The Marketing Hacks That Got Us 200K Downloads and Kris Jenner’s Investment

0:00Had the idea for their company while sophomores at Stanford is called Fia Bibi Gates and Sophia Very accomplished for 22. 200 ,000 installs. Google Flights for fashion. They are also the co-hosts of the burnout. This is game time. It's time to go. We have 200 ,000 installs. And that, huge shout out to wife. Sophia runs our marketing arm. We need to try a bunch of different things and see what's actually going to work. So we ended up doing that. And we have so, so many takeaways. Today, we are finally talking about the fact we launched our company. And we also launched this podcast just a few weeks ago.

0:36So we wanted to kind of debrief on how everything has been going and some of the things we've learned. Honestly, it's been a complete whirlwind since launch. For context, the week before launch, we were in this mode of like, okay, this thing just needs to work when we launch it. Because we'd waited for so long. It's really been a year that we've been properly building the product. And we were doing so many changes up until launch. We're like, we just need to get this thing off the ground and launched. And we were up all night on launch day. Max I slept during launch week was three hours one night.

1:01It was a disaster. The night before launch, we launched on the same day that we filmed Call Her Daddy. So we weren't able to have our phones while we're in there. And it's a two and a half hour recording. We're prepping for Call Her Daddy. By the way, you don't get the questions. You don't get final cut of anything. So we're like, oh my gosh, this could be really bad. We're like hallucinating. Like I'm so sleep deprived. I didn't feel burnt out because I was like, oh, there's so much adrenaline around this. There's so much momentum. I honestly felt like when we went on Call Her Daddy, I was like, this is game time.

1:27Like it's time to go. And so I was like hyped about that. I want to like flash forward to where we are now. Do you want to go into the different things that we've been trying this last month? I think we should kick it off with your creator farm. One thing that we've been trying recently is basically running like a creator farm. So we have a ton of different college students that we pay to make videos about Fia on their own accounts. So it's like Stephanie style every single day, two times a day. She will post a video where she shows the Fia app and extension and try to focus on our fashion niche to reach girls who we think might like the product.

2:00and this is like an approach that's really focused on volume we have like 10 creators they post twice a day and then you ultimately reach 600 videos total and i would say that this has been mediocrely successful another really key thing about this is also figuring out which of these accounts work versus not you're really not focused on quality you just want to see what videos hit but being like someone who creates content or someone who builds like a tiktok account for a brand is actually like a very specific skill. And some people are good at it and some people aren't. You know, these are made up names, but like maybe styled Stephanie's account actually isn't good.

2:34And Trisha who shops, that account is doing better. So then the next month you would just pump into, okay, we're going to keep working with Trisha and we're going to stop working with Stephanie and see what hits. So one of the things that we did that I would say was a really helpful byproduct of this experiment is we made a really clear creator guide where we basically said, okay, this is what Fia is. This is how it works. Here are our taglines that we think have been very successful. And here's a series of key assets and videos that you can use in your video to make your content creation easier.

3:04The issue though, was that the spray and pray approach was great because we had 600 videos and out of the 600 videos, I'd say maybe like five to 10 actually ended up performing really well where they organically on their own reached a ton of views. You should focus on volume, but you need to be learning from your volume. Like you can't just have 600 where they're just like spraying and praying and trying everything it's like you need to do a hundred and then you need to learn from that hundred what worked and what didn't work then you need to double down on what worked and then keep doing more of that and we didn't and so i think that that transitions into the other thing that we've now started doing that i would say has been tremendously successful which is going out and finding creators who are we think are really talented and who already on their own have organically gone viral paying them to create videos just for Fia, just for our Fia account, and then running them as trial reels.

3:53For those of you who don't know, so trial reels is like this feature on Instagram where you can actually post stuff not to your main account, but to trials. So it goes out to random people that don't follow you or have never seen your content before. So you can see no matter how many followers you have, how it organically performs. And then what we'll do is be like, oh, if that trial reel is really good, then we'll actually put it on the Fia account, particularly because we don't want to spam the fee of users with like a bunch of ad generated content we want to see what's actually going to hit because that's the only way to objectively understand like whether or not the content is like really good content is by sending it to complete random people and so that's how we discovered our our guy who we are going to gatekeep and no one no one can work with him our guy who created this one video so we paid him for one video and we ran it as a trial reel and it was first trial reel that blew up it reached like 300 000 people overnight and our downloads went like this i mean it was literally crazy it was insane amount of installs that this one trial reel generated influencer marketing is extremely expensive these girls that you guys see on instagram are charging anywhere from like 10 000 to 50 000 for one video that's a few once they get over like 400 000 followers 100 and as they should they should be because the bigger brands have the budget to pay it.

