Go Viral with Customers Like a Granola PMM

31 Mar 2026 · 58 min · 26 chapters

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In short

Granola’s “Granola Crunched” wrap-style campaign that used AI-enhanced meeting insights to drive organic sharing, plus a messaging critique of Lovable.

Guest backgrounds

Jack Cully, founding marketer at Granola (AI meeting notes). Previously early marketer at Monzo (UK fintech branding) and led brand refreshes at multiple companies; also ran two marathons.

Key claims

People like reading and sharing about themselves, but don’t want to brag directly—Granola Crunched acts as a “mirror.” The campaign succeeded by being accurate, respectful, funny-but-safe, and privacy-forward (no one at Granola can see data; only users share). Sharing was optimized across public posts and internal channels (Slack/Teams).

Notable examples

Intern-built prototype using “Recipes” prompts; chief of staff Jo spent 24+ hours tuning AI prompts. Campaign shipped with multiple slide variants (catchphrases, “partner in crime,” achievements). Launch timing targeted UK→NY→SF wake cycles; Jack replied to every Crunched post for organic engagement. Results: millions of organic impressions, ~25% share rate, highest acquisition week post-launch, long tail requests months later.

Guests (other segment)

Lovable messaging critique—brand film “ideas are too loud to ignore,” plus London OOH. Suggested improvement: more specific use cases; consider street stunts/activations.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Introduction to Granola and Jack Cully

0:45 to 2:17

Meet Jack Cully from Granola, who discusses their successful campaign.

“you've probably seen what we're about to talk about.”

Understanding Granola's Features

2:17 to 4:39

Jack explains Granola's purpose and new features enhancing meeting experiences.

“It is no surprise to me that Jack and the team delivered such a successful campaign.”

The Birth of Granola Crunched Campaign

4:39 to 5:41

Exploration of the Granola Crunched campaign's inception and purpose.

“I remember when I would do, this was a long time ago.”

Creative Process Behind Granola Crunched

5:41 to 10:15

Delving into the creative brainstorming process that led to Granola Crunched.

“So tell me a little bit more about what was going on at Granola when you realized you needed some kind of campaign like this.”

Customer Insights and Engagement

10:15 to 13:11

Discussion on how customer insights shaped the Granola Crunched campaign.

“And I know you mentioned at the beginning, the goal in mind was around getting people to talk more about granola.”

Sharing Insights: The Strategy Behind Granola

13:11 to 14:00

Jack shares how Granola decided which insights to use for customer engagement.

“So, well, I was going to ask you about the insights that you decided to use and how you found the insights.”

The Power of Shareable Moments

14:00 to 16:04

Learn about different vectors for sharing experiences in a work environment.

“It should reveal something quite meaningful and it should be something that you want to share.”

Crafting Humor in Marketing

16:08 to 18:21

Discover the challenges of making marketing content funny and relatable.

“And part of what works so well with the campaign and I guess the output of the campaign is that it was funny and fun and witty and entertaining.”

Developing Shared Principles for Engagement

18:23 to 21:30

Understand the principles behind creating shareable and engaging content.

“pulled the right detail, didn't make any assumptions about you, didn't offend you, didn't say anything that was confidential.”

Preparing for a Successful Launch

21:31 to 22:22

Explore the steps taken to ensure a smooth product launch.

“Which intuition is sometimes part of the game, you know, just leaning into intuition.”
Show all 26 chapters

Achieving Viral Success

22:28 to 28:00

Learn how to effectively create buzz and generate traction for a product.

“On Monday night, we did all our final checks.”

The Impact of Granola's Viral Campaign

28:00 to 30:14

Learn how Granola's viral marketing campaign reshaped brand perception.

“Just like the thing that that does to people's perception about the granola brand is invaluable and positions us as like a real necessity for businesses, right?”

Steps to Create an Engaging Marketing Campaign

30:14 to 31:07

Discover the foundational steps for launching a successful marketing campaign.

“prospects had about your product is, it's a dream.”

Building a Cross-Functional Team for Campaign Success

31:07 to 34:09

Understand the importance of collaboration across teams for effective marketing.

“customer insights, product capabilities, and wanting to create some customer engagement?”

Using Customer Insights to Drive Engagement

34:09 to 36:48

Learn how to leverage customer insights for creating engaging campaigns.

“That said, you need to build a system as you start thinking about these things.”

Establishing Guiding Principles for Campaigns

36:48 to 40:01

Explore how to set guiding principles to streamline your marketing efforts.

“So let me dive into now you, you talked about some earlier on with a crunch, you talked about that, like you said some like kind of established some guiding principles around this.”

Iterating on Campaign Ideas and Building

40:01 to 42:01

Understand the importance of iteration and feedback in the campaign development process.

“So if I were doing this today, I would come up with whatever, you know, guiding rules or principles make sense for me.”

Iterating on Product Development

42:01 to 43:12

Learn how iterative testing and feedback can refine a product before launch.

“at granola is getting as close to the thing that you want to ship as quickly as possible and then iterating and refining until you get to something that you feel is ready to ship.”

Preparing for Launch

43:12 to 45:58

Discover strategies to engage customers effectively during a product launch.

“We were quite picky about who we chose because we wanted specific feedback.”

Key Steps for a Successful Campaign

45:58 to 47:54

Understand the essential steps to drive a customer insights engagement campaign.

“And then I want to audit my data, try to gather context, figure out what insights I should use, and then define the guiding principles around how I'm going to use that.”

Biggest Takeaway for Marketers

47:54 to 48:14

Focus on making it easy for users to share their experiences.

Messaging Critique Introduction

48:14 to 49:15

Transitioning to analyze real-world marketing messaging with a guest.

“So congrats again on the campaign and thank you for sharing it today.”

Analyzing Lovable's Brand Campaign

49:15 to 54:48

Explore the strengths and weaknesses of Lovable's recent marketing campaign.

“And the fun part is you get to pick the company that we will look at today.”

Gratitude in Marketing

54:48 to 55:49

Discuss the importance of acknowledging mentors and influential figures in marketing.

“to like conduct little mini docuseries or something.”

Lessons Learned from Monzo

56:00 to 56:49

Discover the valuable marketing insights gained from experiences at Monzo.

