REVEALED: The Exact Strategy I Used to Build a $10M AI Startup

David Park went from zero to10 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 on growth marketing for an AI startup today 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 like people actually be able to take some of this uh this Playbook and Implement in

their startups I hope you enjoy this episode people charge for this stuff but it's free uh here on the startup ideas podcast uh enjoy the episode [Music] we got David park on the startup ideas podcast I learned about him through this post how to go from Zer to $5 million AR Profitably step by step went absolutely Bonkers viral 4.5 th000 likes he talks about organic short form content influencer marketing SEO paid ads now this isn't just a click baity hook he actually goes through exactly the playbook for how to grow um and he's grown him

you know he he's done it himself he's actually since then gone to $10 million AR with his startup uh Jenny AI 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 grow tactics to go from0 to $10 million a profit Pro profitably David Park welcome to the Pod thank you so much for having me um I wrote this uh a while ago now so

uh I'll kind of be reading along uh with you guys and I'll kind of be adding more context as I explain the things that we did to go from Z to 5 million and then actually haven't written the 5 to 10 Million uh Revenue post so uh be I guess writing that real time on this podcast and figuring out how I did that but um 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 um if you want

to just start getting to post I'm happy to do so 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 multiplier accounts what do you what do you mean by this yeah so I mean that uh traditionally on social media um 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 um there are many cases Where Founders will just make one video on their Tik Tok and that video will just immediately go viral uh which which you know no matter how many times I say it people don't really seem to believe it until they it happens 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 straightup

ad about your product uh if the hook is good and the content is you know high quality you have a good shot Of getting you know 10 100 thousand a million views and that's obviously you know cost you very little or nothing to do so this idea of like fresh account with um you know 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 ab test that Jenny whereare 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 and it's not really that you know strange for the account with 56 followers to beat the amount of Engagement or the amount of views with the account with more followers I mean it's really just uh 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 um 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 um you could just use that make some content on it and um yeah it's not like prior where there were Gatekeepers where you needed you know lots of follows or anything like that 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 I don't

think it's a controversial opinion what do you mean what do you mean by that I mean if fresh accounts first of all like uh if you look at their their history if a fresh account is getting similar views with an account that has uh you know millions of Subs uh 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 um 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 there 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 but then if you go into the granular details very clearly you should sponsor fresh account because these fresh accounts uh you you can pay them you know literally one 100th of the

price to sponsor because these YouTubers they're kind of they've been spoiled by the nordvpn and the grammar leads and the you know the Sony sponsorships they Expect like $20,000 for a 30- second you know video and um the 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 uh 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 um 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 um 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 um be seen by you know hopefully hundreds thousands of millions of people and yeah I mean if you break it down like that it's just cheaper um 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 uh to go for the fresh account quick breaking 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 uh 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 uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the Description and 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 yeah so um you could say there's somebody who's has like 10,000 followers and they're doing you know numbers on their content you could either uh Continue to pay them you know with partnership sponsorships where you have to pay the per post and uh the the creator has a little bit of a worry that uh maybe their account is getting polluted by ads which you know every Creator

kind of has to do that talul lus 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 um and they can kind of be the face of your product and they'll kind of be telling your telling the viewers about you know educating them about maybe some pain points that your product solves uh just helpful advice

tips things like that um and like I said before you know follow follower account doesn't really matter in this new age of social media so you know the I I mean the the example I gave is like pretty Ridiculous but obviously if any famous person were to make a new Tik Tok account and they were to make new videos it would not get right I'm trying to avoid say I'm trying to avoid saying it because it was like the most cliche uh probably thing you could say but yeah so if they made a new Tik

