Luke_OBrien

Founder @the_journeyapp | Tweets about how to build & monetize a thriving community

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[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

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@ankurnagpal Love to!

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@ankurnagpal @dunkhippo33 🙌

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

Angel investing in startups can be fun & profitable

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The course is usually $299 - but free for 24 hours. To get it,

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[David Park @Davidjpark96]

How to go from 0 to $3,000,000 ARR in 18 months (step by step)

I included all of our growth hacks that we used at each stage of our startup

1. The student cold caller ($0 - $5000 ARR)

Cold calling itself is a growth hack because very few people actually have the mental fortitude to get rejected hundreds of times per day.

If you can get over that mental blockade, you can learn 10x faster from your users because you are able to skip the bullshit and just talk with them and ask them about their life.

One secret I learned to not get hung up on immediately is to be a student.

I would always start my cold call with “I’m a student at 'x' university and I'm calling about 'y' because I want to learn more about this field”

You will still get rejected because cold calling is inherently annoying for the receiver, but the frequency of getting hung up on as well as the warmth of the prospect was night and day for me.

All you need is that extra few seconds of them not hanging up to demonstrate you’re not a greedy leech cold calling to waste their time.

You might be thinking “what if I’m not a student, do I lie?”

No, don’t lie. That’s weird.

But it’s pretty easy to enroll in an online class or become a student to genuinely learn more about the market you will be building for.

For example, when I was cold calling I was not a traditional student because I dropped out, but I was taking summer classes when I had time.

This growth hack is great because you can talk to users, and get immediate revenue.

Its weakness is that it isn’t scalable at all, which is why you should move to different growth strategies once you have some revenue (in our case $5000 ARR) and a basic idea of your users.

2. Facebook groups ($5,000 - $30,000 ARR)

I wrote a super extensive post on this a few months ago, but I’ll summarize it again here.

Find Facebook groups where your target audience hangs out and deeply immerse yourself.

Genuinely engage with power users and become an active member. Active doesn’t mean just posting, it means you are truly learning/contributing.

Eventually you will befriend enough people in the group where you can ask them if they’re open to getting on a call so you could pick their brain for just 15 minutes.

Use all the learnings you’ve gathered from the group as a whole and these individual calls to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that you will privately share to the relevant group members who you’ve grown close to.

As these relationships deepen and the product evolves based on feedback, eventually your beta users will promote your tool on your behalf.

If they are hesitant to do so, it likely means that your tool isn’t cool enough or doesn’t provide enough value.

This is good, just continue to iterate and get more feedback.

Eventually you end up with a pool of people willingly ready to give you product feedback (this is rare), a product that people want to use (this is even more rare) and a tool that already has a few evangelists who are excited to talk about it (this is what you need to get momentum going)

3. Get lucky to build momentum ($30,000 - $120,000 ARR)

Once you have a product that has some semblance of PMF, you need to start broadly shooting and experimenting with marketing that can scale.

You need to explore before you can exploit.

Try your hand at paid ads, influencer marketing, partnering with other tools, etc.

Also, try unorthodox things specific to your product.

We tried making university ambassador programs, hosting college events, sponsoring clubs, digital ads on student reddit pages, etc.

You’ll either succeed with one of these channels, or someone will notice you from these channels and give you your lucky break (assuming your product actually provides value, which it should if you’ve spoken to enough users!)

For us, our lucky break was a majorly viral tweet from Zain Kahn.

It got over 348k likes and is possibly the most viral tweet about AI in history.

We had been paying influencers in Zain’s adjacent space and he must have found our tool from one of these promotions.

Either way, that one tweet quadrupled our revenue and propelled us from $30,000 ARR to $120,000 ARR in one month.

I wish I had more actionable advice, but unfortunately this is the truth of our journey. We got very lucky.

However, I’d argue that these “lucky breaks” are somewhat common if you have a product that people love and you are prepared to take advantage of it.

Examples:
- You’ll be posting videos for months until one video finally goes viral and suddenly all your videos are being picked up by the algorithm. 0 to 50,000 followers overnight.
- You wake up and suddenly you’ve been included in some newsletter or a big account retweeted you and suddenly you’ve 10x’d your traffic
- You are unable to close any deals until you miraculously close one big client and now they’re recommending you to all of their other big enterprise friends

There’s no formula to “create” luck, but you can increase your surface area of luck for better odds and you can capitalize on situations when luck finally arrives.

The actionable advice is to do both of these things to the best of your ability as you’re experimenting and getting your product out there.

4. Social media marketing lives up to the hype ($120,000 - $600,000 ARR)

After seeing the insane virality of Zain’s tweet, it was clear that social media was an easy driver of growth for AI tools.

We noticed that his tweet inspired several TikTok and Instagram creators to make videos about our startup, and those videos also went viral.

So we started taking short-form video marketing very seriously, and it was one of the best decisions that we ever made.

I wrote a long post about short-form as well, and that post is more difficult to concisely summarize so I’ll just link that somewhere below this post.

In aggregate, we’re approaching a half a billion views just with our organic accounts, and almost all videos are explicitly about our product.