5:07Not realistic for a startup. Instead, pay someone who doesn't have their own audience, but who's really good at creating content. You call them UGCs. So they create user-generated content that you can buy from them and use on your own brand accounts. And this can range anywhere from like a hundred to I'd say like$500. If it's like a very experienced person who has an extensive portfolio of content that they've generated for a brand, we pay them to make one video for us and then we'll run them as trial reels. And then we start to learn and understand and see these patterns of, okay, here are the top performing pieces of creative.

5:38Which creators was it? And those are the people that we're going to double down on and have them make us more videos over time. And I think that's where our tagline, FIA, Google Flights for Fashion was born, is we made one video where we tested that and that did way better than all the other ones where we were like, FIA is a mobile browser extension. Because no one knows what a mobile browser extension is. One of our biggest, biggest learnings is if you want to explain something new to a consumer or new to a customer related to something they already know and like. People love Google Flights. They love seeing, oh, what's the cost going to be?

6:09What are historical prices? What's the best flight for me to go on? And if you can tangibly relate your product to something similar, particularly if you're a tech product, it makes it so much easier to get people to instantly grasp, okay, that's what this is. This guy sold his company now, but he created this startup and he called it Tinder for fashion. And it blew up on TikTok and Instagram and he was marketing his startup as Tinder for fashion and everyone understood it because it was like you swipe between different fashion products and see whether or not you like them. Everyone was texting me like, oh, this guy made Tinder for fashion.

6:39This guy made Tinder for fashion. And so we realized from that this lesson of, okay, he took a super popular concept everyone knows about Tinder and then he used it to explain his app. So we did the exact same thing where we were like, what's a super popular concept everyone knows about Google Flights and now let's use that to explain our app. And that's how Google Flights for Fashion was really created. We actually do this all the time where we'll look through social media and be like, wow, that was a really well done video. And then we'll make an Excel sheet. These are really good videos. Here's why this video was good.

7:09And then we'll reverse engineer like how to make that video. So a lot of times even for like our simple like founder videos, we'll reverse engineering other content that we've seen do really, really well. I'll take you back and give you a tangible example of this. So for our two founder videos that we did when we launched Fia, both of them, I scrolled for like three hours and I found five videos that I thought were really successful founder videos that have gone really viral. Then I narrowed it down further. I picked two of them. I used like Chachabiti and I transcribed the video so that I had the transcript of it.

7:41I was able to break down, okay, what was the hook? How did they start the video? What was the middle? And then how did they end it? And then I turned that transcript into, I like wrote a description of Fia. then I put that into ChatGPT and I asked it like can you turn this script into one that works for Fia you should not be starting anything from scratch the internet exists for a reason and you can scroll and you can go and find viral content and then you need to start to understand the patterns behind why things are viral there is completely a formula behind why things go viral people nowadays have literally like a five to six second attention span if within the first five If that, if that, maybe probably I have like a three second attention span.

8:22If you don't get someone's attention within the first two to three seconds of the video, they're going to keep scrolling and they're not going to be interested at all. And so I think that was a really big learning for us is when we were making these videos in the very beginning that were super critical to jumpstarting our product, we just kept refilming and refilming the very, very beginning of it. Cause we were like, we need to start on something crazy. Like, and that's when we started doing like the, we dropped out of Stanford to build this app. One of our best performing videos He's literally like this creator who's like, oh, this girl had the audacity to come up to me in the gym and ask this.

8:52And then the question that they ask is, how do you always have such cute fits? Oh, I'm buying them secondhand through Fia for a good deal. I'm using the Google Fights for fashion. But the first line, once you're scrolling, because we're busy, like you don't have any time. When you're scrolling on social media, you're seeing such incredible content all the time. It needs to make you stop and watch it. And that was one of our best performing videos also in terms of like driving installs because people were actually willing to watch the entire way through. Focusing on generating brand halo is super important.

