My telephone buzzes as I get a textual content from a buddy who’s a accomplice at a VC agency. It’s a screenshot of a Venmo notification that simply got here in. “My 2 cents on why it is best to spend money on my firm,” reads the message she acquired, together with a $0.02 switch. I tracked down and emailed the founder who despatched the switch to determine what they have been as much as.
“Previously two and a half weeks I’ve reached out to over 100 VCs, angels, celebrities, athletes and influencers by Venmo,” says Chip Herndon, CEO and co-founder at Chatterbox, in an interview with TechCrunch. He claims that his unorthodox advertising and marketing marketing campaign has been very profitable. “I’ve acquired a number of responses, two of them being terribly prime quality. The primary was a accomplice at [a venture firm], the opposite was an angel investor.”
Herndon claims that these messages have been the start of a string of conferences which will nicely lead to an funding.
Chatterbox is a platform that describes itself as a Nextdoor for Gen Z. It connects younger individuals of their native communities by a medium they perceive — group chats.
A screenshot from the Chatterbox web site. Picture Credit score: Chatterbox.
“In our early stage we’re focusing on faculty campuses. We’ve three core options: user-generated chats, emergency chats and everlasting chats. For instance, we’ll launch at UCLA in partnership with the USAC President this October,” claims Herndon. “As a part of the MVP we’ll have everlasting chats for each dorm constructing, library and different high-user-density places; we’ll additionally enable customers to generate chats for attention-grabbing occasions they encounter, and lastly we’ll routinely generate chats for emergency conditions.”
The founder says that the Venmo-fueled outreach marketing campaign stems from a want to be observed in an intensely aggressive panorama.
“I needed to get scrappy. I put aside 4 hours with solely a pen and a bit of paper in entrance of me, not permitting myself to do something aside from brainstorm till I had a technique,” says Herndon. “In that point, I considered a number of untraditional avenues to contact somebody, however ultimately I made a decision that Venmo can be one of the best.”
Leveraging the Venmo platform’s search and profile footage options, he got down to discover the buyers he was on the lookout for, and he claims this permits him to “acquire their consideration in a method that doesn’t really feel intrusive.”
Not all buyers agree on that individual level. “It feels somewhat creepy,” famous one investor who acquired one of many Venmo transfers.
That is probably not the case for everybody, although.
“You’ve acquired to do what you possibly can to face out,” stated an affiliate at one other enterprise fund I spoke with for this story, and for a second appeared impressed by the creativity. “Would I like to obtain a ton of $0.02 donations with a bunch of random pitches for startups? No, however the first one or two would possibly stand out sufficient that I’d listen.”
Kudos for attempting one thing new, I suppose, however remember that gimmicks typically backfire.
So, is that this the following large strategy to attain out to buyers? Personally, I feel it comes throughout as fairly spammy. Let’s put it this fashion: The primary PR person who tries to pitch a narrative to me by way of Venmo will get themselves banned and blacklisted; my email address is easy to find, and for my part, it feels actually skeevy to attempt to go across the channels which can be in place to get your self to the entrance of the checklist. However then, I’m somewhat OldManYellsAtCloud.gif about these items; your mileage might range. Simply concentrate on the primary impression you’re making; it is probably not as constructive as you assume.
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