Tok account it would not get 10 views obviously right despite having zero followers they would probably break the internet and they would probably get you know Millions Upon millions of on 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 Ty of Middle Ground where the Creator is not having to pollute their account with ads and you pretty much uh can get a similar view count maybe not initially

but you know over time uh 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 um things that have good retention that people want to see so um in that sense you can find somebody new uh to be kind of the face for 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 on creating a new account with 30 videos one video a day on a new account it's like um it's it's not that difficult to to sell because um you know it's it doesn't really feel like you're selling out at all so yeah and can you talk about uh mang mang 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 yeah so um 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 M May duck and I were part of the same fraternity so I was able to just kind of like DM him and have him join um us at Jenny um I paid him $4,000 a month for 20 videos um 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 yeah writing tool and uh obviously he was teaching people how to write emails like he was teaching people how to like uh you know speak to their boss or how to you know send a cold EMA email or you know anything where it's important to be precise it's important to have high quality written content so when he was the face of our account um 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 which

probably had half a billion views Al together um on that account and other accounts that he posted on so um yeah I mean sorry I'm reading this I haven't read this a long time yeah in our first month we got 7 million impressions in our first month which is um you know it's pretty nuts uh even a view a video that can get one million views you know It can add thousands in Mr to your product right depending on you know how how good your product is converting depending on if it was pushed to the

right countries where um you know you have higher conversion rates 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 probably is good but you know there's a lot of factors but like seven million views that you can essentially Get for um if you record yourself for for free or if you partner up with a uh someone like Ming duck for $4,000 like that's you know quite good Roi I would say and when you when you reached out to mang mang

duck I don't know if you remember but approximately how many followers did he have I want to say he had 300,000 on Tik Tok and uh I when I say that people are like well I could never convince someone with that many Followers dud it for $4,000 but um I don't know I think that there's kind of this uh this uh cognitive distance a little bit where oh this person is so famous this person is so famous he has so many followers he so much influence they must be like raking it in like insane amounts

of money you know but um that's not always the case right there are people that just love to create and maybe um they either aren't focusing on monetizing or maybe the type of content They make isn't they the the type of product that can monetize their their type of content hasn't reached out to them yet so um 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 we could get a similar deal you know even today and like

I said if you if you have somebody that um you know creates good content that's getting similar views like let's say magm duck has 300K Followers and then there's like Ming n bear over here that has 20K followers and they both have similar views you know like you could probably get mning bear for like a you know probably cheaper and the results would probably be the same because they're it's going to get push the same audiences of the people watching them and if the views are the same for both it's doesn't really matter so um

yeah at the time I would say you was big but um that Doesn't that shouldn't be a barrier for anybody like it doesn't matter how big the Creator is if they have good if you believe that you guys have good energy together then just send the email you never know what might happen 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 I remember we committed I think three months three three I I we didn't

commit For very long like the memor is kind of hazy it's like three four years at this point but you it wasn't like over dict to lock in or anything it was like a I I really think that we both enjoyed working together and that it was a good deal for both of us at the time 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 a crazy deal where I had to lock in for 36 months or something like that I I guess 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 mang mang duck would

rather take $4,000 over $4,000 a month over three to six months then maybe a onot brand deal for 8,000 right um but you know it's but those come and go you know those come and go so I I I I hear that a lot from creat I hear that a lot from creators um and by the way I know someone's going to listen this and they're gonna be like you're a Creator it's like dude I don't have any ads on on on this podcast so like I you know no Greg if you want to make

you know 20 videos a month for 4,000 I would love it if you would if you would work with us Jen I don't do short form bro I don't do short form oh damn it okay next in the next life maybe but yeah I mean uh just one final thing to add is um you know $4,000 for2 vids it sounds daunting but you can tell the Creator like look these things can literally take you like 5 10 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 reals shorts Tik Tok and you make $4,000 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 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 uh 20 video 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 so you say here when you get a new Creator just follow this basic guideline repost vids On all platforms reals Tik Tok 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 uh you can get someone cheaper uh for similar results uh how important is the Daily Post I mean the the I probably should have said this in the post but the importance of like uh frequency of Posting is just you want to be uh exploring before you exploit you know so if you're posting like one video a week uh you only have four tests per month uh to find a hook and like content angle that really works whereas you post one video a day uh I said

one plus you could post even more than one video a day you could continually kind of try you know different um like you try like skits or memes or humor or educational content or straight up ads or you know uh like play With different angles play with different hooks text on screen like um you could try different like there's so many things you could kind of be experimenting with and if you at least post one video a day you can kind of be like methodically exing out okay well my product will if I present it

like this it seems to flop like this seems to do okay like this it seems to flop get the winners of your content kind of Coliseum and then to the next week try with the Winning variance and try more things and eventually you'll get uh one thing that like one Mega Banger where it gets like a million to 10 million views and um it's like the most euphoric kind of crazy feeling that you have to kind of like you have to really experience it to put into words but you cannot get to that uh sorry