9:23Kind of like the Google Flights example. People love buying like aloe yoga. They love reformation. So within the first few seconds of a video, we will say a brand that people really, really like. And then we'll focus on a specific tangible example. So we'll say I found this reformation like dress for$80 from$250. We've been using our data. So we can see on Fia, here are the top brands that people are shopping for. So we have a better understanding of like what is trendy within our target consumer. So then we'll use those examples and say, okay, well, someone used Fia and they were able to find like Aloe Yoga Pants for 50 % off.

9:58And so focusing on like very specific examples where you're using this brand halo of like getting the bump from a brand that someone already knows and something that someone's excited about. Those have also been things that we've found work. we have found that it is such a high intent user to like sit and listen to entire podcast episode. But people are so acclimated to scrolling through TikTok or Instagram and seeing like a short clip of a podcast and being willing to sit and listen to that. I mean, a masterful example of this is, you know, Stephen Barlett on Diary of the CEO or Alex Cooper show.

10:28They do this incredibly well. And so what we learned is if we clip moments of the podcast, we're able to like mass promote those. And now our episode with Kris Jenner, just from these little clippings we've made, has reached over 18 million accounts. I mean, that's like 10x anything our YouTube views have reached, which is incredible. And we've honestly found that that also works very, very well for our podcast as well. It's just finding these golden nuggets within the podcast and clipping those and mass spreading those around different TikTok accounts. Oh, well, that could be a good hook. And then we're using that time and time again to open it.

11:01Also, people love people's faces in things. So if you're getting someone to promote something, you don't want them to put something on their story that's like oh check out fia with a cute graphic on fia you want it to truly be that person using it and so when we show rish jenner and then we show a photo of oh here's what it would look like to get her outfit on fia or her really nice bag on fia then we're actually seeing that that increases the amount of people who get to the end of the video and watch the entire thing through and that was actually one of the biggest portions of our launch strategy is we had all of our friends and family, anyone who was anyone who said that they would post about Fia, we asked them to give us photos of themselves.

11:40And then we would take those photos and we would zoom in on an item of their clothing. And then we'd find that item using Fia. Those videos and photos drove thousands and thousands of downloads because people stopped because they liked that person and they followed that person and they saw their face. Okay, I'm actually going to listen and understand. And it didn't feel like an ad. It actually felt authentic. It sometimes takes people up to 10 times to hear about something before they actually take the action to download it or to try it themselves.

12:15Organic top of funnel marketing is super important. When we first started FIA, we did go out to a ton of different journalists. We pitched our story. We wanted them to write about FIA, but those articles themselves probably drove very, very few downloads because there's not an app link. Like there's not something that directly converts someone into trying the thing. And so what we actually have found work very well is you look on social media and see from your organic content what is resonating the best and what is working the best. And then you actually take that and package it into a very short clip, like 20 to 30 seconds, and you run that as a paid ad.

12:49and you try to specifically focus on those people that you think are within the demographic that have already hit your top of funnel marketing, which might be like press, which might be just like fun, silly founder videos. And then you focus on like a specific video that is driving conversion and then you attach an app link. And what's been really amazing is you can actually get like very low cost of download attribution where we've run our paid ads that started as like organic marketing. And we've been able to see like we can get someone to download the app for like a dollar or$2 or$3. If a piece of content is going, you know, is going viral or it's doing super, super well, do not put any spend behind it until you start to see it plateau.

13:28Because otherwise you're going to actually mess up the natural algorithm of that thing being promoted and that being sent to other friends. Wait till it starts to plateau and then put paid marketing spend behind it. We had like a TikTok video that was doing really well. And so I was like, oh, okay, we should run this as an ad and we should attach a link to it. Because for meta and for reels marketing, that works super well. If you attach a link to something that you're marketing on Instagram, usually the paid ads work really well. TikTok, it does not work at all. I feel like the TikTok audience is very sophisticated.

