How to make 21,000 people care about your funding news
Last week we at Kula came out of stealth and announced our pre-seed funding of $2.7M. We expected a few things to happen, even planned for them, but none of them did. However, other things happened, unexpected things, and overwhelmed us.
Here's the Behind the Scenes, which can be read as a short guide to thinking about and executing a PR blast.
When I joined Kula, Achu (founder and CEO) had a date decided for our funding announcement - 19th January. The drill was simple, reach out to all the media houses that you can. And then be at their mercy - reading your email, maybe replying, and then either ghosting you or agreeing to cover the funding.
That's where we began.
The planning phase
We knocked on every door we could. There were moments on our calls where Achu and I would make lists of all possible people we can ping for introductions to tech publications. We made our own media list. We borrowed media lists from our friends who have done this in the past. And we mailed each one of them. Every one of those email IDs - one on one, no mass blast.
Few needed more time, few of them covered only certain niches, few redirected to other reporters who never replied, few replied to a couple of mails and then ghosted, and a few agreed. In the end, we had a half-decent list of media confirmations. Far from our wishlist, but we still looked pretty good.
We built our strategy according to the confirmations we got. We wanted to make the most of them, so we planned the narrative meticulously - captions for everyone in the founding team, time of posting, warming up the profile from at least 4 days prior, and so on.
Best laid plans.
And true to form, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
One reporter got caught in something personal. The other publication didn't have clarity on the time of publishing the news. In the meanwhile, another major publisher ran with a watered-down version of the narrative we wanted to set.
It was absolute chaos.
We had to rescue the situation, though.
11 am on D-Day, we were dismayed by nothing panning out the way we wanted. We decided we had to take control of the situation ourselves, without wasting a minute more.
Owning The Narrative
Achu and I had been tinkering with the narrative even before I joined Kula. The 3 pillars we had zeroed before we wrote even our first press release draft were:
1. The category
2. The 30-60-90 words blurb for Kula
3. The positioning canvas
The category
Creating a new category wasn't our preference. We acknowledge the cost and effort that goes into the education of a new category. We did our research - Drift had to spend more than $10M to create the Conversational Marketing category.
But with Kula, we didn't have an option. We didn't fall into a pre-defined category. The closest we could congest ourselves in would be the ATS (Applicant Tracking Software) category and that would have been a fatal marketing mistake - We simply weren’t that. Within the first couple of discussions, both Achu and I were convinced that we will have to create a category, and there was no other way. So that's what we did.
We created a living doc where we would jot down any and all ideas about naming our category. We debated multiple names for days before we accepted that 'Recruitment Automation' would be the name of our category. Marketing is less innovation, more repetition. Naming the category was the first step to ensuring the consistency of our narrative.
The 30-60-90 blurb for Kula
We knew once we go out of stealth, we would get a lot of inquiries from prospects and investors who would be curious about what we do. Since it is an innovative product where an established alternative doesn't exist, we knew that people would find explaining Kula to others even more difficult.
As they say - if you don't define yourself, someone else will - and you won't like it.
This became another living doc, and it went through multiple edits, plus reviews internally and externally to seal a version that would be used consistently.
The positioning canvas (based on April Dunford's framework)
This is still a work-in-progress. We have a version which is at best a first draft. As April suggests in her book to keep revisiting this every 6 months, that's what we'll be doing. In fact, we will be tuning the canvas every 3 months until we achieve PMF and then go from there.
The founder brand
Even before I joined, I had this idea in mind to build Achu's brand. As distribution gets tougher, we knew we had to do this and own the audience. Achu has 30K connections on LinkedIn (the go-to platform for our target audience - recruiters). Achu has a bag full of first-hand learnings from his decade-long career as a recruiter, and I knew I had just the right arsenal to blow this up.
However, I didn't know we would use it this soon, and it would be such a success.
We had been building Achu's profile on LinkedIn for a few weeks. We had a founder-brand strategy outlined and that started with content creation on social platforms. The early signs were overwhelming. With the first few LinkedIn updates, we were able to get 50,000+ views and 1000+ likes on Achu's updates.
We took a chance on our network. We got in touch with the folks at Together and Venture Highway, who were guiding us through the entire launch. For amplification, we had Together's thesis, Venture Highway's thesis, our own blog post, Achu's LinkedIn, the LinkedIn profiles of everyone in the founding team, a Twitter thread from Manav (of Together), and a moonshot to have Girish post about us.
Here's how we brought some order to the chaos:
11 am?- Achu's LinkedIn update goes out. Theme: When you're obsessed with a problem as much as to disrupt your life in solving it, nothing means more than the validation from the early believers.
11:30 am?- My (Rohit's) update goes out. Theme: Building a category-defining product, needs courage, motivation, and boat-loads of belief.
12 pm?- Kula's page shares the link from ET. Theme: Thanks to Venture Highway LLP, Together, and Global Founders Capital for the trust and impetus you have given us.
12:30 pm?- Together publishes and shares their investment thesis. Theme: An exceptional team solving a major problem that recruiters worldwide continue to struggle with.
2 pm?- Achu's Twitter thread on Kula's funding. Theme: We took Achu's blog on the raise and re-wrote to fit the Twitter thread format.
3 pm?- Each one of the founding team members announces their job change, and shares funding news. Theme: LinkedIn promotes job updates, and we clubbed funding with it to exploit that visibility.
3 pm to 6 pm?- The next 3 hours were spent on a bit of rest, enjoying the after-effects of the little entropy we introduced to the world. The fly-wheel was in motion.
6 pm?- Girish retweeted our tweet with the sweetest caption.
A flurry of likes, follows, and retweets ensued.
The next 5 hours were spent acknowledging the comments and messages from the US network Achu had. We got a bunch of DMs appreciating the launch, a number of them appreciating the website, and asking for an intro to the agency that built it (we built the entire thing, in-house), and inbound angel investment offers.
Quantitatively, this is what the launch looked like:
LinkedIn Views: 170,000+
LinkedIn Likes: 2600+
Website Traffic: 21,000+
Signups: 500+
Keeping the momentum up
We had incredible momentum going on for us, and we didn’t want it to die. We have taken the budget that other brands would have spent on a standard PR agency and distributed it among 3 tactics:
1. Twitter and LinkedIn ads promoting our press release in markets where we aren't present organically.
2. Find prominent podcasts in the recruitment space and sponsor them.
3. Get Achu as a guest on recruitment and HR focused podcasts.
All of this means that we were on everyone’s minds for at least a week. And this is just the beginning.
There are lots to come, and I hope to record everything we do in marketing so we can all learn together.
P.S:?This post was written for?The CMO Journal by?Sairam Krishnan, the Marketer in Residence at Accel.