I mean yeah look there are going to be like Savant out there that they can just um you know they they know exactly how to how to do it from the Get-go like I said some people can just go bile from the first video you know but um there are there are many cases where you won't and um the best way to get to that Viral Banger is to iterate towards it and that's why I think should post often yeah it makes sense it's just like shots on on goal right so you said a way

way way cleaner than me yeah that's what I should have Said I'm canidian so I just think of things in in hockey references you know right you just got to hit a top shelf you know um exactly 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 this strategy and why this is the goal yeah I mean I think that often times 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 I I don't think that's actually how uh most people work uh 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 um it's why people always complain that like the YouTube algorithm is so [ __ ] they're like oh I just get the same videos on my Front page every time you know but really

it's probably because the behavior of everybody is they just watch the same videos over and over in that same sense you know once you have a viral video that's like you know a lot of the difficulty is finding that viral video and the the next part is turning that viral video like being able to kind of squeeze as much of the upside as you can out out of that viral video um over and over so you know like uh it's not That difficult I mean I could give you like I have 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 uh 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 Giga viral 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 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 Tri 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 um it's a minimal effort and it just goes viral every time one thing that's kind Of going really crazy viral on reals uh it's kind of dying out lately but it's someone who says like for every follower I have I'll do X so

for every follower I have I'll gamble $ one 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 he's 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 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 V 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 sa do and it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realizing that they have an sa do while they're taking a [ __ ] 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 of 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 been makes me a better student and makes me just like uh remove stress from my life right so it's the same thing where uh is It really that much more difficult of you recording 5 Seconds of you like in the bathroom and then realizing you have a PDW or you're walk your dog and you have paper Dew 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 so I think uh what isn't said here and I want to talk about is you need to have uh format product Fit so don't don't you know this makes sense for you point of view you have an essay do if you're building Jenny AI that makes complete sense now if you would have 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 exactly uh 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 absolutely that's uh I should have add that as well I mean one to add more color to that you know

we've had videos where it got 50,000 views and it's converted to it's literally brought us In hundreds of thousand dollars in revenue and I remember the saddest time ever was we had one video that got 20 million views one video and it it almost had a negligible effect effect on like conversions that day for Jenning it 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 uh create content for people that actually want to convert and want to

actually use your product 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 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 um I experiment with tons of hooks and video ideas different creators kind of I Talked about earlier eventually you'll get a video that goes viral after enough experimentation there probably step 1.5 where you'll get videos

that completely Flop videos that do well uh 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 what's what's really catching people's attention and then experimenting eventually after all those things one that 1.5 you will get a video That goes viral and then like I said before you want experience somehow turn that into a series how can you like just tweak this video over and over so that you could keep posting it and you can continue to get uh viewers uh that

that could convert to to using your product um you want to start tweaking and posting series on multiple accounts so in at our Peak we had probably seven different accounts uh seven different accounts on each platform so that There's like 24 accounts 24 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 um I I don't speak Mandarin so 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 just like these meme pages that have just insane reach but they're run by like 17 year olds or like 20 year olds and you could just pay them like $50 to repost your content they will take like two weeks to respond because they they don't they just like they have other parities probably just like having social life and stuff but uh you basically can just take these videos repost them on

mean 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 poing 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 the mega viral content for paid ads um and then the the saddest part is eventually enough copycats will copy your video series it'll 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 got to be uh you gotta be farming out hooks farming out ideas doing your research and then running through life cycle Once More Beautiful on point on point and very cool to see POV you have an ESS 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 The One video series made us half a million dollars that's one point

of it it's made you half a million dollars in Revenue but you know for every $1 of Revenue especially in the AI world you're looking at at least 5 10 15 20x of Enterprise Value to the business which is insane right so if you bring in $100,000 of Revenue um that might mean your company's worth 500,000 I'm you Know I'm making things up numbers but it could be 500,000 a million 1.5 two right so it's it's this is this is a big deal yeah it's uh I mean I honestly think I didn't I didn't I

