand deal. Like getting three or six months of monthly revenue, like that consistent revenue is interesting. So someone like Ming Ming Duck would rather take four thousand dollars over, four thousand dollars a month over three to six months, than maybe a one-shot brand deal for eight thousand. Um, but, you know, it's.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  But those come and go, you know?

• 16:27Greg Isenberg?

  Those come and go. So I, I, I hear that a lot from creator, I hear that a lot from creators. Um, and by the way, I know someone's gonna listen to this and they're gonna be like, you're a creator. It's like, dude, I don't have any ads on, on this podcast. So like, I, you know, no.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Greg, if you wanna make, you know, twenty videos a month for four thousand, I would love it if you would, if you would work with us.

• 16:49Greg Isenberg?

  I don't do short form, bro. I don't do short form.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Ah, damn it. Okay. Next, in the next life, maybe. But yeah, I mean, uh, it's just one final thing to add is, um, you know, for four thousand dollars for twenty videos, it sounds daunting. But you could tell the creator, like, look, these things can literally take you like five, ten minutes a day. It could be really, because you just record maybe a new hook and we'll supply you with like the screen grabs and the videos of our products that we know look pretty, that we know will convert. So every day you just 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, and you make four thousand dollars a month with just very little time spent per day. Um, 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.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  And you could just maybe, uh, you do a little bit of different editing and repost it again and probably go viral again. And, um, it's really a twenty videos, sounds like a lot, but if you think about it as like just three hours to six hours of time in a month, like it's really not that much.

• 17:49Greg Isenberg?

  So you say here, when you get a new creator, just follow this basic guideline. Repost vids on all platforms, reels, TikTok, shorts, post one plus videos per day. Initially, post vids similar to what the influencer posts on their main account. Then start experimenting with videos that feature your product. You can get someone cheaper for similar results. How important is the daily post?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the, I probably should have said this in the post, but the importance of like frequency of posting is just you want to be exploring before you exploit, you know? So if you're posting like one video a week, you only have four tests per month to find a hook and like content angle that really works. Whereas you post one video a day, I said one plus, you could post even more than one video a day. You could continually kind of try, you know, different, like you try like skits or memes or humor or educational content or straight up ads or, you know, like play with different angles, build different hooks, text on screen, like you could try different, like there's so many things you could kind of be experimenting with.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  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. For something like this, it seems to do okay. Something like this, it seems to flop. Get the winners of your content kind of coliseum and then the next week, try with the winning variants and try more things. And eventually you'll get one thing to like one mega banger where it gets like a million to 10 million views. And it's like the most euphoric kind of crazy feeling that you have to kind of like, you have to really experience it to put it into words, but you cannot get to that. Sorry, I mean, yeah, look, there are going to be like savants out there that they can just, you know, they, they know exactly how to, how to do it from the get go.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Like I said, some people can just go viral from the first video, you know? But there are, there are many cases where you won't. And the best way to get to that viral banger is to iterate towards it. And that's why I think you should post often.

• 19:56Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it makes sense. It's just like shots on, on, on goal, right?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  So you said a way, way, way cleaner than me. Yeah, that's what I should have said.

• 20:06Greg Isenberg?

  I'm Canadian, so I just think of things in hockey references, you know? You've just got to hit it top shelf, you know?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:15Greg Isenberg?

  So then you say the entire goal when working with your creator is to find a viral series because a video that goes viral once will go viral again. So can you talk more about the strategy and why this is the goal?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  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. I think actually we're kind of creatures of habit and we always want to see those things that bring us our creature comforts over and over. It's why people always complain that like the YouTube algorithm is so shit. They're like, oh, I just get the same videos on my front page every time, you know? But really it's probably because the behavior of everybody is they just watch the same videos over and over. In that same sense, you know, once you have a viral video, that's

• 21:11Speaker 01

  like, you know, a lot of the difficulty is finding that viral video. And the next part is turn 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. 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, you know? And then he probably realized that went gigaviral. So he's like, okay, I could either spend another month like workshopping, trying to think of a new idea or execution, or I could literally film the exact same thing but do with coat hangers. That's what he did and that went viral again.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Then he does it with sheets of paper and does it again. And then maybe he gets a little ambitious and he buys like broken iPads. He tries with iPads and that one goes like really viral, right? But the end of the day, it's like, it's all literally the same video. It's a minimal effort and it just goes viral every time. One thing that's kind of going really crazy viral on reels, it's kind of diagnosed lately, but it's someone who says like, for every follower I have, I'll do X. So for every follower I have, I'll gamble $1. And like you have this video, eventually this guy's gambling like $200,000 on Blackjack because he has 200,000 followers. And it's the same thing, right? It's the same hand of Blackjack use, you know, gambling. Um, every single video I put here, like a guy drinks a cup of milk for every thousand followers he has, you know, it's like, it's a slightly more laborious to drink like five cups of milk