“marketing at Monzo gave a chance on me as a, to kind of start doing marketing.”

Connecting with Jack

56:50 to 57:13

Learn how to connect with Jack on LinkedIn and his newsletter updates.

“My last question for you, Jack, is the best place to find you on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect?”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:02Jack Cully:Hi, friends. Welcome to Product Marketing Adventures, the only show that takes you beyond theory and into the real execution of product marketing. My name is Elle Grossenbacher, your trusted guide and host of this show. In each episode, I bring in expert product marketers to co-host two segments of this show. First, a case study example of their work, followed by a messaging critique for companies we admire. So if you're a PMM looking for practical guidance and inspiration, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's go.

0:41Jack Cully:If you spent any time on Twitter or LinkedIn in December of last year, that's 2025, you've probably seen what we're about to talk about. Everyone posting their year in review stats or could look like screenshots, maybe swipe cards on LinkedIn. I'm talking about those funny little insights about how people work and what they listened to, what products they shipped, what they obsessed over for the year. Yes, I think you know what I'm talking about, the popular wrapped campaigns. Now, Spotify wrapped made this format famous, but some of those wrap style campaigns completely flop when brands try to copy them.

1:19Jack Cully:You guys remember that year in review from LinkedIn. Yikes. Well, today we're talking about a company that absolutely nailed the wrap style campaign. A scrappy AI powered, deeply shareable experience that generated millions of organic impressions and changed how people talk about their product overnight. I am so excited to welcome Jack Cully to the show. You guys, Jack is part of the team at Granola, the AI meeting notes tool that people genuinely love using. And today he's going to walk us through how they created Granola Crunched. That's their version of a year in review campaign that spread across tech workers on Twitter and LinkedIn like wildfire.

2:02Jack Cully:Although he's a founding marketer at a startup and owns all of marketing, today he's representing the Granola team as an honorary product marketer for their strategic use of customer insights and product capabilities in this incredibly clever campaign. It is no surprise to me that Jack and the team delivered such a successful campaign. Let me tell you guys why. Jack was one of the earliest marketers at Monzo, the wildly popular app-based bank in the UK that redefined modern fintech branding. And he has led a brand refresh at every single company he has worked at, which tells you he's not afraid to rethink the story from the ground up.

2:43Jack Cully:And if that weren't impressive enough, Jack has also run not just one, but two marathons. So clearly endurance is part of the package deal here. Jack, welcome to the show.

2:56Product Marketing Adventures Host:Thanks for having me, Elle. It's great to be here. And thanks for the very kind intro.

3:00Jack Cully:Yes, I have been looking forward to this conversation for so long. I know I initially reached out to you because the campaign was so popular. I'm not going to lie. I had a little FOMO because I was not a granola customer. So I did not get a granola crunched year in review.

3:19Product Marketing Adventures Host:So we'll have to get you this year for a granola crunched.

3:24Jack Cully:Exactly. Right. Okay. So let's quickly get our listeners up to speed. For those of you who may not know what Granola is. Help us understand what is Granola.

3:34Product Marketing Adventures Host:So Granola is the AI notepad for people in back to back meetings. So really simple. It's a separate app that lives on your computer or on your phone. And whilst you're in a meeting, you can take rough notes and then Granola transcribes in the background. And then once the meeting is over, Granola will take the rough notes you've made and enhance them and make them into readable summaries. So you can kind of stay focused on the conversation you're having and not worry about making sure that every detail was captured. So yeah, we're based out here in London. Team is growing as well. 50 of us and we keep growing.

4:18Product Marketing Adventures Host:And yeah, I guess the big thing for us at the moment is kind of growing Granola from a notes app to an app that makes the most of the context that you get from within your meetings. So we just launched something called MCP, which is basically a way to let Granola talk to ChatGPT, Claude and all your other AI apps. So yeah, lots of stuff going on.

4:40Jack Cully:Whoa, that is so cool. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited for this. I remember when I would do, this was a long time ago. This was before AI or maybe like right when AI like meeting summaries started to come out several years ago, or maybe just like recording transcripts. And I remember I'm very much like a hand note taker. It's just part of my processing. And I remember I'd go back and like listen to the recordings to try to fill in things that I missed. So I love that it just does that for me. Very cool. Pretty game changer with the new MCP. Congrats on the MCP, right? That's what it's called.

5:20Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, it's pretty cool. People are really loving it. So that's great.

5:27Jack Cully:Ah, I love it. Okay. Well, for today, we're going to dive into the first segment of the show. So the first segment is where we talk about the case study example, specifically on Granola Crunched and that campaign and how you guys pulled it off. So tell me a little bit more about what was going on at Granola when you realized you needed some kind of campaign like this.

5:48Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, we were really surprised at how much people loved Granola Crunched when we put it out to the world. But it all basically started as maybe a few things. You know, there was a desire from on our side to do something fun for our users to be a bit more visible on social media. And, you know, we felt that the product had good word of mouth growth already. Lots of folks were already talking about us on Twitter, AI Twitter. There's a lot of conversation about Granola already. So that's great. and you know every time we speak to users about granola they absolutely love it they swear by it so we feel very lucky that they're you know we already had kind of fairly strong product market fit the thing that we wanted to boost is actually people talking about granola online more because basically we thought that we could juice that a little bit so people are already talking about granola online a bunch but um how could we find a way to get customers to talk about granola more now at the same time you know we've we spend some time brainstorming fun marketing ideas and we kind of all just got kind of you know there's there's this desire in every company isn't there for your products to go viral at some point so you know we were just kind of talking through some of these, some ideas.

7:07Product Marketing Adventures Host:And, you know, it was back in the summer where we were brainstorming some ideas and someone, you know, talked about Spotify Wrapped, which is, I guess, for every marketer, it's every marketer's dream to do a version of Spotify Wrapped. But, you know, over the last 10 years, they've become a bit ubiquitous, shall we say. And they're very, you know, I think lots of people do them. And you mentioned LinkedIn at the beginning, not many of them are done very well and they just become more noise rather than like genuine user value so we were kind of you know thinking about how we might be able to do it and you know the one thing we didn't want to do is just do something that was was gimmicky that said granola knows a lot about you it's surprising how much because you say a lot in meetings that reveal a lot about you the phrases that you use in meetings, the people that you spend time with in meetings, the decisions you make, the projects that you advance and, you know, the achievements that you celebrate.