wasn't aggressive enough when I wrote this out you know like uh you you you don't you don't you could it's not even you could post the same video over and over multiple times a week you could probably post it multiple times a day 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 mul times 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 a them like how could you possibly want accounts like why would you reward accounts posting the same videos like five times a day but the views don't lie I think that um 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 cool let's let's move on to how you actually find influencers because I think this is uh 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 right right uh yeah I mean finding influencers uh it's it is kind of a Blackbox unfortunately the non-sexy answer is you need to find the influencers that your users watch which is uh which goes back to you know the very important um like one of the Ten 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 the influencers that they follow you just ask them hey would you mind like you Know 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 just like look at 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 drink 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 you know have some Affinity towards so anyways you could go to your users Instagram see which influence they're following um and then you can uh Basically this for several users and you have like a pretty good list of people

that could immediately start following or immedi 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 influencers profile click suggest similar accounts um you kind of like do a little you know look at the current influencer crop that you have that users follow click suggest Similar accounts see if those influencers when you go through the content go through their messaging does it kind of fit into what you feel like is a similar bucket

then it's probably not a terrible bet to go after these influences 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 like like it's a great way to find influencers and I don't know too many people that do it Is once you have a list of influencers uh you could create a new Instagram or Tik Tok 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 T of thousands of dollars To go out and do this influence marketing for them you can just not do that you just take your influence that you have uh make a new Tik Tok or Instagram account just watch these influences 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 and you can you can see the craziest steals you'll 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 real 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 befriend this person maybe

sponsor 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 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 if a influencer video shows up on your for you page as you swipe through the algorithm it's just like an amazing amazing thing because what's the worst thing that

happen is you pay for a dud You pay for a video which just it's just not pushed to anybody it gets like a 100 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-f follower accounts to be you know uh that that the Tik to is trying to push and test their their content to larger audiences and that really lowers the their downside of like okay well at the Very least this

person oh sorry it it doesn't lower your downside it increases your upside where like this per this account um sorry it does both you have the upside of it could go viral the downside of like it's not going to be it's not guaranteed to be a dud where they just have have like a lot of followers and you know they happen to like the their their view count is really just being recycled through their legacy followers that just watch them Maybe out of hate or out of like uh apathy like instead you you sponsor somebody

where it's being pushed to people that um are not their followers so yeah that's uh you know that's one um method that we use that's really beneficial to us and um if 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 uh there'll be more cool Partnerships made and uh startups Can um obviously grow faster once they use this strategy I like it okay so here you have the Playbook on reaching out to influencers um let's let's let's

run run it through yeah so um yeah when you reach out to influencers um you want to try like all Avenues of attack which is DMS emails if they have a LinkedIn you could hit them up on LinkedIn um if they have like you know I've done very strange Things where I found that they had like a blog or like a tumbler or something and I'll DM them on the the 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 shot gunting emails to like tens of thousands of people which we don't do I I try to find people that I think really resonate with uh the people that we're also trying to um help and um yeah so you know you want to be uh not relegated to just email I feel

like a lot of Founders they send one email and they're like oh wow these influencers suck you know they think they're so much better than me they don't respond you know dude like they Probably got like 50 emails just today and your email was probably in like the lowest 10th percentile of like uh actually trying to connect with them on a human to human level like they don't care what series round you're at I don't know why you added that in your email or like you know like you want to just talk to him like

a human but so yeah I guess that dove tailes into the next thing which is like you would be very detailed and by the way I have a hack I have a Little hack on that uh someone did this to me actually a few people actually did this to me they were just venmo me like they found my venmo username and I get I get a push notific like people get push notifications on venmo so it's like who the hell is David sending me $50 or whatever and you're G to respond you're G to respond

to those people right um so I actually think that one quick hack is you know put a little Budget together and start just sending them like a few dos see what happens so you know all messages need to be detailed and as tailored as possible but be concise I agree by you know no one's reading like paragraphs it's just not happening right right yeah ironically as we are reading paragraphs here but only we read paragraphs you know yeah I was so surprised this like did well because it's like it was just like such a dense

