Ylixr Update #5: Ads Don’t Start Revolutions

We all know starting from scratch is no joke, but I’m not sure one can fully appreciate the gravity of getting something going from zero without having personally tried to do it.

In the last update, we talked about reaching the first 100 on the supply side (service employees) and the idea of starting to drive users in order to get the demand side going. So how do you do that?

The marketer in me will certainly be writing about various growth hacking approaches as we go, but for now we’re keeping it very simple.

Because we wanted to run through the specific use case of a potential nightclub guest requesting to get on the guest list of an employee such as a cocktail server, we just needed to drive a relatively small number of people aged 21–40 in Las Vegas to our site.

While no startup should lean on paid media to start their revolution, Facebook advertising is a no-brainer for driving initial targeted users to test the concept with real people.

So here’s what we did:

• Three cocktail servers from one nightclub made their guest lists available via Ylixr for one weekend (2/5 and 2/6)
• We spent less than $300 to get more than 400 people to click through to the guest list pages for the three cocktail servers
• From these guest list requests, a total of 43 people were accepted and booked on guest lists for Friday and Saturday

We’re still waiting for the final number of people who made it into the nightclub from the guest lists those days, but it’s safe to say we drove people to the establishment by first taking users to pages with actual employees of the place. Pretty cool.

We’ll run that play again to keep fine-tuning every aspect of that use case, but now we also have to start looking more closely at the other use cases that drive value. The good news: We’re not quite at zero anymore.