• 22:40Speaker 01

  versus one cup of milk, but it's like, you know, it at least saves you the time of having to think of a new viral video every single, you know, just continuously. That's, that's difficult to do. And for us at Jenny, we had like point of view, you have a paper or an essay due. And it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realizing that they have an essay due while they're taking a shit or right before they sleep or whatever. And it always ended with the second half, which is exactly the same, which is just either the milk gets chugged, the guy falls because it's not a spaghetti. And in this case, they figure out, oh, Jenny could help me, you know, write my paper faster while, you know, I'm still in the driver's seat and, you know, it's, that makes me a better student and makes me just like, uh, remove stress from my life, right? So, uh, it's the same thing where, uh, is it really that much more difficult of you

• 23:23Speaker 01

  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 a paper due? It's kind of like, um, once you have something that you know, people resonate with, you know, it's people like, it's just, it's just something that, uh, no matter what you put in front of the hook, as long as it's relatable, it'll always go viral. And, um, you can kind of do it for however long you, you can really do this, uh, 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.

• 24:07Greg Isenberg?

  So I think, uh, what isn't said here, and I want to talk about is.

• 24:15Greg Isenberg?

  You need to have a format product fit. So don't, you know, this makes sense for you. Point of view, you have an essay due if you're building Jenny AI. That makes complete sense. Now, if you would have done the a guy drinks a cup of milk for every thousand followers he has. And then you're like, okay, sign up to Jenny AI doesn't work, right? But maybe if you're like selling, you know, milk, you have a milk company or something like that, or dairy company, that might work, right? So I think that

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:45Greg Isenberg?

  You don't want to, you know, going viral for the sake of going viral is empty calories. You don't really want to do that. Like you have to, you want to go viral with, with a series, with a format, and then you want your product to, uh, to just buckle right in there.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's, uh, 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 thousands of dollars in revenue. And I remember the saddest time ever was we had one video that got 20 million views, one video, and it, it almost had a negligible effects on like conversions that day for Jenny. It almost, it was as if it, we got zero views, like nothing really happened that day. And, um, yeah, it's just, like you said, it's important to create content for people that actually want to convert and want to actually use your product.

• 25:45Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. So before we get into number two influencer marketing, let's just go through the order, let's just go through this order of virality.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  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 experimented 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. There's probably step 1.5 where you'll get videos that completely flop, videos that do well. You should probably do some, um, a little snooping, see what your competitor is doing. Maybe see in general what's happening in other industries. Is what's what's really catching people's attention and experimenting eventually after all those things. One point that one point five, you will get a video that goes viral. And then, like I said before, you want to experience some, I turn them into a series. How can you like just tweak this video over and over?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  So that you could keep posting it and you can continue to get viewers that that could convert to to using your product. Um, you want to start tweaking and posting the series on multiple accounts. So in at our peak, we had probably seven different accounts. Uh, seven different accounts on each platform, so that is like twenty four accounts, twenty four videos posted every day. Um, and the these these videos will, uh, you know, even if they don't have that many followers, they they could, they have a chance of, uh, going viral on each of these accounts, which just gives you so much. The surface area of luck just gets so large. Um, then you could actually translate and create the same video with creators that speak Chinese, Spanish, etc. Um, we have like, we have, we approve videos, uh, completely in Mandarin.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Um, I I don't speak Mandarin, so it's sometimes it's hard to do quality control for these videos. But, uh, they they convert, we we track the the UTM clicks, we track the, um, the conversions from the coupon codes from these like Chinese accounts, they do very well. Um, and then once you kind of feel like you're at the, uh, tail end of the of the cycle, you could take these viral videos. You could sponsor other pages to repost them, you know, there's like this kind of, uh, underbelly of Instagram. Uh, specifically where there's just like these meme pages that have just insane reach. But they're run by like seventeen year olds or like twenty year olds. And you could just pay them like fifty dollars to repost your content, they will take like two weeks to respond because they they don't, they're just like,

• 28:07Speaker 01

  they have other priorities, probably just like having social life and stuff, but, uh, you basically can just take these videos, repost them on meme pages. They'll have a second life again, um, they they won't have, they won't, um, reach the same heights as when in the in the heyday when you're posting them on your accounts, but, uh, they'll probably just go viral again to a lesser degree. And then you could always use, uh, the mega viral content for paid ads. Um, and then the the saddest part is eventually enough copycats will copy your video series. It will get played out, um, people will just, uh, stop responding to it because, um, it's not, it's not something they want to watch anymore. And then you're back to step one where you gotta be, uh, you gotta be farming out hooks, farming out ideas, doing your research and then running through the lifecycle once more.

• 28:53Greg Isenberg?