8:14Product Marketing Adventures Host:These all happen in conversations with your colleagues. And so, you know, we thought there was an opportunity here to use that context in some way and actually it not feel like a gimmick in the way that some of the recaps do today. So yeah, we were in our summer, kind of we're going through things in the summer. We're actually working with some interns. Shout out to Luke and Malaika who were with us over the summer. Incredible engineering interns. They were super, super smart people. And they worked on a bunch of things whilst they were here. But for their last week, which also was a week that the whole team was at the company Villa in Mallorca, which we call Casa Granola, we thought we'd give them a fun project to work on.

9:08Product Marketing Adventures Host:And so we thought, well, why don't you work on Granola Wrapped, as we called it at the time? And so they built a very basic version based on a technology that we have called Recipes. It's a feature that basically lets you save custom prompts. And the results were really surprising. Even with a very basic prompt behind it, we were all kind of a bit blown away by the things that Granola could say about us and what we had done. And so after seeing the prototype of it, I just thought we have to do this. So they finished their internship with us and went back to university mid-September, which is around the time that we were doing Q4 planning.

9:48Product Marketing Adventures Host:And I just put launch granola wrapped into our Q4 plans. And I just wrote that, just the words launch granola wrapped. And I did that because I wanted us to do it because I knew how cool it would be just based on the team directions. So I kind of forced ourselves to think about how we might do it. And that's, yeah, I guess that's where we ended up by kind of pursuing it as a project, I guess.

10:14Jack Cully:Yeah. And then you just made it happen. So, I love this story. And I know you mentioned at the beginning, the goal in mind was around getting people to talk more about granola. You had this initial like word of mouth conversation, but it sounds like a lot of that initial word of mouth probably happened more, behind closed doors, you know, you didn't necessarily have people creating an organic post on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I use granola.

10:48Product Marketing Adventures Host:It's great.

10:48Jack Cully:Like, you know, but this is obviously people started doing that, but, um, but Justin wrapped up, no pun intended in your, you know, insights that you guys.

11:01Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, a hundred percent. And, you know, we did have some folks sharing, but I think, you know, we felt that the product was so people do really love using granola. Like you should see our feedback forms are just full of, you know, praise, which I, you know, feel very genuinely lucky to be here. And I just thought we can get more people to talk about it. So we thought, how do we do that?

11:20Jack Cully:Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And going back to something that you said about when you were, you saw the initial results with a super basic, you know, basically prompt that the interns were able to put together and that you were just blown away with it. You know what it reminded me of? And maybe this is still the actual output of the whole campaign. And I think is a testament to why being so customer-centric and specifically using the insights that you had available to you was so successful, tapping a little bit into human psychology. It's kind of like why people like reading about their personalities or their personality.

12:01Jack Cully:People like taking personality tests. What's my personality type? You know, like, so it's a little, it has a little bit of that flavor to it. So it's just very interesting. I don't think that that wasn't necessarily intentional for you. It's just something that you guys discovered as you started to, you know, run those internal, you know, I guess not experiment necessarily, but the, you know, the test internally with the interns and kind of the rest of the company for that summer end project.

12:28Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, that was a big learning for us. And, you know, maybe we'll talk about this in more depth in a bit, but a big learning for us was people really love to read and read about themselves. And then they like to talk about themselves, but they don't like doing it directly. So like people like saying how great they are, but they don't like to say that they're great from their own voice. So if granola can do it for them, great. And that's kind of, yeah, that was a big thing we learned.

13:00Jack Cully:Totally. Right, right. I think in our prep call ahead of this recording, I think you said something like, what's an acceptable way for a user or a listener or people out in the world might be thinking, what's an acceptable way for me to brag about myself without bragging about myself? You know, so it kind of creates that. So, well, I was going to ask you about the insights that you decided to use and how you found the insights. I guess like you mentioned before that by nature of the product, that granologist knows a lot about you and has that context. How did you decide which insights to include?

13:42Product Marketing Adventures Host:So great question. I think, well, we set ourselves a bunch of criteria. And I think first and foremost, they needed everything that we showed folks needed to feel like they'd been seen. So they needed to feel really, oh my God, like Granada really kind of gets me. It should reveal something quite meaningful and it should be something that you want to share. So you hear something that you want to share and you maybe think, okay, post it on LinkedIn or on X or somewhere else, like a social media platform. But we kind of thought about it in maybe three different ways. We thought about it in terms of posting publicly.

14:22Product Marketing Adventures Host:So posting something on LinkedIn or X, and that kind of a thing would maybe be an achievement that you did at work, something that you felt really proud of doing, or something that sold your services. So we had a lot of people who were consultants basically using their Granola Crunch as a bit of a customer testimonial ad for their own business, which was really interesting. So that was definitely useful because it's valuable for the user and for Granola, right? The second thing that we, the second like vector of sharing that we're thinking about is Slack or Teams or email. Probably not email, but certainly Slack and Teams.

15:02Product Marketing Adventures Host:These are the kind of like company in jokes that you might have. So, you know, someone's always falling asleep on a call or someone always uses the same buzzwords. So we kind of optimized for that in terms of, yeah, so we had like catchphrases and we also had your work bestie. I can't remember what we called it, but it was like your partner in crime or something. And then the third vector was maybe sharing with friends. So something that you say at work that may be transferable outside of work, you know, what would you send someone on WhatsApp? So yeah, we saw success on the first two. A lot of people did share very publicly on LinkedIn or X.

15:41Product Marketing Adventures Host:And then there was a lot of, from what we can see, obviously we don't know for sure, but anecdotally we heard that lots of people were sharing on Slack. And we also saw that we had analytics on the share button. We saw lots of people were pressing share and not necessarily seeing that same percentage show up on LinkedIn or X. So you can deduct that there was a lot of sharing on Slack as well. So yeah, that's kind of how we thought about it. happy to go into more detail about how we, how we made that work, but yeah.

