Startup Growth Lessons #1

An ingenious startup campaign + how we're experimenting with AI

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Welcome to the first ever edition of Startup Growth Lessons, brought to you by the team at Stella Startups.

This short and sweet newsletter is for startup founders and operators looking to make sense of marketing and find that ✨ magic touch ✨ needed to accelerate growth.

Like our clients, Stella Startups is technically a startup too. We officially launched in August and after focusing solely on client work, we’ve decided to start “walking the talk” of sharing our knowledge for the greater good. We’ll never be able to work with all the startups who need our support but how can we scale our impact? Enter – this newsletter!

So here you are, inside a live growth and brand marketing experiment where you’ll learn about (you guessed it!) growth and brand marketing… 🤯.

Once you’ve had a read, we’d love to hear your thoughts so please reply with your feedback! 🙏

But that’s enough from us. Let’s get into it!

Think billboard advertising is out of reach for startups? Think again.

When we saw this large-scale outdoor campaign (or as those in the industry call it – “OOH” – for out-of-home) from Butter Insurance (founded in 2022, seed stage), we immediately wanted to know more.

Running an OOH campaign was once a marketing channel reserved for big corporate brands with six-figure budgets. But you can trust a startup to find an ingenious way to leverage this super high-impact placement, without breaking the bank.

We spoke to the Marketing Manager of Butter, Josh Kessel, to learn all the juicy details on how the team pulled it off, and how their broader marketing strategy is shaping up.

Side note 👉️ If you want to waste some time scrolling invest a few hours in researching social media tactics, check out Butter’s Instagram and TikTok for their hilarious video content (links in the article below).

Growth Tool Review 🛠️

AI tools and MarTech are evolving FAST so we’re setting ourselves a challenge to review one new marketing/growth tool every edition. Unless we clearly state otherwise, these are not sponsored.

This week’s tool is… Copy.ai​

What is it?

A generative AI (LLM) tool that helps you create content of all types – from long-form articles to social media posts, briefs, sales and ad copy.

Key features include the ability to train it to speak in your brand voice, upload past content/documents to reference in future content, plus support for repetitive marketing and sales workflows.

Who is it for?

Marketers and sales people whose jobs involve a lot of copywriting, especially writing with a repetitive or predictable structure.

What did we test?

We mainly tried out the “Chat” function. While the tool has a bunch of great templated prompts to choose from, we used these as inspiration to craft our own detailed prompt that instructed the AI to write a long-form founder bio, based on a tried and tested structure we’d developed and the inputs provided about the person.

The verdict

The results were pretty astounding. While the level of detail in the end product was a result of the highly insightful inputs we’d provided, what the AI did well was weave together all the key messages seamlessly, saving at least 30-60 minutes in writing time. Naturally, there was some editing required to make the piece sound less like an AI had written it (e.g. some strange vocab choices and generous extrapolations of the truth), but this was minor compared with the time saved.

This is just one small example of the use cases this tool covers, so there’s definitely more to discover and test out for feasibility.

Pricing

There is a free option, which is great for a very quick trial, but we found the “words in chat” do run out quite quickly. The cheapest paid plan (Pro) is $36 USD/month, which allows for 5 seats and unlimited words in chat as well as 500 “workflow credits”.

You can view all the pricing details (and if you’d like to try it out, see if you can still grab 60% off the Pro Plan in the latest sale).

Competitors

We’re keen to try out Jasper soon as the clear top competitor with a similar price point, although with fewer inclusions ($39 US/month for 1 seat). This persuasive blog comparing the two tools was the reason we tried Copy.ai first!

Good reads to level up your growth game 👀

​How to build your growth (marketing) strategy, from MKT1

• Perfect for anyone planning for the new year…!

​Brian Chesky’s new playbook, from Lenny’s Podcast

• A fascinating interview with the co-founder of AirBnB. The first 15 mins are the most interesting as he explains how the company has redefined many product management roles to be product marketing roles, reflecting the huge importance of alignment between product, engineers and marketing teams.

This newsletter is from the team at Stella Startups 👋

ICYMI, we’re Stella Startups – a true marketing partner for AU and NZ startups from early stage to scale up.

We bring you marketing strategy, brand expertise and hands-on execution, all with a commitment to innovation so you can make an impact bigger than your budget. Head to our website to find out more and if you’d like help, book some time to chat (we don’t bite!).

See you next time,
Gemma & Bridget