  Beautiful, on point, on point and very cool to see POV you have an essay do that video series has generated 300 plus million views overall essentially the same video over and over multiple times a week consistently went viral and one thing, one thing, you know, you said that one series, one video series made us half a million dollars. That's one point of it. It's made you a half a million dollars in revenue, but you know, for every one dollar of revenue, especially in the AI world, you're looking at at least five, 10, 15, 20 X of enterprise value to the business, which is insane, right? So if you

• 29:34Greg Isenberg?

  bring in a hundred thousand dollars of revenue, that might mean your company is worth 500,000. I mean, I'm making things up numbers, but it could be 500,000, a million, 1.5 or two, right? So it's, it's, this is, this is a big deal.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, I mean, I honestly think I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't aggressive enough when I wrote this out, you know, like, you, you, you don't, you don't, you could, it's not even you could post same video over and over multiple times a week. You could probably post it multiple times a day. You could, like, I, I think that, 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. Uh, I didn't believe that this possibly could be rewarded by the algorithm. Like, how could you possibly want accounts? Like, why would you reward accounts posting the same videos like five times a day? But the

• 30:33Speaker 01

  views don't lie. I think that you could crank it up. You could take what I've done to the next level and that could even bring you even more fortune.

• 30:43Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Let's, let's move on to how you actually find influencers. Cause I think this is a black box for a lot of people. They're kind of looking at this and they're like, yeah, cool. But how do I actually, how do I actually get creators on board?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  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 users, which I feel like founders like avoid like the black plague. But the good news is, um, if you talk to users, you can really easily see just like the, the influencers that they follow. You just ask them, hey, would you mind like, you know, telling me your Instagram handle or telling me like who you follow that has to do with like my product that teaches you about, you know, education or how to be a better student, whatever. And then from there, once you have their handle, you can just like look at

• 31:39Speaker 01

  who they're following, right? Like, uh, that's the best thing about user interviews is a lot of times like you could ask leading questions or you maybe like, they might lie to you in the interview to make you feel good, or they don't want to hurt your feelings. But if you just ask for their handle, you know, like that, that's, that's, they're not lying about who they're following, the people that they're interacting with. So you can just see who are the people that, 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, 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 drinking a bunch of milk, like, that doesn't do you any good. You want to like, who are the people that they, you know, that doesn't show up on their feed? That's the people that they have some affinity towards. So anyways, you could go to your user Instagram, see which influencers they're following.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And then you can, uh, basically do this for several users and you have like a pretty good list of people that could immediately start following or immediately start sponsoring on day one. But there's a lot of other things you could do, like for example, once you like, um, you know, there's, there's ways that you could, uh, click the influencer profile, click suggest similar accounts, uh, you kind of like do a little. You know, look at the current influencer crop that you have that uses follower. 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. But um, we have like a pretty interesting um, kind of, I don't know if it's a hack, but it's what we do for finding influencers like.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  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 influencers. You don't follow anybody else. You manually follow these influencers, watch their videos all the way through. And the algorithm will start automatically showing you like other influencers that are uh, you know, in the same bucket. So the algorithm goes out and you know, there are people that pay agencies like tens of thousands of dollars to go out and do this influence marketing for them. You can just not do that. You can just take your influence that you have, uh, make a new TikTok or Instagram account. Just watch these influencers. You kind of be, you kind of like, it's great because you also uh, become your user in a way. You start to see what they see and you start to like uh, like be, be in their shoes a little bit.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  And you can, you can see the craziest steals. You find the craziest deals if you do this, uh, do this uh, strategy. Because occasionally you'll find someone with like 10 followers with like their first reel. And it's just amazing content. And you just, you know, what eventually your intuition just gets so good. You're like, oh, this person, five videos from now, it's going to go viral. I want to just message this person to friend this person, maybe sponsor them immediately. And um, 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 of the insecurity of posting. This person is now a huge believer in me. He wants to pay me to post the same type of thing I'm already posting. So it's just like a great uh, win-win for everybody. And obviously.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  If an influencer video shows up on your For You page as you're swiping through the algorithm, it's just like an amazing, amazing thing because what's the worst thing that happens is you pay for a dud. You pay for a video where it's just not pushed to anybody. It gets like a hundred views. But if you sponsor somebody because they appeared on your For You page when you're not following them, you know this person, at the very least, has the capacity to be pushed to non-follower accounts to be, you know, the TikTok is trying to push and test their content to larger audiences. And that really lowers your downside of like, okay, well, at the very least, this person, oh, sorry, it doesn't lower your downside, it increases your upside. Where like this account, um, sorry, it does both. You have the upside of it could go viral and the downside of like, it's not gonna be,

• 35:25Speaker 01

  it's not guaranteed to be a dud where they just happen to have like a lot of followers and, you know, they happen to like, their view count is really just being recycled through their legacy followers that just watched them maybe out of hate or out of like apathy. Like instead you've sponsored somebody where it's being pushed to people that are not their followers. So yeah, that's a, you know, that's one method that we use that's really 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.

• 36:09Greg Isenberg?