piece of content but um anyways yeah so Um when you send them you want to demonstrate you're a fan of their content they're excited to partner up um why should they partner with you why will Their audience love you don't talk about weird stuff about number of employees or what funding round you're at uh make sure to IND oh this is pretty big make sure to indicate somewhere that this is a paid promotion because influence are constantly inundated with like um oh like it's GNA be great we'll Send you like free product or like you'll

get a free sub but like um you know that 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 um and then no matter how good you're your U 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 uh get more tougher skin the More you'll be actually able to um optimize your your Outreach versus get butt hurt 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 check mark then it's much more likely to Respond versus if you have like 10 followers 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 cool and then how do we negotiate with Influencers 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 con that converts and uh one way to do that is you don't want to give them all 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 um obviously I love Influencers most influencers are fantastic people but some will try will just take the money and um 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 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 how their previous sponsor viws go so um

yeah I mean I just try to Negotiate with like um like transparency of like okay like the video needs to do this much to really get us this much Roi like this is the break even point would you be down to like do this and then we could have this much as bonuses uh if we both do if the video does well and we could 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 w 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 Lincoln 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 $1,000 you know you can think about it and be like well what do I actually really want like do I really want the usage rights in this case is it that too expensive all right let's remove that how much can we get if we remove that or let's say I don't really want the linkoln bio let's say I remove that I don't really want the story let's say you're poping onagram Tik Tok 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 $800 $700 you could say 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 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 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 on 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 pay 1 thousand if there this much they a celebrity celebrity you should pay this much it's like the most craziest misinformation um that's probably Causing uh like Junior social media people at like V 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 that if you have a million followers you have to pay me this much and which is maybe even heard influencer too so yeah don't listen those garbage articles and that's how we Negotiate at Jenny cool I agree with you by 100% yeah 100% okay 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 yes okay so uh when it comes to posing

content uh you can't use like a one siiz fits-all strategy for all the Partnerships because every influencers 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 going to convert um like if you have don't have much experience you can air 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 [ __ ] just remake this video and just have like you know use the product Halfway through the video you know at this time stamp 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 will 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 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 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 product 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 we buy a package deal we won't even bother you for the next like month until we come back can kind of assess like the the um the the metrics and you can just go cook and 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 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 your profits if you have to keep expanding your your team you know like For us we only have two people running influence marketing even though we spend you know 50 to hundreds of thousands uh per month um and

it's just two people running it it's myself and one other uh very talented individual named Shane so um yeah uh I guess the other things I wrote is uh views are relevant uh I talked about that earlier do we should make a cited um forget about the second yeah when and doubt oh yeah when and doubt but also don't be afraid of your Video looking like a straightup ad uh even if it gets less views it's will convert better um I can't tell you how many times I've paid for a part or for a sponsorship

where like it's an aesthetic person studying and then it's like a 30 second at like kind of ad in the beginning or in the Middle where they just like open and they show Jenny Ai and they just go about their day and then they start talking about you know how tasty the 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 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 you're out the other uh you're very likely to 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 paino will remember it more and they will you know be be checking out your product they're more

likely check out your products 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 AR uh can you can you uh you know pick one or two final tips that you you want to leave people with yeah I mean I think that um when it comes to like influencer when it comes to uh 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 um these ugc creators so um a lot of it is just be can you uh facilitate these Partnerships well um you know there some of it is like you you would think when it comes to creating content uh 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 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 um you know a 100 campaigns uh efficiently can you really track all the data and find out ways to um 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 um you kind of Have to use like both sides of your brains um where you have to be working with so many people uh and kind of the managerial uh skill set the organizational skill set is quite difficult 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 um you know It's difficult to kind of break through the noise so that would be like my final tip totally yeah I mean you you know you talked about nepotism because uh with that that Creator right like you went to that uh 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 uh 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 okay so how to do SEO what do people need to know here how to do SEO in two minutes or less how do David Park I'll do I'll do a funny story with seo seo honestly is not one of my fores but um we basically Turned 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 uh so that we could get we could become their main client and they only the SEO for us and uh yeah uh we work 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 we'll raise our bar of Excellence like we'll do anything to kind of work with them 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 plans 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 as everyone knows SEO is kind of like um it has delayed gratification so it could take like a long time for you to even

