Army of creators, feed a starving crowd, and emotional journeys.

Welcome to all you growth-loving founders and marketers!

Broadcasting live on location in Palm Springs for a team retreat :)

We're spending the next few days strategizing on the best ways we can help startups grow in 2024. Expect some exciting announcements to come!

Now for: Army of creators, feed a starving crowd, and emotional journeys.

Let's dive in 🌴

– Neal

Find and feed the starving crowd

Insight from $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi.

You could have a bad product, mediocre offer and no ability to persuade people and still sell a ton if you have a ton of demand for your product.

(Masks and toilet paper were a great example of this during peak COVID)

You need to find a market that's desperate for a solution. Typically this boil down to seeking improved health, increased wealth, or improved relationships.

Four factors to find a great market with latent demand:

Pain
Purchasing power
Easy to target / easy to find your audience
It’s growing

Let's dive into each:

Pain

They have to desperately need what you’re offering. It can’t be a nice-to-have.

How much you charge is proportional to the pain someone has and your ability to relieve it.

Share the dream of their life without that pain.

Purchasing Power

If you target students, they cannot pay you $1200 for a course.

Target venture capitalists and they could cough up ten grand if you can make them more.

Easy to Target

But, if you can't get your offer in front of venture capitalists easily, then what's the point?

You need to be able to consistently be able to get in front of a lot of your audience.

Where do they spend time? What mailing lists are they apart of? Social media groups? Communities/forums? What YouTube channels do they watch?

Growing

Find a market that’s growing. You'll grow as it does.

Don’t go into the newspaper or radio business. You'll be fighting a downward trend.

In short, an increasingly painful problem for people with money who are easy to reach.

Grow by leading an army of creators

Insight from Marketing Examples and tabs.

Most social media advice for early-stage startups:

"Focus on one account, maybe the founder. Or just do something else, like ads."

Well, Oliver, the 21-year-old college student and founder of tabs, did the complete opposite—and achieved months with $500,000 worth of sales of "sex chocolate" as a result.

Here's how:

They have at least 30 creators they work with.
Each with their own tabs-branded TikTok account. Seriously, 30+ accounts.
They each post 1-3 videos every day.
They're all less than 10 seconds.
Over a third of the accounts have > 10,000,000 total views.
They feel like customer reviews, not ads.

Each of the 30 creators has their own unique link in the bio so they can track purchases. Assumably, they're all being paid per conversion—so the upfront cost for tabs is minimal.

Added benefit of this strategy:

Now, when tabs run ads on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, they have a ton of organic-feeling, proven-to-work ad creatives to use.

PS: They're clients of ours at Ad Labs. We're running their ads now ;0

Take people on an emotional journey

Insight from Patrick Campbell and The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell & Chris Vogler.

A lot of movies, books, and TV shows follow a typical arc: The "Hero's Journey."

Here's what that looks like (using Stars Wars Episode 4 as an example):

This 12 step storytelling framework is overkill in most marketing. But, you can capture its essence with a helpful framework:

"Emotional Resonance" maps.

We buy with emotion and justify with logic. Stories tap into emotions, which tap into wallets.

When you script an ad, webinar, sales pitch, fundraising pitch, marketing email, or social post, map out the emotion you want people to feel as they consume it.

Here are 3 arcs that Patrick shared:

News and links

News you can use:

Google Bard can now respond in real-time.
Meta is rolling out ad-free Facebook & Instagram subscriptions for users in Europe.
Instagram is rolling out new features with their Reminder Ads to help advertisers reach a wider audience.
Google is rolling out new generative AI product imagery tools for advertisers in the U.S.

Tool we recommend*: Amplitude

We've been using Amplitude since 2019—big fans.

Amplitude just launched an affordable plan built for startups and small businesses. The Plus plan lets you grow your business with one integrated solution in a low-cost plan.

Starting at just $49 per month, cancel anytime.

For the price of an iTunes song a day, you get to unlock powerful behavioral insights and build product experiences that help you acquire, retain, and monetize customers.

Check out the Plus Plan

*Sponsored by Amplitude