  I like it. Okay, so here you have the playbook on reaching out to influencers.

• 36:16Greg Isenberg?

  Let's run it through.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, when you reach out to influencers, you wanna try like all avenues of attack, which is DMs, emails. If they have a LinkedIn, you can hit them up on LinkedIn. If they have like, you know, I've done very strange things where I found out they had like a blog or like a Tumblr or something and I'll DM them on. But the thing that keeps me going is like, wow, that was really difficult for me to find this person's email. Or wow, that was really difficult for me to find out like what this. Dude's Tumblr was from like five years ago. That probably means that very few people are messaging this person. So they'll just be even more impressed and more happy that, you know, I'm not just like a person shotgunning emails to like tens of thousands of people, which we don't do.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  I, I try to find people that I think really resonate with the people that we're also trying to help. And yeah, so you know, you want to be not relegated to just email. I feel like a lot of founders, they send one email and they're like, oh, wow. These influencers suck, you know, they think they're so much better than me. They don't respond to me, you know, dude, like they probably got like 50 emails just today and your email was probably in like the lowest 10th percentile of like actually trying to connect with them on a human to human level. Like they don't care what series round you're at. I don't know why you added that in your email or like, you know, like you, you want to just talk to them like a human. But so, yeah, I guess that dovetails into the next thing, which is like, you want to be very detailed and.

• 37:42Greg Isenberg?

  By the way, I have a hack, I have a little hack on that. Someone did this to me, actually, a few people actually did this to me. They would just Venmo me, like they found my Venmo username and I get, I get a push notification, like people get push notifications on Venmo. So it's like, who the hell is David sending me $50 or whatever? And you're going to respond. You're going to respond to those people, right? So I actually think that one quick hack is, you know, put a little budget together and start just sending them like a few dollars, see what happens.

• 38:23Greg Isenberg?

  So, you know, all messages need to be detailed and as tailored as possible, but be concise. I agree by the, you know, no one's reading like paragraphs, it's just not happening.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 38:36Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Ironically, as we are reading paragraphs here, but.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was so surprised this like did well because it's like it was just like such a dense piece of content. But anyways, yeah, so when you send them, you want to demonstrate you're a fan of their content. They're excited to partner up. Why should they partner with you? Why will their audience love you? Don't talk about weird stuff about 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, you know, the 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.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Um, and then no matter how good your, your messages are, you kind of assume that a majority of them will not respond, especially in the early days. The sooner you kind of get that, accept that and, and get more tougher skin, the more you'll be actually able to, um, optimize your, your outreach versus get butthurt every time that they don't respond. Um, and the good news is as more people talk about your product, it gets easier and easier to convince, uh, other people in the ecosystem to talk about your product. Uh, for many reasons, one, because like unknown products could be risky or scams. Um, if you DM them and you have like 70,000 followers and blue checkmark, then it's much more likely they'll respond versus if you have like 10 followers.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  That's maybe the only thing left that's like actually helpful with follower numbers is like if you want to talk with other creators or if you want to like do outreach like this. Otherwise the followers number doesn't really matter that much in terms of like actual reach for content. So yeah, that's the, how we reach out to influencers.

• 40:22Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. And then how do we negotiate with influencers?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, uh, when you negotiate with influencers, uh, you want to basically align the incentives between you and the influencers. Uh, you, you should both want a video that can, can, that converts. And, uh, one way to do that is you don't want to give them all of the money upfront because you immediately lose leverage. Uh, like your side of leverage if you pay, pay for everything and, uh, they, they, uh, they just have to post afterwards. Obviously, I love influencers. Most influencers are fantastic people, but some will try, will just take the money. And some of them will actually just not post any videos and others will drop a half ass video. Um, because they already got their bag. Um, you want to try to split some of the payments so that a percent of it, percentage of it comes from like the number of conversions they bring. If you give them their personal coupon code.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Or maybe like the number of views that they get. Um, also when you negotiate, I don't, I mean, something that I do is I try to be like really straightforward with them. Like, oh, you know, like we have, uh, we usually do well in these countries and we usually, uh, like for these types of, uh, partnerships, we usually have this sort of, uh, budget and just being fully transparent. Um, and then they are transparent with like their demographics and help their previous bunch of views go. So, um, yeah, I mean, I try to try to negotiate with like, um, like transparency. I was like, okay, like the video needs to do this much to really get us this much ROI. Like this is the break even point. Would you be down to like do this? And then we can have this much as bonuses.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Uh, if we both do, if the video does well and we can both be happy, things like that. Um, and yeah, there's other things that I didn't, I might have written it later, but, um, you know, what you want to do in the beginning is you want to pay for, you want to get the price point, you want to get the most expensive price point. You know, so you want to get like, how much is it if it's like link in bio comes with an Instagram story? Post on all of your short form accounts. 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, um, you know, for one video, how much would that be? Like full usage rights, all these things. And you want to put it on the table and they're going to say, you know, a thousand dollars, you know, and you can think about it and be like, well,