13:57My boyfriend was like, you are doing your TikTok strategy completely wrong. You should never attach a link to something that you're running as an ad. You need to just run it as a reach campaign and you shouldn't even put the app in there because it's actually immediately going to turn people off and they're going to realize that it's an ad. So we tried that and it did so much better. Like we looked at our downloads and we were like, holy shit, like we got so many downloads off of this very cheap reach campaign that we ran on TikTok. I think the other biggest hack that we've learned is there's two platforms that are kind of slept on in terms of marketing, and that is LinkedIn and Substack.

14:29We're not talking about directly attributable downloads, but if you're thinking about, okay, a consumer has to see this thing 10 times before they go ahead and download it, especially for FIA, where it's something you actually have to toggle us on as a shopping assistant, that's a high intent user behavior. You're going to need to see these things multiple times. And so posting on LinkedIn has been really, really critical for us. And we've reached a ton of accounts that way. I did write this LinkedIn post on Saturday at this Yale frat party. I need to write a thank you post on LinkedIn. I want to thank our team.

14:57And I want to talk about the fact we just hit 21 on the app chart. And I'm so grateful and I'm so excited. And I threw up this random photo of me and you that I had in my camera roll that was like from this article in this mosh pit. And I'm writing this thing. My boyfriend thinks I've lost my mind. He's like day drinking. And he's like, why are you not having fun with us? And I'm like, wait, I need to write this post. And then I will return to having fun. A couple hours later, I checked my phone and my LinkedIn is blowing up. People are liking it, sharing it, commenting it. And you want to know why?

15:27Because I used the hook. We just launched the Google Flights for fashion and everyone ate that up because it was so interesting. They understood what Google Flights was. And also because LinkedIn is slept on and people don't use it for marketing. And so people saw my post and organically like I think honestly that probably drove like thousands of downloads and then the other way is really focusing on something like Substack where there are really niche communities around certain things the style and fashion community on Substack is huge and they're very dedicated users where there's writers who are every single week they're making a post about their curated finds or things that they like and so if you can reach out to those people and be like hey we want your honest feedback on our on our app or our application you want to create goodwill within the community.

16:11Finding where your community exists is really important and then experimenting in other places and actually like watching, okay, what makes things go up or down is really important. To end on founder-led marketing, there's a couple different things here. So one is we're here today. We're obviously doing like a long form podcast where we get very candid, go behind the scenes of like, what's working? What's not working? Having that so you just constantly have content going out and have stuff that is good for clipping is really important. And I think something that we've definitely done on the FIA Instagram, which has been working really well is we have friends who are content creators and so we offer to make them content and we will say like we would love to do like a collaboration series with you we had this creator that we connected with because she has this iconic series where she basically says if i were to blank like if i were to create a coffee brand this is what i would do and so she wanted to make a video on fia where she was like if i were to create a fashion tech company this is what i would do and her video did really well and so we basically pitched her on this idea of like would you want to do a series with us where we can help to make all of the videos and we could do everything for you.

17:12If I were to like create an office wardrobe, here's how I would do it. And like, here's how you could use Fia. It's like, we are both able to generate community and followers and we're able to have a repeatable content format that people can look forward to. The most successful creators run their content as though it is a reality TV show. And so there are episodes, there are seasons, but you are watching along and you kind of know that there's a storyline. And so if you want to build a storyline on your socials, you need to understand like they're tuning in for something. And so that's why we've started to bank and started to focus on creating these series so that our audience knows like I am tuning in to understand if I were to create a city girl outfit, if I were to create an office siren outfit, here's how I would do it.

17:56And that's been really fun, easy ways that we can collaborate with like small micro creators and also give their audience something that they actually would be excited about. One series that we have is like finding celebrity outfits for less using FIA, finding them thrifted or finding them for cheaper. And so we'll reach out to these celebrity closet accounts like Sabrina Carpenter's Closet. And we'll be like, hey, we saw your recent post of Sabrina Carpenter's amazing outfit. We found all of these items secondhand via FIA. We'd love to do a post with you. Here's the graphics that we have. What do you think?

18:27Like that has worked so, so well for us because then our audience can literally comment and request like, oh, I want to see this celebrity next or I want to see that celebrity next. And these celebrity closet accounts like really like this because then they're able to boost their following and get more girls who are fashion obsessed, who are the FIA followers to follow them. And it's so funny you say that Phoebe, because something that we did that honestly, I am not even sure I would recommend was that before we launched FIA, we actually just posted a lot of very general fashion tech content on our Instagram just as a means to like build a following.