16:08Jack Cully:Right. Right. And part of what works so well with the campaign and I guess the output of the campaign is that it was funny and fun and witty and entertaining. And I think that was intentional as you mentioned. So I guess like, how did you make it funny?

16:28Product Marketing Adventures Host:um so it's a very difficult thing to do well especially with ai it's very hard to make ai funny and i can i can claim no credit really for making for making granola crunched funny we spent a lot of time thinking about the tone and what kinds of things we want to say about granola about users in the experience and you know we we always wanted it to be accurate first and foremost we wanted it to kind of be respectful we didn't you know a lot of certainly spotify and some others have have kind of gone down a roasting route and we tried that we tried to roast people and it just felt super mean honestly it did not work um yeah you're like ah it doesn't make me feel good right 100 and like i can kind of see how like roasting definitely works on spotify because you can be like haha you listen to taylor swift let me roast you but there's something different about when it comes to your conversations so yeah we basically talked about it we kind of set ourselves a bunch of principles that kind of we're aligning on like how we make this super shareable and interesting but also we don't cross a line where we kind of upset and offend people And the way we mainly did that, honestly, was by kind of making an example, showing it to people inside the company, and then getting their reaction and just kind of seeing how they felt about it.

18:03Product Marketing Adventures Host:And so our chief of staff here, Jo, is behind all of our kind of AI prompting. And so she spent countless hours, I would say over 24 hours worth, just pure tweaking the prompts to make it work and do it properly. The most attention that we spent on this whole project was tweaking the AI and the prompting behind it to make sure that it felt really sharp, but also empathetic and pulled the right detail, didn't make any assumptions about you, didn't offend you, didn't say anything that was confidential. because a lot of your meeting context is confidential. You think about, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about people who work in the people teams or HR or recruiting.

18:58Product Marketing Adventures Host:You know, sometimes you're having very difficult conversations. And the last thing you want is for that to come up in this situation, right?

19:06Jack Cully:Or if you're, yeah, like revealing product details or product roadmap information, there's all kinds of things, right?

19:15Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah. So we spent a lot of time thinking about those use cases. And yeah, slowly but surely, we worked our way into a prompt that felt like it was giving good and funny results. And it felt safe enough to start scanning out to more people. But as I say, I can take no credit for that. That was all Joe, who did an incredible job. I'm like really, really proud of that.

19:35Jack Cully:Shout out Joe. That's awesome. And what I love that, you know, and this is credit, you know, entirely to Joe and then, but then also the rest of the team to sit down and think through what those principles are. And you really put yourselves kind of in the customer's shoes to think through what, how would we make this, like, like what is required to make this shareable, you know, something that they're proud of, basically. It has to be something that they're proud to put their name on. And everyone likes to be funny, you know?

20:07Product Marketing Adventures Host:So yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like, yeah, were we, the way we thought about it really was, is this something that says something about someone like yes, no? And if yes, does it say enough about that person for them to share it with someone else or feel really warm about granola? and if it didn't hit that bar then it was out because everything had to feel like you've been really seen by and you know the reason we did we had i can't remember the exact number of kind of screens we had in it but the reason we did eight or nine in the end is because everyone's different and as we were testing it with folks some people really resonated with their partner crime.

20:58Product Marketing Adventures Host:There was other people who really resonated with their catchphrase and other people really resonated with their achievements. And so we wanted everyone to feel warm about the whole thing, but different people are minded to share different things. And if we just, there was one version where we basically were just going to go with one or two slides and that's it. But what we found is that actually there was no clear winner on the slides of which people would share. So we shipped them all and made, and hopefully, you know, it felt like an appropriate length. So yeah.

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21:29Jack Cully:Oh, that's awesome. I love how you kind of just went with your gut a little bit on that.

21:34Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah. Oh yeah.

21:35Jack Cully:Which intuition is sometimes part of the game, you know, just leaning into intuition. Okay. Let's talk about the launch. How did you actually put this into the world and make sure that it kept up with the fire, you know, the wildfire spread?

21:50Product Marketing Adventures Host:Well, yeah, so we spent in total probably myself and James, who's a design engineer on our team, we probably end-to-end spent six weeks on this project. We started roping folks in at weeks two to three, and it ended up with five of us, I think, kind of looking to ship the experience. And we did lots of readiness checks from an engineering and platform point of view to make sure that we were super, super ready in kind of all scenarios. I was expecting folks to resonate with it, but I really didn't expect what was about to come. So on the Monday, we launched on a Tuesday. On Monday night, we did all our final checks.

22:34Product Marketing Adventures Host:We went through the experience. We had one last minute change to the beginning of the experience, which was actually just to reiterate how private this data is. Like no one at Granola can see it. No one inside your company can see it. The only time this data gets shared is if you choose to share it. So we didn't have that in there and we thought it was important to put it in to kind of set the scene. So we made that change on a Monday evening before we went out on Tuesday. And then, yeah, Monday, Tuesday morning, about 8 a.m. UK time, we'd basically made the calculation. So most of our customers are based in the US.

23:14Product Marketing Adventures Host:And generally speaking, when we launch something, we launch around 9 a.m. Pacific time. And the reason we do that is because that's when folks in San Francisco, our biggest market, are waking up. But we made the calculation this time that actually we have enough users in the UK to see it and then start talking about it. Then New York wake up at 3pm. And by the time New York wake up, hopefully, there's a critical mass of people talking about it online. And that transfers to New York and then again to San Francisco. Turns out that that was a good decision because that's exactly what happened so we set the product live at 8 a.m we put a banner inside the product so uh in granola we have like your upcoming meetings at the top we have your meetings that you've taken notes for at the bottom and then we put a bar in the middle that just said your 2025 crunched and then very much just like tap to see what this is all about we sent an email which slowly i mean you know how how long it takes for emails to roll out.

24:21Product Marketing Adventures Host:It probably took about six to eight hours for the email to send, which again was perfect for folks waking up in San Francisco. So we sent it out and then we had planned to tweet about it and post about it on LinkedIn and do our socials. We'd planned to do that about 1 p.m. UK time, which is a couple of hours before folks in the US wake up. But we found, we saw that we were getting so much traction from the UK, like just really people just absolutely going for like tweeting us and um you know posting right on some linkedin that we decided to go early with our announcement post so we went probably i can't remember exactly maybe 10 a 10 a.m uk time there was just so much going on so yeah it was crazy uh and then i kind of you know all the conventional wisdom for social says that if you are mentioned on something that you want other people to see, you should reply to it and engage with it.