• 42:36Speaker 01

  what do I actually really want? Like, do I really want the usage rights in this case? Is it that it's too expensive? All right, let's remove that. How much can we get if we remove that? Or let's say I really want the link and buy it. Let's say I remove that. I don't really want the story. Let's say you're a pop it on Instagram, TikTok with now YouTube shorts. Let's just remove that part of the deal. And eventually you get like the true price, the non-inflated price, you get the true price of one video. And then you could say, okay, well, you know, let's say it's now down to eight hundred, seven hundred dollars. Okay, how about now, um, you know, we do a bulk deal. 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 it to what your needs are.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  You end up getting like a pretty fairly priced uh video for both sides. And um that's one thing that we do to negotiate, which I'm surprised I didn't write on here, but um. That I definitely should have written that. Um, and the last thing is like, um, I guess I'll stop saying it after this time, but I've said it, I guess a few times now, but you know, they're. I I'm flabbergasted. You could literally Google like how to pay influencers. You could Google it like everyone viewing can Google it right now. And all of the top articles will tell you to pay based on followers. They will tell you straight up like they will give you a chart. The top article has a chart of like if they have this much, then they're a micro celebrity. You pay 1,000, if they're this much, they're a celebrity, celebrity should pay this much. It's like the most craziest misinformation.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Um, that's probably causing uh like junior social media people at like their various companies around the world. To just uh really pay influencers like insane amounts of money that uh they will never get an ROI on. And which is maybe passively hurting startups because they maybe have this expectation that you that if you have a million followers, you have to pay me this much. And which is maybe even hurt the influencer too. So yeah, don't listen to those garbage articles and that's how we negotiate at Jay.

• 44:33Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. I agree with you about a hundred percent. Hundred percent. So posting content and then we'll we'll end it with some final tips and then we'll move on to SEO, I think.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay, so uh when it comes to posting content, uh you can't use like a one size fits all strategy for all the partnerships. Because every influencer has cultivated their own uh people that love them for what they post. So your sponsored content can't deviate too far from it or else it'll have like. You know, the retention will be terrible and the hook will be terrible and you're basically paying for something that's not. Convert um like if you have don't have much experience, you can err on the side of just like trusting the influencer to be like, okay, just make something very similar to what you're already posting. Like, hey, you post this shit, just remake this video and just have like, you know, use the product halfway through the video, you know, at this timestamp.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And then, you know, here's what you do with the product. Like you, you kind of just uh manage the part where the product is in, where the product shows up. And you can kind of like let the influencer cook and uh let them do what they've already been doing in the past. Um, like in actionable terms, like for example, like some influencers already have their own series, you know, like some influencers have a series like top 10 AI tools that feel illegal to know, you know, and like that's their series, right? Like you don't want to just, it 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. Um, I was gonna add one more thing. Uh, I don't want to forget.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Uh, oh, and the big thing is with influencer marketing, you want to scale. Like the big thing is you eventually want to have like a video going out every few hours, you know, about your products. Once you get to that point. And you physically cannot be micromanaging so many influencers at the same time, right? So you eventually need to kind of be trusting these influencers, giving them this blueprint of like, okay, we want the product to be spoken about in this way. We want the product to be portrayed at least this amount of time. Um, we like when you make videos about this, this and this, and um we expect like this amount of views or this amount of engagement. And you know, four videos a month, we will be by a package deal. We won't even bother you for the next like month until we come back and kind of assess like the the um the

• 47:00Speaker 01

  the metrics and you can just go cook and then you just kind of set and forget. Once you have enough of these like uh uh these people on autopilot, that's how you can actually start scaling your influencer marketing strategy. And um yeah, unfortunately, um you you you have to learn this early on or um 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 um it'll hurt into your profits if you have to keep expanding your your team, you know, like for us, we only have two people running influencer marketing, even though we spend, you know, 50 to hundreds of thousands uh per month.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  And it's just two people running it. It's myself and one other very talented individual named Shane. So, um, yeah, uh, I guess the things I wrote is, uh, views are irrelevant. Uh, I talked about that earlier. Do you should make a cited? Um, forget about the second, yeah, when in doubt. Uh, yeah, when in doubt, also don't be afraid of your video looking like a straight up ad. Uh, even if it gets less views, it's will convert better. Um, I can 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,

• 48:22Speaker 01

  the waffle they had that day is, you know, it's like, um, it's just so easy. People are hit with so many ads, like everyone's buying so much for attention. Uh, so much for your attention that, uh, you know, if it's kind of subtle and it's not really blatant. And it's just kind of in one year, out the other, uh, you're very likely kind of waste your money. Whereas if someone just hits you with like, dang, don't you hate when this happens? Has this happened to you? Or like, are you afraid of this? Uh, or do you want this? This will solve your issue. You know, it's a very, uh, 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 product, they're more likely to share your products.