You can talk to any AI startup (especially B2C) that has great distribution and all of them are either leveraging short-form or their products are so alluring that their users are creating viral videos for them.

All AI demos are inherently flashy/impressive because the underlying tech is so powerful, so why are you not capitalizing on the intrinsic spectacle of what you’ve built?

This step is pretty straight forward, just post more TikToks.

5. Diversify at first sign of trouble ($600,000 - $1,740,000 ARR)

We were a one trick pony at this point, all of our growth lived and died on whether our videos would go viral that week.

The crazy part was that we had a streak of continuous bangers for several months until winter break.

But during winter break, our growth plateaued.

None of our videos went viral because nobody wanted to watch videos about school, everyone was on break.

It was very sobering, and although we could handle a few weeks of slow growth we knew that we couldn’t handle multiple months of slow growth when summer break would roll around.

We immediately started unloading all the eggs from our TikTok basket and spreading them out.

To name a few: we built out referral systems, 10x’d our influencer marketing budget, took SEO seriously, and started doing paid ads.

Thanks to our diversification we grew the fastest we’ve ever grown during summer break.

We went from $1M to $1.75M ARR in 3 months despite all of our short-form videos flopping hard.

Fast forward to today and organic short-form isn’t even our main source of traffic and tbh I need to spend more time focusing on that distribution arm because we’ve diversified possibly too much.

But the key lesson is that had we purely lived and died by our TikTok videos, we would have died.

6. Strengthen the funnel & focus on internal metrics ($1,740,000 - $3,000,000 ARR)

Growth isn’t just something external of more views and more clicks.

Growth can also be internal, how can you be more efficient with the users that come to your product?

At this point we were building out systems so that we would consistently add hundreds of thousands of new users each month, while also tackling our internal growth metrics.

We had a renewed focus on improving the very basics of our startup:
1. Conversion rates (how many free users -> paid)
2. Churn rates (how long are users staying?)
3. Growth loops (can we get one user to bring another user?)

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve always had a focus on these metrics, but we started to get truly obsessive.

We’ve probably done thousands of experiments at this point and the vast majority of them have been “failures”.

But all you need are a few key improvements or learnings and it could make a world of a difference.

And thankfully we made a lot of headway, particularly when it came to converting users.

To put this in perspective:
- Before optimizations when we added 241,700 new users our MRR only increased by $26,000 MRR
- After optimizations when we added 152,300 new users our MRR increased by $48,000 MRR

That month we only had 63% traffic but had 1.8x more growth.

These internal improvements will hopefully pay dividends later down the line when we crank up the top of the funnel even more because we’ll convert at a higher rate.

The future ($3,000,000 - $??? ARR)

We went from 0-$3M ARR and it’s mostly been a cyclical strategy.

Explore a myriad of different growth strategies + product directions, then double down when we find something that works well.

We’re also always cycling between distribution, conversion or churn.

We’re hyper-focused on one of these pillars at all times, it’s just a question of which pillar.

As of now, I think we have the systems in place to continue growth at our current pace for the short-medium future, so now it’s time to explore once more.

I suspect we can cruise to $4-$5M ARR with our current systems in place, but we’ll have to innovate a bit more to hit $10-$20M ARR.

At this point in time, the pillar we are focusing on is churn and we’re exploring multiple product directions that will hopefully double the value that we’re currently providing.

And of course, we’re also cooking up some truly unhinged marketing bets that could either embarrassingly flop or have great upside.

It feels kind of weird because at each stage of growth I feel like I have to be a ‘different’ founder.

Some weeks are honestly really easy because the path forward is so obvious and/or we discover something that works and we’re having so much fun tuning the knobs to try and maximize growth.

Other weeks we’re scrambling because no matter what we do it isn’t moving the needle or we’re trying to understand why something isn’t working anymore.

The scariest times are when we are afraid that we might be approaching the limit and we can’t scale any further.

We know logically that there are always ways to unblock growth/scale, but it doesn’t make the uncertain moments any less daunting.

In those uncertain times, it’s extra meaningful to get a pat on the back, a supportive slack message, an unprompted plate of cut fruits (thanks mom), or perhaps an unnecessarily long post on X with a few ideas on how to get to the next stage of growth lol.

If you’re currently in an uncertain moment, I hope this post helped a little.

Thanks for reading.

[David Park @Davidjpark96]

We went from 0 to 1 million users in 9 months 😋

Here are all of the growth hacks we used to scale our startup 🧵

[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

@Davidjpark96 This was one of the most used tweets I’ve ever read, thanks for taking the time to write it 🙏

[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

@amiyoshimura_ https://t.co/X7oPibMOZn

[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

@awwstn 🤚

[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

@jonjfarb Tool

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@alexisohanian Check out this demo vid of our paid community platform…and this was before we added AI community managers for every community…https://t.co/brI6QclLYe

[Luke_OBrien @Luke_OBrien]

@Austen Throwing our hat in the ring. Check out https://t.co/IVX5Sgiy75 — Facebook groups for the next generation.