25:20Product Marketing Adventures Host:So I decided that for Crunched, I was going to reply to every single post about Crunched, whether Granola was tagged or not. So anyone posting about Crunched, I would just reply to. So from 8am through to, I think it was 8 or 9pm, I was replying to posts and I just was, it was all day, all day. Wow. I was replying to every single one, just trying to be a bit funny about what they'd said. I don't know. It was a bit of a wild day and I feel very delirious even

25:58Jack Cully:thinking about it but i felt you wanted that like organic engagement that was unique to every post not you know not just like copying the same thing and putting it on the same post because that just feels so inauthentic which is the opposite experience of what you wanted the campaign to be

26:15Product Marketing Adventures Host:exactly exactly and i wanted people to feel that granola had a personality i wanted people to you know folks who follow granola would hopefully see the fact that we are interacting the person who posted would feel you know there's always like a sense of like okay they've recognized me validated yes validated is the word i and then i think if you've posted something you see others posting or if you want to post something you see others posting you're more encouraged to but then if you see the thing you're posting about post back to you you there's just like a human psychology thing where you're like, oh, I am going to post because everyone else is.

26:55Jack Cully:Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Wow. Your fingers must have been cramped up after that. I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed. I myself, like I, I was not a granola customer and when I saw it popping up everywhere, I'm not going to lie. I had some FOMO. I was like, I don't have one. So I think it does, you know, it definitely works. Right. So what can you share in terms of results? You know, your initial goal for all of this was to get people talking about granola in a socially acceptable way. So, and you've talked a lot about how you did that, which was so clever, but like what were, can you share a little bit about actual business impact and, you know, what that what that did for you guys um in the success of the campaign yeah i mean for sure so

27:49Product Marketing Adventures Host:um i think just the fact that granola was visible on the internet and very very visible on the internet for a few days we've done a rebrand since but it's a shame because if we had to rebrand it would be great to have all the colors but just the fact that the granola name was out there for a few days and we were kind of being talked about a lot of people were saying some very kind things about us like Spotify Wraps, the best thing since Spotify Wraps, which is obviously very, very kind. Just like the thing that that does to people's perception about the granola brand is invaluable and positions us as like a real necessity for businesses, right?

28:28Product Marketing Adventures Host:Like, and I think that's important. So, you know, we had millions of organic impressions within the first few days of that campaign. And there was a long tail. We still get people asking us today for their Granada Crunch, which is, you know, wild. It finished four months ago. So like, it's amazing that people are still asking for it. So yeah, millions of organic impressions, which was great. We saw very strong sharing rates. So we were, we could see the percentage of folks that were clicking the share button, you know, click through rates on a, on something like this are, you know, typically in the low single digits, we were looking at something like 25 % of people were sharing their crunch, which is really cool.

29:15Jack Cully:I think that's, yeah, those are some really strong metrics.

29:18Product Marketing Adventures Host:It was kind of amazing to see. But yeah, I think it did for some folks change how they felt about Granola 2. So, you know, we saw some really high acquisition for the kind of week or so after crunch, like the highest to date, which was great. And that was great. So we achieved that goal. Something that we didn't anticipate, but I think did happen was people started to think about granola as more than meeting notes. Like as in granola is actually a place that understands you at work. And that context is really valuable and useful. And I think that was a very good unintended consequence that I personally didn't expect.

30:01Product Marketing Adventures Host:So, yeah.

30:03Jack Cully:Absolutely. So you not only did you, you achieved the goal. People definitely talked about you, as you pointed out, every marketer's dream to kind of have a marketing campaign go viral like that. But then to also have that happy, unintended outcome of the mind shift that customers and prospects had about your product is, it's a dream. It's a marketer's dream. So congrats on that. Again, so clever. We're very perfectly executed. Okay, so now I want to shift gears just a little bit. And let's say that you're my coach and I am trying to pull off an engaging marketing campaign and I want to use customer insights and my product.

30:52Jack Cully:Help me understand what the playbook looks like for this and what would step one look like? What's the first thing I need to go do if I'm trying to pull off a, not necessarily a wrapped campaign, but using the approach of customer insights, product capabilities, and wanting to create some customer engagement?

31:13Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, for sure. So I think firstly, for any kind of customer engagement campaign like this, you have to have a product that users love using. And so if that isn't the case, that needs to be fixed first, I would say, because users won't, users are not going to share something that they don't love using, even if the insight, you know, maybe you could do it if there was like a really unhinged or ridiculous thing that they might share for different reasons, which would give you visibility, but not necessarily kind of like a positive association. So look for things like people proactively saying that they use the product.

31:54Product Marketing Adventures Host:We had kind of a baseline level of this on Twitter, X and LinkedIn as well beforehand. Look at your attention numbers, look at your daily active use, look for your customer conversations with customer support and see how sentiment is there. If there's like strong emotional language being used there, you should look. But really without a kind of genuine emotional connection with your brand, this doesn't work. So the reason this worked is because the team here have made an amazing product and as a result, I very luckily had permission to do a campaign with the team on top of that.

32:31Jack Cully:Yeah. So step one, you have to have a, for a minimum viable campaign, you absolutely must have customers, current paying customers who just genuinely love the product. Okay. Assume I have those conditions. What comes next? What's step two?

32:50Product Marketing Adventures Host:So the next thing I think is having a think about how you can actually execute internally. So you're not going to be able to do it on your own. You're going to need a team. Something like this required a lot of what you'd, I guess, call cross-functional collaboration. I mean, for us, it was engineering on the back end and the front end. It was AI prompting. it was design both from a product design point of view but also from a kind of brand and marketing design point of view so identify the people who can do all of the core functions of the thing you need to deliver um and so yeah i just described those for us and if you don't have those where are you going to get them from?

33:43Product Marketing Adventures Host:Like, could you work with someone? Could you engage an agency or a freelancer to help you? Noting that if you go externally, it might take a bit longer. And so you need to give yourself a bit more time.