• 49:03Greg Isenberg?

  With the final tips, just conscious of time, because I want to go through SEO and paid ads. But I also want to go through, what have you learned since posting this? And how did you get from five to 10 million ARR? Uh, can you, can you, uh, you know, pick one or two final tips that you, you want to leave people with?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, um, when it comes to like influencer, when it comes to, uh, UGC, I think that a lot of it is just, you kind of feel like, uh, 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. So a lot of it is just be, can you facilitate these partnerships well? You know, there's some of it is like, you, you would think when it comes to creating content. People think it's like creative endeavor. It's like an art form type of thing, and it definitely is. For some people, like it, they just can't seem to differentiate between a good video and a bad video.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know, it maybe it's just like, some of it's innate, but a lot of it is not creative. You know, a lot of it is a science, you know, like, or can you manage, you know, a hundred 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, why are they winning? Why are they losing? How can you kind of refine your mental model of which influence to go back, 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 on kind of the managerial skillset. The organizational skillset is quite difficult.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And you also have to use the other side of like, you were working with these like creators, these artistic people in, 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, you know, it's difficult to kind of break through and notice. So that would be like my final tip.

• 51:00Greg Isenberg?

  Totally, yeah. I mean, you, you know, you talked about nepotism because with that, that creator, right? Like you went to that fraternity. I mean, use whatever advantage you can, you can, you can get. I mean, when someone reaches out to me, for example, and they say,

• 51:19Greg Isenberg?

  you know, I grew up in the same neighborhood as you, for example, I'm a thousand times more likely to, to respond to it, you know? So it doesn't need to necessarily be like you went to some fancy Ivy League school or something like that, or you worked at Google. Just find some common ground with the influencer if you can.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  I'll put that.

• 51:39Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, so how to do SEO? What do people need to know here? How to do SEO in two minutes or less?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  How do I see it?

• 51:49Greg Isenberg?

  By David Park.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I'll do, I'll do a funny story with SEO. SEO honestly is not one of my forties, but um, 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 uh, we acquired the entire SEO agency. So that we could get, we could become their main client and they only SEO for us. And uh, yeah, we uh, we worked together and we have uh, some tips for you today, but um, maybe that's, I, I've never heard of anyone that's, that's done that. I mean, maybe other people do, but they don't talk about it, but um, when our, our general philosophy is like, when we meet somebody, we feel is like spectacular. And uh, we'll raise our bar of excellence, like we'll do anything to kind of work with them.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, this is the, the blueprint written by the agency that is now an in-house agency at Jenny, where they used to have multiple clients and now they, 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 uh, as everyone knows, SEO is kind of like, um, it, 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, you can easily get, you know, uh, orders of magnitude more traffic from the earlier things like influencer marketing or UGC content versus uh, investing in SEO. But if you do want to, uh, you're more than welcome to.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Some of the hacks that we have is um, i- if you find pages with featured snippets, um, that's one way to easily get a lot more eyeballs on your website. So it might be difficult for you to actually, you know, go from like the sixth spot to the first spot. But if you notice that there's a featured snippet of like that exact query, um, sometimes you can find that if you like basically um, create the, 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 could just take that featured snippet and there, there are a few times we've actually done that. Um, and it's led to obviously uh, more, more traffic to uh, that article or and then, and the more conversions.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  We, we, we go technically into it here, but um, I feel like we should just breeze through this so we get to the, the five to 10.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  The good part about if you do the influencer and UGC first is that very few people actually actually click the link when when you when they see your content on TikTok. So they don't actually say, oh, wow. Jenny, I so interesting. And then go to the video, go leave the video, go to the profile, go to the link, click the link. Are you sure you want to leave TikTok? Click TikTok, open Safari. They usually don't do that. What they do is they watch the video and they just swipe up on their phone, go to Google and search up the name of your your product. Right. And then they they click your product. And 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 makes you more legit in the eyes of Google.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  But the great news is if you do the influencer and UGC first, you kind of already get that get that boost because people will be searching your

• 54:55Speaker 01

  searching your account or searching your website or your tool. And then you'll be gaining legitimacy kind of passively without even doing much SEO work. We spend a lot of time thinking about like, how how valuable is the traffic that we're getting from SEO? How much traffic are we getting? Like, which are the juicy keywords that we actually want to be ranking for versus like, you know, vanity metrics where, oh, it looks like our traffic tripled from, you know, like last year to this year, but we're ranking for all these like, you know, kind of useless keywords or not useless, but obviously, if you could choose between ranking for like, like free and then your tool, whatever your tool does, or just like what your tool does, you would much rather choose

• 55:37Speaker 01

  to rank for the non-free version because everyone who's searching for free, they don't have really a buying intent to actually convert and pay for your tool versus the other people are just looking for the best tool possible on the market. So you want to accurately estimate the ROI from your search engines. And yeah, I mean, I I would say that SEO is one of the main pillars now that we spend a lot of money on SEO. We probably spend like.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  We spend tens of thousands of dollars per month just on increasing our SEO. We do interesting things like making mini tools. We've made some free tools. We have landing pages in different languages. We obviously write a lot of content and it's been pretty fruitful for us. But like I kind of said in the beginning, I would not, especially AI startups. I would not suggest you do this on day one. This is more something you have like a steady income stream. You have a little bit of PMF. You can kind of take that money and you could go out and buy your own SEO agency if you'd like.

