📂 Guerrilla tactics leverage doing things that don’t scale (until they do)

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

• Competitor buyouts
• Importers
• Direct mail
• Swag
• Personalized videos
• Crazy stories from newsletter

Direct mail is a marketing strategy that involves sending a physical letter, package, mailer, brochure, postcard, etc. to your prospects and/or current customers.

If you’re gonna do it, you HAVE to know exactly you’re sending to. Don’t even waste your time and money on someone you aren’t sure would like it. It’s just not worth it.

As you can see here, my friend Asia got a huge package full of a ton of stuff but she’s not a prospective customer. They just spent A LOT of money for nothing.

But that’s not to say it doesn’t work…

In one of my previous jobs, one of the most successful direct mail campaigns we did was sending out unicorn floaties to leads that were in later stages and close to converting into customers.

Yes, unicorn floaties.

And that’s the magic of direct mail – it can be literally anything – so long as it’s relevant and helps you foster a relationship.

This is actually a fantastic example of a great landing page also but this startup Postie will put together mailers for you to send out. You don’t even have to touch anything.

Guerilla tactics

What I’m about to tell you is one of the most genius displays of guerilla marketing that I have ever seen.

Let’s set the scene here…

You’re a web developer back in 2010 heading to one of the biggest tech conferences in the bay area.

It’s the first day of PayPal’s developer conference.

Wake up. Put on your startup’s branded tee shirt. Make one of the first Uber requests for a ride in San Francisco. Get dropped off at Moscone Center. Walk up to the entrance stairs. Look down…

…there’s a 600 pound block of ice with money inside?

You read: “PAYPAL FREEZES YOUR ACCOUNTS” and then at the bottom “UNFREEZE YOUR MONEY.”

All of a sudden, you hear some commotion. There’s yelling and the sound of metal clanging and wheels rattling across the sidewalk.

It’s a chase!

A security guard is running after a man frantically wheeling a pallet mover behind him, trying to escape.

Eventually, the security guard catches up, snatches the pallet mover, walks back to the entrance, and wheels the giant ice block away from the building. After a brief chat with the security guard and the stuntman, it’s then wheeled around outside, keeping a bit of distance from the building entrance.

This is the story of how WePay co-founder Rich Aberman made a lasting impression that changed the company’s trajectory forever.

See, if you were a PayPal developer back then, you might have been one of many to get your account frozen by PayPal for some obscure reason — your own money held hostage for sometimes weeks until PayPal decided to release their chokehold and allow you to continue with business.

It was immensely frustrating, and a story that felt all-too-common at the time.

So when PayPal held its developer conference, the WePay team knew they had to find a way to leverage that pain into publicity for their competing product.

Here’s the press coverage they got from TechCrunch: WePay drops 600 pounds of ice in front of PayPal conference, hilarity ensues​

Here’s the blog post that the WePay team wrote about it: Icing PayPal: How We Did It (had to dig it out of the old Wayback Machine — you’re welcome!)

Thanks to some inside intel, I was able to gather that this stunt did indeed put WePay on the map and began a flood of sign ups.

Pretty nuts, right?

My friend Saul Colt was hired by Xero to help them make a big splash in the U.S. to promote their (then novel) cloud-based service.

Naturally, Saul started daydreaming about how to literally use clouds to get the word out.

Enter: Skywriting ☁️

They chose to write a message with artificial clouds directly over the top of the TechCrunch Disrupt event during lunch and at the same time as a San Francisco Giants playoff game was going on.

The spectacle made it onto the national broadcast of the baseball game, trended on Twitter and Instagram, drove record web traffic and most importantly… the CEO tweeted 2 years later that when they survey customers about how people heard about Xero, people still mention the skywriting as the reason they chose to use the product.

In a stunt that may simply never be topped, Red Bull sent Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner on a 24-mile freefall — that is, from the edge of outer space.

Best of all: It was live streamed, attracting 8 million YouTube viewers as Baumgartner broke several records, including fastest freefall and highest jump.

He also broke the sound barrier during his jump, the first human to do so without a vehicle. 😳

This, ladies and gentleman, is how you build brand association.

You can’t help associate Red Bull with “extreme” after a stunt like that.

What word do you want associated with your product?

Life as a SaaS marketer would be so much easier if your customers just sung praises from the rooftops about your app.

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to generate word-of-mouth.

If you could instantly generate organic shares, it wouldn’t be so organic anymore.

…or would it?

This campaign my friends over at Arrows caught my attention for this reason.

One day, my Twitter feed was instantly dominated with people sharing how much they loved a new product I had never heard about.

Here’s what they did:

1. Wrote unique memos about each one of their customers, investors, partners, and friends
2. Generated pages with those memos for each one of them
3. Told those people about the pages
4. Some of those people shared the pages on social media, some didn’t (but most did)

Here’s an example: https://arrows.to/friends/louis/

How fun is that?

If I were to psychoanalyze this tactic… I’d say something about people just love sharing about themselves and amplifying what other people say about them.

But magic here is more in the novelty and thoughtfulness of the memos about each person.

How can you not share it?

I want one…

Enter: NFTs as marketing.

The team over at Party Round, a fundraising platform for startup founders, cleverly made a CrypoPunk-style NFT collection based on famous venture capitalists. Then, they notified each VC that they only had a few hours to claim their NFT avatar, creating massive urgency. The stunt drew a ton of attention on Twitter, both from people reacting to Party Round’s public notifications for VCs to claim their NFT, and of the VCs tweeting about the claiming them!

Who said B2B marketing had to be boring? Not gonna lie, I was massively impressed by ProfitWell when they introduced a project to create collectable trading cards of executives at large subscription businesses. It’s silly, lighthearted, and perfect as a stunt to bring some life to a historically stuffy space. As an added bonus, this also (strategically) came at a time when Pokemon Go hit the zeitgeist.

This is especially relevant for B2C SaaS apps, but even niche B2B SaaS have an opportunity here. GIPHY is the default gif search and is integrated into tons of apps, including iMessage and Twitter. Someone sharing your gif, even if it’s unbranded, can lead to tons of impressions. My friends over at Buzzsprout took action on this and created a series of gifs on podcasting.

Here’s an interesting look into how eToro got over 15M views using this strategy:

Wistia recently released an animated cartoon series called “Gear Squad vs Dr. Boring”

It’s a limited series cartoon animating some of the common problems and challenges with video marketing.

​Get your startup on a billboard in Times Square 🗽​

​Cereal Drop​

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—Corey

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