Growth hacking at ComiCon India with just Rs 5,000/-
RideSafe — A mobile app which can sense trouble even before you can! (An app which detects deviation in real-time and informs your contacts about your location thru a FREE SMS along with notification when the user leaves to and arrives at a destination)
Our target customers are people who use cabs/auto’s!
We pulled out this hack during the Bangalore Comicon 2015 http://www.comiconbangalore.com
Sponsoring the event and booking a stall for exhibiting was way too expensive for a 2 month old start-up like our’s, at an event like ComiCon where there was 65,000+ footfall!
With basically no option of advertising inside Comicon, we had to do something drastically different outside to be noticed! And since we already had clarity who our target customers were(people who actually used cabs)! And following are things we did targeting them!
- We knew Comicon would be attended by lot of children and women! Hence we got a few balloons printed with our logo and our USP on it, and started giving them away to children and women entering the venue. The best part was we filled the balloons with Helium, which meant, even if people let go of the balloon once they enter the venue, the balloons would be hanging/stuck at the roof! (comicon was a closed door event)
Gave away around 100 balloons and all of them to people going into the venue.
2. Borrowed a drone from a friend, We went to the ticketing space (outdoor) where people were slowly trickling-in , & started flying it! people started noticing us, since we had a huge puddle of balloons tied to the person flying it!
3. Printed posters of size A0 (A-zero) from Printo, malleshwaram, tied it to the drone and started flying again! More attention!!, but this time, it didn’t go out well as planned, as the (A0) paper started twisting & twirling due to the wind ! FAIL!
(photo of the poster)
4. But we changed the failed experiment into something better! We tied these posters on all the sides of our car. And parked the car diagonally opposite to the EXIT gate! That was not all, we parked it in such a way that we were under a streetlight with maximum illumination & just after a speed breaker !
And all the people (Approx 10,000) who were coming out of the venue had to pass thru that exit gate and started seeing the posters on the car!
5. While doing all of this, we also printed around 200 no’s — A5 size flyers!
But these flyers were separated with 2 different texts! 1 specifically targeting women and their safety and the other targeting men and their desire to track their speed while they ride/drive!
Copy 1 — Targeting Women travelling back in cabs
Copy 2 — Targeting Men and their Need for Speed
Since we had only a few flyers considering so many people coming out, we started targeting people who were waiting for their OLA/Uber Cabs! This kicked off, people started to get interested as soon as we mentioned that they could go back home safe without any fear since our app detects deviation in-case the driver deviates from their intended route to their home/destinations.
They also got interested when we mentioned that our app would send FREE SMS to their friends /family when they left and reached their home! This meant they need not call/text every friend and tell them that they reached home safe! Our app would do that for them!
http://www.ridesafeapp.com/download
6. By this time people slowly started reading the posters on our car and started asking us, what we were doing, We started explaining to them one after the other.
During the midst of everything, a lady around the age of 45–50 years came to us and started asking what RideSafe actually was, We explained every detail patiently! She was so awww’d by what we were doing, She said that she was a principal of a reputed school in Bangalore, and she would want us to come to her school and distribute these flyers and inform about this app to all her students!
We were so happy, we started talking to more people! We were happy that people actually noticed us & started using the app then and there
7. But the best was yet to come! We were giving away flyer’s to everyone awaiting their cabs, and that’s when we met 2 women, walking towards their cab and they stopped to listen to us!
They were so intrigued, they took down our number and wanted to know more about it. We had no clue who they were, next day evening, we get a call from journalist from Times Of India- Bangalore Times, And that’s when we realized she was from the media.
Couple of days later, we got featured in Times of India, Bangalore Times edition !
(photo of the media mention)
8. And all of this at a cost of mere Rs 5k! Rs 2500 for Printing on the balloons ( We paid 4 times more than normal since we got it printed in 12 hours on a Sunday) Rs 1500 for Helium filling Rs 1000 for printing of posters and flyers!
Though we could have drastically reduced the expenses if we had planned it few days in advance! But none the less — It was a great experiment to try!!