• 56:39Greg Isenberg?

  There you go. And this is the strategy that worked for you and might work for other people. So thank you for talking about it. Now paid ads.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Paid ads.

• 56:51Greg Isenberg?

  Let's, let's get into it. How to paid ads.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  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 intercycles, right? So you want like, you want to be able to test something, see if it resonates and then change up how you're doing it. And so you could do that with like, like you just see influencer. You can't really do that with SEO. Paid ads is kind of a middle ground where you could do it a little more. But even then, like, you know, you have to spend time in the learning phase. You have to spend time creating creatives. You have to like, it's its own kind of beastly have to go after.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  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 tactile TV or like 1.5 to one. And they, or some people, a lot of people just stay unprofitable. And a lot of like the money that they end up raising, or maybe their own personal money, they end up using paid ads. The good news is if you do, you just see your influencer first.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  You can actually get content that you know people will resonate with organically, and you can reuse that in terms of paid ads. You can use data from your social media partnerships to have better target graph than day one. Oh yeah, this is big, like what countries convert better? What's the LTV of each country? What type of users are ideal to market to? And yeah, in the early stages, your budget won't be big enough and you won't be able to spend enough on meta to get enough data for targeting based on personal conversions. So we really only got into paid ads after we got some semblance of PMF. Unclear if we have like PMF, PMF, but like there are people that like our products today. And once we kind of had that feeling, then we started getting to paid ads. And you know, the numbers kind of speak for themselves.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  We try to aim for like a three to one tax to LTV or three one LTV tax. And we try to get a short payback period. So I think right now we make our money.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Like within the first two months of a of a acquired user. And so that's always, I mean, that's helpful because the reason that's helpful is because then you can take that money, just funnel it back into your best performing.

• 59:10Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  That's getting more UGC influencers or doing more mini tool for SEO or you know, putting more into paid ads. I personally also think it's the most boring growth channel. So don't deprive yourself of the joy of figuring out the other fun ones first. So that's the quick breeze of the last two kind of pillars. If you want to know more, you could, we could link like the, my SEO guy is also on Twitter and stuff. And we could, you could look at his post as well.

• 59:41Greg Isenberg?

  I wanna, I have to hear the conclusion. It's such a, the final tip is too good. Like it's such a catchy line. Do you remember what it was?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Uh, that none of, no one's actually gonna do any of this shit. Yeah.

• 59:54Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  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 into the article, it would be so bad if it flopped and like, it didn't actually help anybody. So I was just trying to like, challenge people. So I basically just said like, since you made it all to the, all the way to the bottom, I'll tell you one final secret. If you look at the bottom right of this tweet and count the bookmarks, um, there was probably like, like how many people will actually read this whole thing, 10%. I would actually try to implement some of the strategies, 10% of that. How many will continue to try one year from now, when these marketing tactics help them uncover deep flaws of product? Probably like 1% of, of that. Like, it's very difficult to like, try for a year and get gut punched for a year.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I, I, I prophesized it pretty correctly where I said like, hundreds of thousands of people will read this. But ultimately, it'll only properly be utilized by, you know, one or two people. And I hope that, you know, the, the person reading is that person. I guess I'm cheating now because I'm like, rehashing it on a podcast. So, um, maybe, maybe that number will go up now, but. Yeah, I was read by, um, 700,000. If we do the 10%, 10%, 1%, 1%, whatever. It's probably like, 7, 70 people, something like that. That probably actually, you know, implemented this and made a big business from what I posted. And, um, if you're one of those people, you should definitely like, message me and that would bring me immense dopamine.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  If you, if you told me that like, this post helped you out. But, um, yeah, that's the, that's the whole thing.

• 1:01:24Greg Isenberg?

  And just comment, comment on the YouTube just so we, just if you're committing to the act of, let's do this. So.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Also comment on 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.

• 1:01:44Greg Isenberg?

  It's like your one comment from jail. Like you're in the, they're giving you like, instead of a phone call, they're like, you know, you can comment, oh my God.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:52Greg Isenberg?

  All right, David.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  This showed up on my feed, yeah.

• 1:01:55Greg Isenberg?

  So now you're at 5 million ARR.

• 1:01:59Greg Isenberg?

  And then all this, you know, it takes, I don't know, six, nine months and then you zoom by 10 million ARR. What, what have you learned since then?

• 1:02:11Greg Isenberg?

