Believe me or not, I was selling my mobile accessories from my bedroom. It was my first startup Pocomaru, back in 2012, while I was still getting my MBA from Seattle University.
Pocomaru is the e-commerce website to sell tech accessories. We spent a lot of time hand-picking great products from big to indie brands. We were so excited when the website was up and was just waiting for orders. However, three days later, nothing really happened.
I figured it was the problems of our product images. Because we were totally bootstrapped with no funding, to save money, we created our own website design with only few boring product photos. I started to thinking about hiring models, but sadly they were way too expensive for me. Until one day, I saw my classmates Lauren’s great selfie seating at a Starbucks with her Macbook, looks like she was having a great relaxing time there, I turned to her and said, “Hey Lauren, can you be my model?” And she said “Yes”!
As a photographer myself, I have to say I did a good job catching all the nice moments of Lauren with some of our products, phone cases, laptop covers and backpacks. I uploaded those pictures on Facebook and tagged her. Magic happened from here.
Lauren helped us to get the first 5 orders of phone cases, all from her friends. I started to ask my classmates, friends or even people on the street to be my models for Pocomaru. As an exchange, they got a free product, free photos, and discount codes for their friends.
I started to taking much more photos with those “models”. In few months, I have worked with more than 150 people, including Miss American, Miss Washington and Football players. We even started a “everyone can be a fashion model for a day” program so people can apply online to be our “ambassadors”. It works great for us. They started to charge us some money. But we also got more and more sales, and started to become famous among certain groups.
After 3 months of experiments, I found that people who have tons of followers do not necessarily guarantee great results. And, there were two type of “models” worked the best for my business — good-looking girls who are popular among their community, and surprisingly, the geeks.
Why? Because they both have one thing in common. That is they both have a lot of geeky followers, who are my potential customers. Lesson learned. It is all about targeting!
And for those people who did not sell, some of them have a very big number of followers, and charge me most of the money. But their followers are not active at all. They could not bring in any conversions.
So, we started doing some experiments. We want to quickly scan people’s social media account to find out more information about something like how many of those followers are real, how many of them are active, and how many of them are located in the US, and how many of them are my targeted customers.
Meanwhile, very interestingly, I got some offers from my startup friends who want to work with those ambassadors. They’d like me to figure out who is the best ambassadors for them, and is able to bring them sales. They were willing to pay me for the referrals and help them with the marketing promotion.
Aha! I figured that there’s much bigger potentials there as a business! So, we were imaging there’s a marketplace where my startup friends can come in and talk to those ambassadors directly so they can work together. At that time, there’s no such thing at all. We got so excited and start to working on the product. That was our first product version of Boostinsider.
And then, one day I have a conversation with the Marketing Director from AT&T. He said to me, “Well, Heidi, the marketplace idea sounds cool, but I can not use it. Why? I have millions of budget all the time for social media marketing, but all your ambassadors only cost $20 to hundreds. I have to talk to them one by one. So for a million dollar budget, how fast can I spend it? Do you know something like Google adwords or Facebook Ads? What I need is to target the right demographic, put down my KPI, and plug in my budget. Then, I can just wait for the results. I will compare my KPI. if it is good, I will spend more. If it is not good, I shut it down. That’s it!”
Bingo! Social Adwords was born.
The concept is the same as Google Adwords or Facebook ads. We applied the same concept to the ambassadors, now we call them “influencers”. Brands don’t have to choose influencers one by one. What they need to do is target the right demographic, set down the bidding for CPC (cost per click), plug in the budget, then hit “go”. There is results right away.
Boostinsider launched Social Adwords in the year of 2015 at TechCrunch Disrupt. We now served more than 300 brands with more than 3,000 campaigns. We have happy customers told us, either our CPA (Cost Per Action) is so low that is half of Facebook Ads, or the new users got from our influencers are spending more money than those users got from Facebook ads.
Here is the campaign comparison of one of our case studies:
So, this our startup story. Starting from non-tech company to a data-driven technology company, we even moved from Seattle to Silicon Valley in 2014 to continue our journey. We have made lots of transformations and iterations during this process, and we are still working on it to meet our customer’s needs.
The magic is still happening. And we can talk about it in our next chapter.
