How StayUncle hijacked earned media, by Taig McCarthy
Taig McCarthy's Where is the Dinosaur contains one of the most detailed accounts of the techniques we've used to raise StayUncle into stardom. Here is a snapshot from the chapter on StayUncle.
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The Blazesaurus is a humble dinosaur that becomes famous and well-liked for challenging bigger animals and questioning the status quo.
The specimen is named after Blaze Arizanov, co-founder of StayUncle. This Indian startup was founded by a Macedonian redhead and an Indian salesman that moved to New Delhi to promote an idea that appeared immoral, radical, and controversial for India: hotels for unmarried couples. And in just three years, StayUncle expanded to more than 800 hotels, with $3.5 million in turnover and a user repetition rate above 30%.
The Blazesaurus consists of somehow challenging the status quo, and therefore creating a story that becomes newsworthy for its social implications. In India, there is a lot of hate regarding this topic. The most traditional sectors of society strongly oppose pre-marital sex. So when Blaze and his co-founder Sanchit started their company, they were flooded with hate comments and criticism. They were threatened by fundamentalists and online trolls.
You might think that this is a bad thing, but strong opposition is an awesome opportunity to become newsworthy. Indeed, the idea was controversial enough to make their company thrive with a non-existing marketing budget.
When I asked the founders what their major milestone on the path to success was, they quickly remembered April of 2016 when they “starred” for the first time in a newspaper:
According to Blaze, that was the day on which they became a business. On the same day, many Indian nationwide outlets published the story, and in the following weeks, several international outlets such as; Discovery Channel or BBC called them to publish stories such as:
Hotel rooms for hire: Young lovers get a break in India. 06 Oct 2016. BBC News.
The Uncles of Good Sex. July 20 2018. VICE.
Why are unmarried couples seeking a room in hotels seen as immoral? APRIL 22 2016. The Hindu Times.
Before that, StayUncle only did street marketing, which is exhausting and does not provide a significant reach. But thanks to the media coverage, StayUncle grew from around 10 monthly transactions to 100 and kept doubling their metrics at that rate for 3 months.
The story of the underdog challenging the establishment falls into the narrative of David vs. Goliath, a biblical archetype that Hollywood and media outlets love exploiting. So most articles covering StayUncle’s story featured them as the hero, battling against the most traditional stakeholders of Indian society. And Blaze Arizanov sure got the hang of it.
The team decided that their whole marketing strategy would revolve around being social activists supporting progressive topics in India to get purposely into trouble as much as they could. According to the founders, the topic of rooms for unmarried couples that made them famous wore off after a while. It stopped being current. So they needed “another hook”.
But Blaze had another controversial idea: promoting StayUncle with images featuring Indian divinities.
And as you can see by the comments, the campaign sparked off the discussion, drawing love, hate, and tons of attention and free clicks to their website, as well as the second wave of media coverage.
In late 2016, StayUncle was targeted by a series of cyberattacks that made their website repeatedly go down. So they contacted journalists to let them know about the attacks, and many newspapers published stories that got them even more media attention:
For Blaze Arizanov and his team, coming up with newsworthy stories has become a process. Every 3 to 4 months they do something radical: “whenever StayUncle’s Google Alerts were going down, it was time to think up something new”, explained Blaze. In April of 2018, StayUncle dropped another controversial bomb to get the company into news outlets again.
Take a look at the article that Reuters published:
Fake Indian website offering girls for ‘every taste’ stirs up a storm. APRIL 4, 2018. REUTERS.:
A fake website offering girls to cater to “every taste and pocket” clocked up more than 1,000 subscribers on its first day, highlighting the challenge of tackling sex trafficking in India.
It worked like a charm: the following two days were buzzing with news about this unusual campaign run by a small company offering love stays to couples.
When we contacted Blaze and I told him about our own entrepreneurial background, he said:
It looks like angering traditionally-minded people turned out well for the both of us.
Indeed it did.
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To read about the Donald Trump marketing method (The Trumpsaurus), the Elon Musk method (Elonsaurus), as well as The WeWorksaurus, the RedBulldocus, the Uberdocus, and the Ashleyraptor, buy the full version of the book here.