  Is it more of the same? Have you figured out new channels? Give people some of the sauce.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  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 five million, you have to, you know, kind of rebuild the playbook and you have, you could use it for five to 10. Uh, you have to rebuild some of it for like scaling issues, like you probably need to get better at hiring. You probably need to get better at like building out teams. You probably need to get better at, um, like the granular things obviously change as things scale. But everything on this list, we still use to this day. We added a lot of like affiliate, like a lot of our revenue comes from affiliate, um, marketers now.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  So people that enjoy Jenny and now champion Jenny and do marketing and they get sub cut of whatever they like to do. When marketing Jenny, um, we've gone into like acquisitions, which I think is pretty rare. So we've like acquired a few startups. And I, I think that it's a good hedge. Like, uh, I think that, you know, we, we get to zero to 10 million revenue a year. Can we get to 20 million revenue? I believe I can, but, uh, you know, that's obviously anybody's guess of every probably arrogant founder thinks that they can. But what I do know for sure is I've gone from zero to five, I could probably do that again. So, you know, we do have a little bit of bets on side of like, okay, um, we could probably go from 10 to 20.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  I'm pretty confident about that, but just in case, we're also incubating other startups kind of within the Jenny group. We have one startup doing, uh, 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, um, in like five months. And, and we didn't put any marketing budget into it. Really it's just like, oh, these are the things that we clearly learned while running Jenny. That we could transfer these learnings over and immediately the conversion rates went up, retention went up, churn went down, all these things. So, um, that's kind of interesting. I should probably write a post about that, but I feel like it's so niche. Like, once you kind of get to the level of like, you can acquire startups, um, you're probably, I probably have something to learn from you.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  You know, I feel like if you were going on acquiring startups like, um, I don't know how much like a post like that would be helpful. But yeah, those are some new things. I think like the the another kind of like non sexy answer is like, you we kind of went back to the basics, you know, like we have all this traffic coming in. We have all these like different distribution channels. We worked a lot on retention, conversion, like the like, you know, the funnel really. And once we kind of improve those funnels, it allows us to capitalize more on the traffic. And that's something that you could 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.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  So we we really, as we got larger from five to 10, we got, we really laser focused on it. I mean, that's one of the really proud things that we've done is we went from like 20% churn to like nine to like around 9.8% churn. We more than have it, which, you know, for people who don't know about how terrible and like nightmarish churn can be and how it could keep you up at night and stuff, like having churn, it can can literally make your startup, you know, so much larger. It just makes it so much easier for you to grow because the the leaky bucket is just not torrential anymore. It's just like, you know, manageable at some point. And, you know, that's like, yeah, I don't know how much time we have. I'll just say like, one open secret about AI tools, these B2C AI apps is like, the churn can be insane, right? Like you could have 50% monthly churn.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  That's like not unheard of. 40% to 30%, that's like kind of normal. And then, you know, 20% is like if you're really focused on your your customers and 10% for a B2C AI, especially ad tech. I don't know too many other startups that have been able to get it down that much. And, you know, that's not a testament, that's a testament to like my team. You know, shout out to Mark, shout out to Shaleesh, shout out to Heymont, Dandy, Justin, Luke, everybody on the team. Shane, everybody that's just killing it. And we were able to get the the these numbers down. So that's really five to 10 is 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.

• 1:06:35Greg Isenberg?

  I loved how you just thanked a bunch of people. It felt like I was, it felt like we were in the Oscars for startups.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:06:43Greg Isenberg?

  And.

• 1:06:45Greg Isenberg?

  I was, I got goosebumps. I got goosebumps because I was like, I could tell that, you know, you all worked really hard on, you know,

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  My team worked so hard.

• 1:06:55Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:06:56Greg Isenberg?

  That's awesome.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:06:58Greg Isenberg?

  David, you have been extremely generous with your time, but also your brain, your lovely, lovely brain. This audience is going to eat this up and appreciate you for it. We are going to include the links to Jenny AI in the show notes as well as your social. But is there anything else you want to leave people with at all?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  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. So, you know, I'm a non-technical person. I'm a non-technical founder doing 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'm not of that world. And like, I was able to kind of build this company, obviously not just because of me, thanks to like, really brilliant

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  and like, you know, people I'm really grateful that took a bet on me. But like, you know, this is, this is the time that I ran. I think a lot of you watching could also run this time if you really like locked in. I'm not, you know, you don't have to send me $50 on Venmo, but you could also just DM me on Twitter. If it's, if I think that I can help you and like, you're like, seem like a cool person, I'm pretty easily reachable. And yeah, I got, I went on this fantastical crazy journey. I feel like I'm not, I'm still closer to the beginning than the end. And 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. So yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah.

• 1:08:47Greg Isenberg?

  Dude, you got to come back again. This has been incredible. David Park. Thanks. And I'll see you, I'll see you on the internet.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Thank you.