As a startup, you need to prove that there's sufficient demand for your service to be able to raise a round of funding & that you know how to generate and scale that demand. Once you can crack how to convert brand impressions to visitors and then to paying customers, you have something investors are willing to take a look at.

Let’s tell you the Hippoc story of how we made that happen.

Timeline: 90 Days Budget: $6k in ad spend + additional agency fees Deliverables:

Ad creative

Landing pages

Growth strategy

Ad Execution & monitoring

Reporting & recommendations

Kevin Co-Founder & COO

While the technology is compelling, at the end of 2021, Hippoc had a go-to-market problem.

They were getting a half a dozen signups a week from several channels and hadn’t really launched their marketing efforts yet. Their organic acquisition wasn't enough to be replicated and certainly not enough to demonstrate a high demand.

Hippoc.aiwas initially conceived as a tool help designers craft better ad creative.

Their pitch to designers was, 'Get better at designs that work with quantitative data”

This way, you know which ads are going to be successful before they are ever run.

Hippoc was taking the guesswork out of the creative process, so designers would know with certainty which ads are going to make an impact with your desired target audience.

This was the basis of the first set of experiments we ran for them. There was just one problem: almost no one wanted that. We ran several different GTM experiments which showed a mismatch between the offer and the audience.

Designers weren't that interested in getting data to back their designs.

The Hippoc team quickly decided to iterate and find a different angle: offering ad performance tests to marketers who were not explicitly designers at all. They knew where they could find such a community—Canva.

In light of our results, we had a meeting with the client about the possibility of changing the audience.

We decided to target is marketers who aren't core designers but have to design creatives. There's a growing industry of non-traditional designers creating designs with apps from their phones and desktop. The one tool with millions of users easily comes to mind: Canva!

Canva allows non-traditional designers and marketers to create design work in minutes. What if we targeted Canva users on Twitter and Facebook and see if we'll get a better response?

So using the same creatives, we changed the target audience to people who fell in that category: Canva users.

This time, the performance of the ads was much better than before; we saw a 4X jump in CTR. We had finally found the offer/audience fit for this product.

It was immediately evident that there was a considerable market of creators who needed this product, so Hippoc’s team switched to fast launch a much more relevant tool to their audience: a plugin within the native Canva app which would make Hippoc much more accessible.

While devlopment continued on new features, CrowdTamers kept running experiments to see what could be done to bring cost per demo down from initial tests.

Over the next 2 months, CrowdTamers brought the CPL down 87%, reducing the time that it takes for new customers to break even substantially.

With proof of a solid business idea and a deep understanding of how to appeal to their target audience,Hippoc.aihad a business idea that they’d proven worked well. CPA for demos was quite low and all of this data showed potential investors just how smart a business Hippoc was, they were able to raise a $2MM round.

Next steps with CrowdTamers involve refining the top and middle of funnel to continue to reduce cost per demo even further and build a healthier business.

The major takeaway is this:

Once you have successfully defined and proven that your go-to-market strategy works, your business is attractive to investors with money to spend.