33:54Jack Cully:Yep. Yep. So basically identify what are the jobs to be done and who's going to do those jobs? What are the roles I need cross-functionally to make this super successful? Okay. So I got my conditions. I know customers love my product. I figure out all the roles you know cross-functionally who are going to help me pull this thing off i put the people in the place and you know in place of those roles so what's next what's step three

34:20Product Marketing Adventures Host:so i think next is kind of what can you use from your product that would be genuinely interesting or useful to users so just firstly like think about you know what's the artifact inside your products that could be useful um and really the whole time here you need to be i think what a lot of people do is they love something inside their product and they want more people to see the thing that they love so they boost it or they put that forward for consideration at a stage like this whereas you need to flip that completely and put your customer's sunglasses on and look through those glasses and see the world with with that tint and once you've got those sunglasses on to i guess extend the metaphor you know identify the signals that a user will think oh i see myself in that thing so you know for us we catchphrase is a really good example of that where you know we have someone saying the same word more than five times uh in the space of two weeks excluding things like and the i whatever um right that is a good good candidate for for this kind of a thing.

35:58Product Marketing Adventures Host:That said, you need to build a system as you start thinking about these things. So as you start thinking about that context and how you might want to present it back to users, you have to think about the privacy story. So if anything is sensitive or private or you know privileged even needs to make sure that only that user can see it and they know that you have put those protections in place um so yeah i hope that makes some kind of sense yeah oh my gosh

36:35Jack Cully:yeah absolutely and can i just say i love i've never heard your specific metaphor for looking at things through the customer's perspective i will be stealing the sunglasses

36:47Product Marketing Adventures Host:metaphor don't worry i will give you credit i literally i literally just came up with it

36:52Jack Cully:i literally just it's the best thing i've ever heard i love it um something else that you've i think you've already said but it's worth kind of repeating here is that when you look at all of this use customer data that you can that um you want to try to see what context is available and how you can use it for a campaign and you talked about wanting making sure that it's you know not proprietary not private not things that people don't want shared externally but what you guys did with crunched and i think what should be done in any kind of leveraging customer insights for an engaging campaign is to make it about the customer and the user not the company they work for yeah if it's like if it's like a b2b if it's a b2b setting you know um yeah yeah so definitely definitely yeah and i think that's something again if you want it going back to what makes something you know shareable is that it's about the person who's sharing it not necessarily like the company they work for um you're totally right and like there's a um

37:59Product Marketing Adventures Host:i was about to use the word lazy maybe i should use the word lazy there's a very lazy version of this which is you used feature x y number of times yeah yeah that is oh that is not the way to do it because I don't care how many right I don't care I don't care how many times I've used that feature what I care about is the thing that I did with the feature you can reflect that yeah

38:21Jack Cully:great right right I know and it's just yeah it's again a lot of this has to do with like the context and uh sharing or building that context around it to make it a fun and entertaining and interesting story. Yeah. Okay. So let me dive into now you, you talked about some earlier on with a crunch, you talked about that, like you said some like kind of established some guiding principles around this. So this is kind of digging a little bit deeper into like, okay, I have the context now for, you know, or I have the insights that I want to use, you know, tell me about how those principles, the guiding principles, like how should I consider that as part of the, um, you know, the insights that I now have and how I should use them?

39:13Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, for sure. I mean, we found this, uh, really useful early on where we, we, you know, followed the steps. We had a bunch of, um, context and, you know, we had some ideas for what we could do for the whole experience, but we kind of stepped back a bit and started to set some rules about what we should actually do. And as soon as we set the rules, it was actually much easier. So I think for everything, if you're doing like a campaign that uses context in some way, setting yourself these rules are like, it just makes things so much easier because you can consider an idea and then if it doesn't meet the rules, you can throw it away or change it.

39:52Product Marketing Adventures Host:So, you know, some principles that we set before where we've talked about this quite a lot, but give people a way to talk about themselves use make you make users feel seen surprise and delight them make them feel like entertained and the tone should be positive should be safe it should feel like it's not kind of taking aim at you but rather celebratory um but still like that edge of fun which I think we did really well.

40:25Jack Cully:Yes. Okay. So if I were doing this today, I would come up with whatever, you know, guiding rules or principles make sense for me. But if I want, and this is something you did with Crunched too, is you worked really hard to define the tone. So maybe that's part of this step is to define the tone and to, you know, figure out what, like, what are those must haves for the insight and how I'm using it. So now once I have the, the insight and, you know, those guiding principles, like what's next? Is it just to build or is there anything else I need to consider before I jump into building?

41:08Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, I guess, you know, we, we didn't do it slightly this way around, but I would do it this time i'd kind of set the rules first and then i'd brainstorm second um but sometimes you need to come up with ideas and then you can um and then you can kind of set the rules based on the example ideas you have so i guess these two stages are interchangeable but brainstorm and then see if they fit the principles or create the principles and then do the brainstorm um either way i think are interchangeable but yeah come up with some ideas and narrow them down i think would

41:40Jack Cully:be the next one fun enough and you can bring uh bring on board all the people that you you know put into roles to get the brainstorm accomplished okay so then once you have the idea now you build

41:54Product Marketing Adventures Host:yeah is that right okay that's right and we something that's kind of culturally very important at granola is getting as close to the thing that you want to ship as quickly as possible and then iterating and refining until you get to something that you feel is ready to ship. So we did that with Crunched. We made a very minimum viable version of Crunched. We just, James made it in a couple of days and then we started playing with it. So we shared it with the team. They played with it, gave a lot of feedback. We iterated based on the feedback. We did it again, we did it again. And then we reviewed it a couple of times with some key folks and, you know, testing against our principles again.

42:45The things that we kind of spent the most time iterating on were accuracy, humor, whether it felt useful, whether it was like genuinely delightful.