get traffic from SEO I know some people dispute that but um for the most part you can easily get you know 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 um some of the hacks that we have is um if you find pages with feature Snippets Um that's one way to easily get um 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 kind of Leap Frog over all of the all of the spots um between you know seven to one and you just take that Feature snippet and there there are a few times we've actually done that um and it's led to obviously more more traffic to uh that article or and then and more conversions um

we we we go technically into it here but but um I feel we should just Breeze through this so we get to the the 5 to 10 um the good part about if you do the uh influencer in ugc first is that uh very few people actually um actually click the link when when you when they see your content on Tik Tok so they don't actually say oh wow J 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 Tik Tok click Tik Tok open Safari do 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 and then um they they click your product and um that's one I mean the the tip Here is you want to increase your brand name searches and that what that does it'll make it'll make you more like uh makes you more legit in the eyes of Google but uh the great news is if

you do the influencer and ugc first you kind of already get that um get that boost because people will uh be searching your um uh searching your account or searching your website or your tool and then uh you'll be gaining legitimacy kind of passively uh without even doing Much SEO work we spend a lot of something 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 key words that we actually want to be spraying for versus like you know vanity metrics where

oh it looks like our traffic tripled from um you know like last year to this year but we're ranging for all these like you know kind of um useless keywords or not useless but um obviously if you could Choose between ranking for like uh like free and then your tool whatever your tool does or just like what your tool does you would much rather choose to rank for the non-free version because everyone who's searching for free they don't have really a buying intent to uh actually convert and pay for your tool versus the other people

are just looking for the best tool possible on the market um so uh you want to accurately estimate the ROI from search engines and um 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 we spend tens of thousands 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 uh languages um we know obviously write a lot of content and um

it's been pretty fruitful for us but um like I kind of said in the beginning um I would not especially Startups I would not suggest you do this on day one this is more something you have like a study income stream you have a little bit of pmf you kind of take that money and you could uh go out and buy your own SE agency if you'd like there you go and this is the strategy that worked for you and might work for other people so uh thank you for uh talking about it now paid

ads paid ads let's let's get into it how to paid Ads how to paid ads yeah so so um this is another the reason that I put SEO P 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 inter Cycles right so you want like you want to be able to uh test something see for resonates and then change up how you're doing it um and so you could do that with um like like ugc influencer you can't do

that with SEO PID 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 learning phase you have to spend time creating creatives um you have to um like it's it's its own kind of Beastly you have to go after 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 toone uh cact L TV or like 1.5 to one and um 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 ugc your influencer first um uh you you can actually get content that you know people will resonate with organically and you could reuse that in terms of paid ads you can use data from your social media Partnerships have better targeting for on day one um oh yeah this is big like what countries Convert better what's the LTV of

each country what type of users are I deal to Market to and um yeah uh 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 um purchase conversions so we really only got into paid ads after we got uh some semblance of pmf unclear if we have like pmf pmf but like there people that know like our product um today and once we kind of had that Feeling then we started getting to paid ads um and you know

the numbers kind of speak for themselves uh we try to aim for like a 3 to1 um T to LTB or or 3 to1 LTB Tac um and um we try to get a short payback period so um I think right now we make our money um like within the first two months of uh of uh acquiring 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 acquisition whether that's getting more UTC influencers or uh doing

more mini tools for SEO or you know putting more into PID ads um I person also think it's this the most 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 um if you want to know more um you could we could link like the my SEO guy is also um on Twitter and Stuff and we could you could look at his post as well I want to I 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 uh that none of no one's actually gonna do any of this [ __ ] yeah yeah yeah so my final thing was like just uh trying to egg people on to actually like make their startup better because I put so much time with 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's probably like like how many people will actually read this whole thing 10% I going actually try to implement some of the strategies 10% of that how many will continue to try one Year from now when these marketing taxes help them uncover deep fla outs the 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 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% 10% 1% whatever it's probably like seven 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 if You if you told me that like this post helped you out but um yeah that's the that's the whole thing and just comment comment comment on the YouTube just so we just if you're committing to the act of let's do this so also com YouTube If you read it and you tried it and like you're now severely

