Fintech startup SquareOne's campaign success, a Heatseeker review + 2 growth reads

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This issue may be a little late for the month of the same name but who's keeping tabs? To be fair, May was a particularly busy one with Sunrise in Sydney and Women in Digital in Brisbane (snaps below), as well as working with interesting startups doing interesting things, including one or two stealth projects. 🐊

One startup that's definitely not in stealth mode is Heatseeker – the subject of this month's tech tool review. Find out more below!

In this issue you'll also find the story of how fintech startup, SquareOne, used a creative kids' competition to generate app sign ups. Plus, two growth reads that might shift your perspective on Net Promoter Scores and help you understand whether PR makes sense for your startup.

Let’s go! 👇️

A creative marketing campaign and a big growth spike 💥

SquareOne is a money management app for kids with parental oversight. With this in mind, it makes sense for marketing tactics to focus on parents looking for digital solutions to traditional bank accounts.

But the kiwi fintech recently drove a big spike in growth by making kids the focus of a creative campaign.

We spoke to Co-founder, Jovan Pavlicevic, and Marketing and Growth Lead, Jody Cruttenden, about their Dragon's Ben campaign and how it was meticulously rolled out to maximise results.

Good reads to level up your growth game 🙌

• ​The Net Promoter Score distraction. Everyone loves a high NPS but marketing guru, Seth Godin, explains why we shouldn't be surprised if that isn't translating into increased sales. We love the reminder in the second last para about how to think about referrals.
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• ​10 totally reasonable perspectives on PR. Which one applies to your startup? PR professional-turned-investor, Ashley Mayer, has turned the debate about PR's value on its head by providing 10 concise scenarios to help startups see how best to approach PR, including when "do nothing" is best.

Growth Tool Review 🛠️

AI and MarTech are evolving FAST so we’re reviewing one tool for you in each edition. Unless stated otherwise, these are not sponsored.

This week’s tool is… Heatseeker.​

WHAT IS IT? 👇️

An AI-powered market research tool.

WHO IS IT FOR? 💁‍♀️

Startups, ambitious businesses, high-growth companies and marketing agencies.

WHAT DID WE TEST? 🧪

We tested Heatseeker as it was just coming out of beta last month and had three main use cases:

1. Competitor analysis – the tool's AI pulls together a competitor analysis in a glass-pane style view.
2. Product-market fit (PMF) – live in-market tests of features, benefits and pricing to ideate, assess customer interest and prioritise what's on your road map (for founders and product managers).
3. Language-market fit – the tool generates value propositions, creates ads based on them and tests them via live in-feed social media ads.

We tested 1 and 3 (minus the live ads).

WHAT WE FOUND 🔎

👍 User experience: Of all the different martech tools we've tried, Heatseeker's UX stood out. It's a super clean design and smooth experience.

It was also easy to get started. Basically, you set up your 'workspace', which involves telling the tool about you, your existing value proposition as you see it and a few other things. You could only do this for one brand/business when we tried it out but the ability to set up multiple workspaces in one account is on the product's road map.

👍 Competitor analysis: In under a minute, the tool produced a table comparing our product (in this case, we tested one of our startup client's products) with competitors. The table compared their main offerings, unique selling propositions, pricing, testimonials and features. It took a few goes to get all the competitors, but it's easy and fast to repeat the test and keep generating more. When we tested it – coming out of beta – some fields were incomplete but overall, it's faster than searching on Google and better organised than ChatGPT thanks to the table format (example below👇).

👍 Language-market fit test: The tool generated 6 value proposition variants for the product we were testing. We chose one, edited it and saved it for the next step.

The tool then takes the value prop you've saved and turns it into ads with the same image and call to action, but different headlines and text. You choose which ads you want to test, edit them as you see fit, and then push them to test live via in-feed LinkedIn ads (at the time of testing, Meta was coming soon). We didn't do the live test because our client wasn't ready for this but if we did, it would've been a very reasonable $300 in LinkedIn ad spend to help understand whether the value prop – and if so what articulation/s of it – resonated with a live audience over a week or so.

PRICING 💰️

• Free 30-day trial (no credit card required)
• Starter plan: USD $99/month
• Plus plan: USD $249/month (includes a new AI persona feature that we haven't tried)

THE VERDICT ✅

We see many opportunities to work with Heatseeker, depending on our clients' needs. We especially like the idea that a small ad spend can potentially pay for itself while generating learnings at the same time – if your startup's product is already live in market, you should ideally get some leads or even sales from live ad tests (and if not, perhaps there's a learning about product-market fit).

Additionally, it could save a lot of budget by testing campaign messaging before investing in creating all campaign assets around a particular concept.

If you're keen to find out more, book a demo or do a trial.​

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

🤩 Psst... nominations are open for the Women in Digital Awards, which Gemma is helping judge this year. There are lots of categories so take a look and get nominating before 15 July. 🤩