42:55Product Marketing Adventures Host:And, you know, the first three versions were fine, but they weren't really fun. and I think we would not have got to the experience we had uh back in December if we hadn't have done this step so this step is so crucial got it ah okay so the internal kind of

43:16Jack Cully:like testing and iterating and making sure that it's gonna land yeah so even so if let's just say like internally you guys are you're using your product so and just the again the nature of your product you can test it internally on just internal employees but if you don't have that if you're doing this at a different company different product would you maybe consider maybe doing like a little beta test with some like trusted customers to get their feedback

43:46Product Marketing Adventures Host:yeah i think so i think um we did do this with crunched so we showed it to i think about 10 users of lots of different backgrounds. Oh, great. So we did that. I definitely would recommend it. Okay. We were quite picky about who we chose because we wanted specific feedback. So we wanted to get feedback from someone who manages a team of talent and people people. We picked out a bunch of industries that we thought it might be a bit risky to do this with. and so yeah definitely but make sure that they don't make sure you trust them enough not to

44:32Jack Cully:reveal all the secrets of course yeah yeah that's a pretty standard when you have you know some kind of beta group or i would i've never experienced not having some kind of you know mda kind of thing so um okay so now once i have you know the test i've done the testing i'm ready to launch is there any last minute suggestions that I should consider as I'm launching, you know, a customer insights engagement campaign?

45:00Product Marketing Adventures Host:Good question. I think just be ready to, like social is your friend, organic social is your friend. Organic social is where all this happens. So spend all of your time there. You can't influence, well, I'll come back to this in a second, but on the day you can't influence private channels. So don't bother. Spend all of your time making it happen on socials. And to do that, reply to everyone, make it feel really personal to them, give them something that is surprising. So you have, with campaigns like this, you have permission to be a bit different. You have permission to drift slightly from your brand tone of voice.

45:46Product Marketing Adventures Host:So encourage that. I think optimize your product beforehand for sharing so we did that with crunch so it was really easy to share to wherever you wanted to share it to and we made a bunch of iterations on that as well and uh yeah just keep keep replying i think that's the key yeah what what did you spend like 12 to 15 hours on linkedin replying to maybe find like part of a team who can take shifts good idea yeah that's one for next year

46:21Jack Cully:okay so let me quickly recap what i think the steps were so the first one was to um look over making sure that my product has the you know that it's loved by my customers the conditions are right there and then step two is making sure that i have the right team you know the jobs to be done And then putting the people, the right people in those roles to help pull this thing off. And then I want to audit my data, try to gather context, figure out what insights I should use, and then define the guiding principles around how I'm going to use that. Then moving on to, you mentioned the brainstorm, bringing the people in the room, looking at that data, figuring out what should we do to actually leverage it in a campaign.

47:06Jack Cully:then build everything and that's part of getting the right people on board who are going to help me build it um testing and iterate and then launching making sure that i'm staying engaged um anything else to the story or did i miss anything yeah i guess um

47:27Product Marketing Adventures Host:just yeah as we talked just talked about actively engaging and making sure that um you don't just launch and then leave launch stay in the room and keep going and then yeah i guess if you do get a bit of a a boost or it does go better than expected think about how you can use that in the future um which which we've certainly done so perfect perfect okay my last question for

47:54Jack Cully:you on this topic what's one piece of advice that you want a marketer to take away from trying to launch a campaign like this if there's only one thing that they should like consider and remember

48:06Product Marketing Adventures Host:what should it be biggest takeaway oh make it easy for users to reflect themselves quickly through something else so like crunched is basically a mirror that lets you talk about yourself to others um and as a result people shared because that's what they want to do they don't want to talk about themselves even if humans don't you know it's it's embarrassing or it is uh not societally acceptable to boast about yourself and that is like i very much subscribe to that i'm very embarrassed about talking about myself 100 yeah but i still shared my crunched and uh so

48:47Jack Cully:yeah i love it i love it okay well this story was just so clever so impressive and I know captivated clearly millions based on the impressions that you garnered. So congrats again on the campaign and thank you for sharing it today.

49:06Product Marketing Adventures Host:No, no problem. Thank you.

49:08Jack Cully:All right. So now I'd like to switch gears a little bit and get into the second segment of our show, which is the messaging critique. So this is where Jack, you and I as marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging. And the fun part is you get to pick the company that we will look at today. So what you're going to do is you're going to reveal the company. You're going to tell me what you're loving about it, something you wish the product marketer would have done differently or considered as they were putting together the messaging or the story. And then we're going to brainstorm a little bit about around how the marketer product marketer can take it to the next level.

49:42Jack Cully:So Jack, if you don't mind, reveal the company that we'll be looking at today?

49:49Product Marketing Adventures Host:Lovable.

49:50Jack Cully:I love it. Okay. So lovable. I love it. So that's lovable.dev for those of you who want to follow along. Okay. So tell me what's standing out to you. What are you, what are they doing really well in terms of their messaging?

50:08Product Marketing Adventures Host:So they did a, the messaging that's like sticking in my mind at the moment is they just did their first brand campaign or brand video and the messaging is, oh my God, I've literally just forgotten it. Some ideas are too loud to ignore. That's it.

50:27Jack Cully:Ah, yes. And I really love how, you know,

50:32Product Marketing Adventures Host:Lovable is basically a way to make websites and apps with AI. And all of the other players in this space are talking about the coding capability of their tools. Claude has started to do this, but they haven't done it with Claude Code. Lovables, however, they're basically really kind of zeroing in on this idea of ideas and bringing those ideas to life. And they've done it in a really beautiful way with their new film. They've just done lots of Out of Home in London. They were all over the tube, kind of all centered on this idea of making your ideas come to life. And I just, I really like how smart that is just in terms of pulling on the actual thing a user is doing.

51:28Jack Cully:Yes. And you know what else is that it's, it's a little bit motivating, you know?

51:33Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah.

51:33Jack Cully:So if you have an idea that's just kind of like itching at you and, you know, that's been in your mind and seeing something like that, it's motivating to be like, yeah, this is too loud to ignore. So what, and as you're thinking, clearly this is geared toward like creators, right? Or, you know, someone, builders, not necessarily builders who are technical, but those who want to, you know, vibe code, if you will. So what's one thing you wish their marketers or product, I don't even know if they have product marketers, but because they're kind of kind of a startup. But what, what do you think they would have considered differently as they were thinking through this campaign?