and dead I've ruined your life and like it's just nothing worked you could also comment that too that would be your one com from 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 right all right David this showed up on my feed yeah so now you're at 5 million ARR um and then all of a 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 um is it more of the same have you figured out new channels uh give people some of the Sauce 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 5 to 10 million it's not like oh once you reach 5 million you have to you know kind of rebuild the Playbook and you have you could use it for 5 10 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 um you probably need to get better at um like the Gran of things obviously change as things scale but everything on this list we still use to this day um we added a lot of like affiliate like a lot of our Revenue comes from affiliate um um marketers now so people that um enjoy Jenny and now Champion Jenny and do marketing and they get some cut of whatever they' like to do um

when marketing Jenny um we've got into like Acquisitions which I think is pretty rare so we've like acquired a few startups um 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 uh can we get to 20 million Revenue I believe I can but uh you know that's obviously anybody's guess every probably arrogant founder thinks that they can but what I do know for sure is I've gone from zero to five I could probably do that again so you

know we do Have a little bit of bets on the side of like okay um we could probably go from 10 to 20 I'm pretty confident about that but just in case we're also incubating other startups kind of within the Jenny um group uh we have one startup doing uh like 1.5 1.2 1.5 million a year in Revenue um we acquired them when they were like half that and we've doubled that startup um in like 5 months uh 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 turn went down all these things so um that's kind of interesting I 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 you know Like if if you were going on acquiring startups like um I don't know how much like a post

like that would be helpful but um yeah those are some new things I think like the the another kind of like non-sexy answer is like um 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 um we worked a lot on retention conversion like uh the like you know the funnel Really and once we kind of improve those funnels um it allows us to capitalize more on the traffic and um that's something that you could do at any point but

obviously for each each percentage point that you decrease for turn it matters way more as the scale of your start gets larger so we we really as we got larger from five to 10 we got we really laser focus on it I mean that's one of the really proud things that we've done is we went from like 20% Churn um to like nine to like around 99.8% churn we more than have it which you know for people who don't know about how terrible and like nightmare turn can be and how it could keep you at

night and stuff like having shurn can can literally make your startup you know so much larger it just makes it so much easier for to grow because the The Leaky bucket is just not torrential anymore it's just like you know manageable at some point and uh you know that's like Yeah I I don't how much time you have I'll just say like one Open Secret about AI tools these btci apps is like the churn can be insane right like you can have 50% monthly churn that's like not unheard of 40% to 30% that's like kind

of normal and then you know 20% it's like if you're really focused on your your customers and 10% for a BC AI especially attech um I don't know too many other startups that have been able to get it down that much and um you know That's not a testament that's a testament like my team you know shout out to Mark shout out to Shell sh heymont Dandy Justin Luke every everybody on the team MCH Shan everybody um that's just killing it and uh we're able to get the the these numbers down so that's really five

to 10 is just like getting back to the basics TW the making the final cleaner um scaling out what's already working doing some Acquisitions along the way and uh adding you know one Or two more channels uh when you have the chance 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 yeah right and 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 my team

works so hard yeah it's crazy that's awesome um 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 um we are going to include the links to Jenny AI in the show notes uh as well as your social but is there anything else you want to leave people with uh at all or 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 Beaten and then one person beat it and then like the next [ __ ] Marathon or the next year like seven people like a bunch of people were able to like run that marathon time um so you know I'm a non-technical person I'm a non-technical Founder doing an AI startup I am a College Dropout I would not say I'm like one of those cracked people I'm not from silon Valley I was I stayed there once before my flight out of SF I'm not

of That World um and like I was able to Kind of build this company obviously not just because of me thanks to like really brilliant 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 um I'm not you know you don't have to send me $50 on venmo 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 I'm pretty easily reachable and um yeah I got I went on this Fantastical crazy journey I feel like I'm not I'm still close to the beginning than the end and um I'm I'm really grateful that it happened to me and I'm I would love it if other people got to experience this journey as well so yeah thanks for having me on the podcast yeah dude you got to come back again this has been incredible David Park um thanks and I'll see you I'll

see You on the internet thanks you [Music]