Beginner to the 1st sale: my journey building an AI for social media marketers

Hey everyone!

Here’s my journey building an AI for social media marketers all the way up until my first pre-launch sale, hope that could help some of you:

My background: studied maths at uni before dropping out to have some startup experiences. Always been drawn to building new things so I reckoned I would have some proper SaaS experiences and see how VC-funded startups are doing it before launching my own. 

I’ve always leaned towards taking more risks in my life so leaving my FT job to launch my company wasn’t a big deal for me (+ I’m 22 so still have time to fail over and over).

When I left my job, I started reading a lot about UI/UX, no-code tools, marketing, sales and every tool a worthwhile entrepreneur needs to learn about. Given the complexity of the project I set out to achieve, I asked a more technical friend to join as a cofounder and that's when AirMedia was born. We now use bubble for landing page as I had to learn it and custom-code stack for our platform. 

Here's our goal: streamlining social media marketing using AI. I see this technology has only being at the premises of what it will be able to achieve in the near-future. We want to make the experience dynamic i.e. all happens from a discussion and you see the posts being analysed from there as well as the creation process - all from within the chat.

Fast forward a few weeks ago, we finished developing the first version of our tool that early users describe as a "neat piece of tech" - just this comment alone can keep me going for months :)

Being bootstrapped until now, I decided to sell lifetime deals for the users in the waitlist that want to get the tool in priority as well as secure their spot for life. We've had the first sale the first day we made that public !

Now what you all are looking for: How ? 

Here was my process starting to market the platform:

• I need a high-converting landing page so I reckoned which companies out there have the most data and knows what convert and what doesn’t: Unbounce. Took their landing page and adapted it to my value proposition and my ICP. 
• The ICP has been defined from day 1 and although I’m no one to provide any advice, I strongly believe the ICP has to be defined from day 1 (even before deciding the name of the company). It helps a lot when the customer is you and you’ve had this work experience that helps you identify the problems your users encounter.
• Started activating the network, posting on Instagram and LinkedIn about what we've built (I've worked in many SaaS start-ups in the past so I have to admit that's a bit of a cheat code).
• Cold outreach from Sales NAV to our ICP, been growing the waitlist in parallel of building the tool for months now so email marketings with drip sequences and sharing dev updates to build the trust along the way (after all we're making that tool for our users - they should be the first aware about what we're building). I also came across some Whatsapp groups with an awesome community that welcomed our platform with excitement.)

The landing page funnel is the following: Landing page -> register waitlist -> upsell page -> confirmation. I've made several landing pages e.g. for marketing agencies, for real estate agents, for marketing director in several different industries. The goal now is just testing out the profiles and who does it resonate the most with.

Another growth hack that got us 40+ people on the waitlist:

I identified some Instagram posts from competitors where their CTA was "comment AI" and I'll send you our tool and they got over 2k people commenting. Needless to say, I messaged every single user to check out our tool and see if it could help them. (Now that i think about it, the 2% conversion rate there is not great - especially considering the manual labour and the time put behind it).

We’ve now got over 400 people on the waitlist so I guess we’re doing something right but we’ll keep pushing as the goal is to sell these lifetime deals to have a strong community to get started. (Also prevents us from going to VCs and I can keep my time focussing exclusively on our users - I’m not into boardroom politics, just wanna build something useful for marketers).

Now I’m still in the process of testing out different marketing strategies while developing and refining our platform to make it next level on launch day. Amongst those: 

• LinkedIn Sales Nav outreach (first sale came from there)
• Product Hunt
• Highly personalised cold emails (there I’m thinking of doing 20 emails a day with a personalised landing page to each of those highly relevant marketers). Never seen that and I think this could impress prospects but not sure it’s worth it time / conversion wise.
• Make content to could go viral (at least 75 videos) that I’m posting throughout several social media accounts such as airmedia__, airmedia_reels, airmedia_ai (you get the hack) always redirecting to the main page both in the profile description and tagging the main account. I have no idea how this will work so will certainly update some of you that would like to know the results. Will do the same across Facebook, TikTok, Youtube Shorts etc… I’m just looking for a high potential of virality there. This strategy is mainly used to grow personal brands but never seen it applied to companies.
• Good old cold calling
• Reddit (wanna keep it transparent ;) )

I’m alone to execute all these strategies + working in parallel to refine the product upon user’s feedback I’m not sure I can do more than that for now. Let me know if you have any feedback/ideas/ tasks I could implement. 

I could also make another post about the proper product building process as this post was about the marketing. No I certainly haven’t accomplished anything that puts me in a position to provide advices but I reckon I’m on my way to learn more and more. Would be glad if this post could help some of you. 

And of course as one of these marketing channels is Reddit I’ll post the link below for the entrepreneurs that want to streamline their social media or support us. Hope I was able to provide enough value in this post for you to consider :)

https://airmedia.uk/