52:14Product Marketing Adventures Host:I mean, I think it's a really good campaign. So I don't think there's too much to consider differently. What I would say from their brand film, the use case in the brand film is basically a website dedicated to this song that is in their head. And I know why they've done it because brand films that have music in them, particularly catchy music, are more likely to be remembered. So I feel like that's why they've done a brand film with a catchy song. That would be my guess as to why they've done it. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. But what they've, in choosing that, which I think was the right thing to do for a brand film, but in choosing that, the use case is slightly weaker because it doesn't really say what most people would build a website for necessarily.

53:12Product Marketing Adventures Host:Like they will have loads of data on like what people are actually building. And I think they've slightly sacrificed specificity in the brand film. but I think it was still the right choice because I think if you're doing kind of upper funnel marketing awareness consideration stuff if you're looking at just awareness you need to optimize for memorability which is what they've done with a song but with a PMM hat on you want those use cases to be fresh and sharp and um I think they lose a few points just for that but I think it's a good ad.

53:50Jack Cully:Right, absolutely. Okay, so how would you iterate on it or take it to the next level or maybe expand the campaign beyond just the video?

53:58Product Marketing Adventures Host:Well, so they've already done so really well with out of home, really crisp, nice billboards or kind of tube cards that say very short, snappy value prop lines, like your idea could be shipped by the time this train reached a station or something it was a bit shorter than that yeah and yeah really nice really nice stuff i'd like to see some kind of uh kind of stunt or activation that like really brings us to life like wouldn't it be cool if um they stopped people in the street and said something like what's your idea dream whatever and then lovable just goes and grants them that wish or gives them a dream or something like that.

54:43Product Marketing Adventures Host:There's a really nice expansion of the idea, maybe.

54:46Jack Cully:Yeah, kind of like people like stopping people in the street to like conduct little mini docuseries or something. They can do like a similar campaign that expands on it. I actually love that. Okay, shout out Lovable. I think you guys, you know, reach out to Jack. Not that, sorry, we're not stealing him from granola, but.

55:06Product Marketing Adventures Host:Love those guys.

55:07Jack Cully:But yeah, there's something here. All right. So Jack, one thing that I always try to make space for on the podcast is a moment of gratitude. So thank you so much for, I know as a founding marketer at a startup, you have no time. So thank you so much for making time to come on the podcast and share the story, share your playbook. It's so helpful for the rest of the marketing community. So thank you so much. Appreciate it.

55:34Product Marketing Adventures Host:Those are all pleasure to be here. Thank you.

55:36Jack Cully:Yeah. And you kind of already gave some shout outs to the rest of the Granola team, but um just wanted to open the door again anyone else you want to quickly shout out and say you know hey thanks you've made a really big impact on my career the canola campaign and anything to

55:49Product Marketing Adventures Host:that nature now's a good time um in the spirit of giving giving gratitude which i love that you do this on your on your show by the way um just a big shout out to tristan thomas who was the vp of marketing at Monzo gave a chance on me as a, to kind of start doing marketing. Um, and he kind of taught me that if you just like go and try and learn something, you'll probably be able to learn it as long as you like apply yourself and dedicate yourself to like figuring out. And so I learned a lot from like that has restayed with me. And, uh, yeah, I've had loads of very, um, influential kind of marketers in my life at my time.

56:31Product Marketing Adventures Host:So I feel very, very grateful to have worked so many. Another Adam Little, who was my manager at Monzo for a long time and taught me a ton about marketing as well.

56:40Jack Cully:Wow. We're going to have to go get the Monzo guys and have them come be on the podcast. Oh, definitely.

56:46Product Marketing Adventures Host:Oh, there are some amazing PMMs at Monzo. You should totally have them on.

56:49Jack Cully:Oh, good tip. Okay. My last question for you, Jack, is the best place to find you on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect?

56:57Product Marketing Adventures Host:Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn. I also have a newsletter that I haven't written in in a very long time. So I don't, I don't recommend subscribing at the moment, but I will get back on it.

57:10Jack Cully:Specky.news. Okay, we will keep our eyes open for it. I'll link it in the show notes just in case people want to just have it in their inbox to be ready for when the next one comes. Again, thank you so much, Jack. And hey, PMM listeners, if you like this episode, please share it with a PMM friend. And I'd be so grateful if you would leave a review or hit subscribe. It helps so tremendously with our reach. Thank you so much for coming along on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take on the next step of your own journey.

57:54Thank you.

From the publisher

If you spent any time on Twitter or LinkedIn in December 2025, you probably saw Granola Crunched everywhere. In this episode, Jack Cully joins me to break down how Granola turned a familiar year-in-review format into a deeply shareable campaign that spread fast across tech workers and generated millions of organic impressions. Jack is part of the team behind Granola, the AI meeting notes tool people genuinely love using, and before that he was one of the earliest marketers at Monzo, helping shape one of the most recognisable brands in UK FinTech.


Jack shares why the campaign worked so well, starting with the fact that Granola already solved a real problem people cared about.
Instead of forcing a trend onto the product, the team used real meeting data to create something funny, personal, and instantly recognisable. We get into how they built the experience, why it felt so shareable, and what made users want to post it rather than just look at it.

We also talk about the details that made the campaign land. That includes how Granola balanced personalization with privacy, why launch timing mattered, and how hands-on social engagement helped turn momentum into something much bigger. More importantly, we unpack how the campaign shifted brand perception, moving Granola beyond a useful tool and into something people felt understood their working lives.


We close with a messaging critique of Lovable and their line, “Some ideas are too loud to ignore,” including where the campaign is strong and where it could go further. 

The bigger takeaway from the episode is simple: the best campaigns do not come from chasing trends. They come from knowing your product, knowing your users, and building something people genuinely want to share.

Key Takeaways

  • Viral campaigns work best when they amplify something users already value
  • Personalisation only works when it feels useful, not invasive
  • Familiar formats can still feel fresh when they are tightly tied to the product
  • Launch timing and active engagement can make a big difference to momentum
  • Great campaigns do more than drive attention, they shift brand perception
  • Strong creative starts with customer insight, not trend-chasing



LINKS


Messaging Critique: https://lovable.dev/ 


Connect with Jack: 


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcully 


Connect with Elle:


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elle3izabeth/ 

Website: https://www.productmarketingadventures.com/

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