18:59But the thing that I would say is that it was kind of a distraction. I think we were honestly very distracted when we first started Fia because we tried to do marketing and do product building at the same time. And the marketing just took way too much of our energy. We decided to take our entire Instagram down and we went completely dark and just worked on product for two months and that's how the user feedback dinner started yeah so we took a via down for two months we went darkly we turned our logo black and we were just like coming soon and then we were no longer distracted i felt pretty cool when we did that i'm not i was like we're like in our taylor swift like renaissance era one girl asked me she's like where'd the fia instagram go and i was like it's really not a big deal you don't need to ask we are rebranding like we are reborn so like for two months we just turned the instagram off and we were like we can't be distracted we need to focused on making the best fucking product possible right now and we will market it when we are ready when we actually have a product that is worth marketing with the time that we had because we really weren't focused on creating content that time was we would just have every other week 40 women who love to shop on their phone come to our office and rip the app to shreds and give us real feedback by accident that ended up becoming part of our marketing where we realized creating community is part of marketing and so now girls will actually download the fia app because they want to come to one of the product dinners because they want to be part of the process of creating something.

20:19And I think that's something that we realized is people are going to care more about a product and be more excited about it and more willing to download if they feel like they've actually had a voice in creating it. And so now we use our socials to ask people, do you like this or that? Is this confusing? What do you want to see more of?

20:41our marketing hot take is focus on really good user generated content that matters trial trial trial reels all day clip everything and as much founder made content as you can do do more than you think you need to do in the spirit of community that's what we've learned so far but we want to answer some of the questions that you guys have asked us about marketing to see if there's anything that we've left on the table sarah said i think creative shy away from AI out of fear, disgust, or contempt of the way technology can impact their careers. But what are the positives you found using AI? What is the future of marketing with AI and how will you use it as a tool?

21:13Oh my goodness, so much here. I use AI almost every single day and it supercharges me. I honestly think if you're an amazing creative, AI is just going to supercharge your workflow. One thing that's been really key for us is using AI to mock up like different product features and then show it to users when it's in a really like half-baked state and get feedback before we actually like make it pretty or invest real time in designing out the user flow. What's nice about AI and Chachubiti is you can train it on your content style. Yep. And so it's not about having AI do things for you, but it's about having AI learn the way that you do things so that you can do things more efficiently.

21:49Let's say, for example, you create a video and it does really well. You wrote a script for it and you're like, oh my God, people love this content. Well, rather than going and rewriting a bunch of those scripts yourself, you can feed that into Chachubiti and then ask it, okay, here's a script that my audience loved. Can you create another script that's very similar to this, but can you instead focus on a different topic? Okay. Veronica asked, what marketing or tips do you have for people trying to expand their business? She's a freelance photographer. Post as much as you possibly can would be my thing.

22:18And also DM people who you want to take pictures of. DM them and be like, I love this photo of you. I would love to photograph for you. I would love to do a shoot for you. It's really important to just take as many shots on goal as you can because someone out of a hundred people that you DM is going to respond and is going to want to do a photo shoot with you. You're saying like, I'm a freelance photographer. In my opinion, that is way too broad. That is you. It is way too hard to advertise your freelance photography services. If that's all you are, you need to be like a freelance photographer for weddings.

22:48Then you can make bridal content and then you can get a ton of women who are brides who are going to reach out to you. Or you can say like, I'm a freelance photographer for startups. I'm helping startups make videos. I mean, we would reach out to you and we would ask you to make a video for us and we would pay you for that. But I would say like, you should focus both for your content and for your business, focus on a niche that your business occupies and then make content about that specific niche. And you're going to be way more likely to reach prospective customers and have content that's actually going to resonate with them.

23:18Veronica, don't be mad at me. I want you to get clients. Stella asks, When is a good time to hire an SEO marketing agency for a brand new company? They've never, never, never. This was a big mistake that we made is we hired SEO way, way too early. If you want to invest in SEO, get a tool like A-Refs or one of these other sites that'll show you what your competitors are doing for SEO. And you can actually see what key terms that they're bidding on. And you can make like sub pages on your website. So like, let's say, you know, for Fiat, a very common search term is like amazing second hand deals.