Guerrilla marketing is always something I’ve been a fan of.  The gist of it is that it’s a  strategy that utilizes unconventional and creative tactics to promote a product or service, typically on a low budget. This type of marketing is highly targeted and aims to create buzz and generate attention. I’ll share a story here that caught my attention during startup school.

Legend has it that there was this big fintech conference happening in the valley and to have your logo featured on the stage and in other places – you needed to pay for a sponsorship that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stripe was a young startup back then and it was taking on PayPal – the Goliath. What the team at Stripe did was take some bank notes, put them in a bucket and froze them overnight. On the day of the conference they turned up to the venue – put the money (now inside ice cubes) near the entrance and held a placard saying – “Paypal freezes your money – Try Stripe !”. This got the attention of EVERY single person at the conference. Stripe also did something clever – they paid the bellhops at the hotels and had them slip a brochure of their product into every room which had conference attendees. This would have cost a bomb to do otherwise – sponsoring the event and include this brochure as part of the SWAG kit. One thing was clear, at the end of this event, every single person knew about Stripe, was discussing their antics and several of them tried Stripe over the coming days.

The next story is somewhat different. On average a successful startup returns about 676% over the course of its lifetime – Wufoo returned around 30,000% ! Yes you red that right if you had invested $10k during their initial fundraise, you would have made around $30M when they were sold to SurveyMonkey a few years later. Such outliers naturally grab my attention and I was looking at some of the things they did right.

I’ll share a story of when they used a form of  Guerrilla marketing to get outsized returns. Most companies in the 2000s used to run hackathons when they came out with a new API and used to give out iPads or iPhones as prizes – this was the norm and was getting kind of boring. Wufoo wanted to try something different, the founding team and early employees were medieval nuts. They contacted a forge and got an actual battle axe built which would be the prize. Talk about weaponizing programming !!

At the end of this hackathon Wufoo got an Android app, an iPhone app and a WordPress plugin for their platform. This would be otherwise impossible to build for the small team with the money and resources they had. Lots of developers continued to remember and discuss this cool hackathon in the coming days and the traction in dev community was unbelievable.

Ship fast and improve faster based on what customers tell you – this has always been our mantra. The faster we can start getting feedback from customers – the faster we can iterate and improve our offering. This feedback loop is oxygen for startups like us,  it helps us validate our ideas, identify problems early on, and adjust our approach accordingly. A couple of extreme examples of this approach caught my eye recently.

Brex calls themselves the OS of scaling startups and have a great banking experience today – I have tried a few similar services myself and can say their product is among the best. The story is when they started off they just had a web form and a virtual credit card they could generate with an internal tool. With that they started on boarding customers. Imagine running a bank like this – no login, no way to see spends, no way to manage accounts or any of the things we take for granted. EVERY SINGLE one of these features was built in once the product was live and was based on customer feedback and needs. Pretty amazing and takes a lots of guts to do.

The next story is from Instacart – a grocery delivery and pick-up app. This product was launched with just a form on the site. Users literally filled up a form with their grocery list and the founder or her friends drove around, picked up the stuff and delivered. That’s it – simple and scary. Many founders I know will first try and raise a few million dollars, build sophisticated warehousing, inventory management and mobile apps before earning that 1st dollar in revenue.