A launch burst can make outbound feel familiar

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:23

   our approach. Um, it was the right approach for us. Um, I'll also sort of caveat with a couple things that, uh, I think are worth calling out that, um, maybe like advantages that we have as a business that don't necessarily apply to every startup. Um, we wanted to take the approach of operating in stealth through this like design customer phase and then have a big sort of shotgun style launch, which we did back in February, where we went from almost a definitionally unknown company. Nobody had LinkedIn, Monaco up. Our website said coming soon or some version of that. We certainly spent zero dollars on marketing up until the day that we launched. And the like reason that we wanted to take that approach is, again, I haven't come up with a better analogy for it than this, which is like the boiling frog thing, where you can imagine if you are the frog

2. 43:15

   and like that you're in the pot and like the water is heating up and you like don't totally notice it. Well, we can apply that to like if you do marketing campaigns over a two year period and you like as a consumer, you may see like bits and pieces of somebody's marketing campaign here and there. And like, yeah, I've maybe heard of this company, but like I heard about them a long time ago and they like did this thing. You can imagine the sort of like psychological impact of that relative to um like dropping the frog in the boiling water which is like oh my gosh we are seeing monaco everywhere all of a sudden like i see the plane and i see the billboards and i see the poker tournaments and your your uh your plane and your billboard gave no explanation of what monaco was like it just said monaco and then like the billboards had like a big dollar sign which

3. 44:00

   I thought was hilarious and I loved it. But like you didn't say, you know, new AI sales platform. You know, you just were like, Monica. Yeah. We benefit from having a geographically concentrated target market. So we're selling to startups. You and I are sitting here in San Francisco. Many of our customers are also in San Francisco. So if we were selling to HVAC companies, we shouldn't be flying planes around San Francisco or putting billboards up around San Francisco because they're like fairly well distributed and not highly concentrated.

4. 44:24

   So there are like maybe two aspects that we were deliberate about solving for. One is brand awareness. That's the plane. That's the billboards and more. When we do think that there may be like two impacts of brand awareness. The first is we do a lot of outbound. Monaco does our outbound for us. When we reach out to a company that is graduating YC, reach out to the founder, they receive the message from me.

5. 44:53

   They have heard of Monaco because they've seen the plan, whatever the thing is. The likelihood that they respond to that outbound message is exponentially higher than if they didn't know me, if they didn't know the business. So the brand awareness is something that we're very deliberate about. There's a second application of that, which is when they take the meeting, they are far more likely to convert because there is comfort in knowing and understanding a brand like the one that we are hopefully creating around ourselves in ways that maybe other folks aren't deliberate about and haven't created for themselves. The other type of marketing that we're delivered about is like demand gen. This is very targeted. This is sending people the poker sets that we send to founders when they graduate YC or something like this and hosting the poker

6. 45:41

   tournaments and inviting specific founders to that poker tournament with the expectation that that specific founder is going to be somebody that we convert. So we solve for both. I can talk