we ended up with the most viral launch of our yc batch. this is how.
1. we broke the mold. five days before launch we did not have a video.
every launch video in the batch looked the same. founder sits down, talks to camera, cuts to product shots, cuts back to founder. it works. it also disappears when four hundred companies do it in the same week.
so we made a mini episode of the office instead. we sell an ai harness called nex.ai for gtm and revops people, and it only makes sense if you have felt the specific chaos of an office with a broken workflow, the person who made it gone ages ago and every person frantically trying to fix it to become the company's ai champion.
we made an ai generated mini-episode of the office with us founders as interns in it and put all our love of the show in the script and the shots.
five days later it was the most shared thing our batch put out. 1800+ reactions on linkedin in the first week and still going. signups went from about 3 a day to 347 in a week.
we thought it was funny. nbcuniversal's rights team disagreed. days after we uploaded they filed a takedown. youtube pulled the video and put a strike on our channel.
it stayed on linkedin though. 1800+ reactions in the first week.
2. everyone says founders should make the launch video themselves because nobody else gets the product. that advice is protecting you from a bad agency, not from agencies.
doing it ourselves meant two founders spending a week making something worse than a pro could make in the same week, while not building and not selling. so we found an ai-native video agency, bambam: https://x.com/thefirst_ad, that took the idea and made it real in a week and did a great job at it. it was so good that the founder of hubspot asked us who did it.
3. outsourcing did not mean hands off. we read every line of the script and watched every clip, and rewrote a lot of the jokes. a joke that is structurally right and tonally wrong is worse than no joke. every character in that show has a specific rhythm, and getting it 80% right is worse than not trying. that part we could not delegate. the production is the part we should not have tried.
4. seedance is OP. it took our photos and turned them into pretty accurate lifelike AI clones of us down to the mannerisms. It was scary and exciting.
5. we invested in high-quality mics (Hollyland Lark M2s are tiny but amazing for sound quality and noise cancellation) and did all the voiceover ourselves instead of an AI dub that would have not been natural.
6. we used remotion for generating product shots that emulated our product design to the T. our designer has a whole playbook to do this right with any product in literally, minutes.
7. no matter how good a launch video is, no one cares if they don't understand your positioning. best way to write product messaging is to dig through customer conversations to look for 2 reactions "finally, someone who gets it" (problem) and "wait. it can do that?" (solution).
8. finally, product needs to deliver, or else all that inbound would have turned into dust. our free trial needs a credit card but that has not stopped users from using us. we had scaled our infra for 10x traffic before the launch. we were not ready for what was about to come.
we went viral twice this year, once of HN and now on linkedin. does lightning strike twice?
1 comment
[ 10.3 ms ] story [ 13.1 ms ] thread1. we broke the mold. five days before launch we did not have a video.
every launch video in the batch looked the same. founder sits down, talks to camera, cuts to product shots, cuts back to founder. it works. it also disappears when four hundred companies do it in the same week.
so we made a mini episode of the office instead. we sell an ai harness called nex.ai for gtm and revops people, and it only makes sense if you have felt the specific chaos of an office with a broken workflow, the person who made it gone ages ago and every person frantically trying to fix it to become the company's ai champion.
we made an ai generated mini-episode of the office with us founders as interns in it and put all our love of the show in the script and the shots.
five days later it was the most shared thing our batch put out. 1800+ reactions on linkedin in the first week and still going. signups went from about 3 a day to 347 in a week.
we thought it was funny. nbcuniversal's rights team disagreed. days after we uploaded they filed a takedown. youtube pulled the video and put a strike on our channel.
it stayed on linkedin though. 1800+ reactions in the first week.
2. everyone says founders should make the launch video themselves because nobody else gets the product. that advice is protecting you from a bad agency, not from agencies.
doing it ourselves meant two founders spending a week making something worse than a pro could make in the same week, while not building and not selling. so we found an ai-native video agency, bambam: https://x.com/thefirst_ad, that took the idea and made it real in a week and did a great job at it. it was so good that the founder of hubspot asked us who did it.
3. outsourcing did not mean hands off. we read every line of the script and watched every clip, and rewrote a lot of the jokes. a joke that is structurally right and tonally wrong is worse than no joke. every character in that show has a specific rhythm, and getting it 80% right is worse than not trying. that part we could not delegate. the production is the part we should not have tried.
4. seedance is OP. it took our photos and turned them into pretty accurate lifelike AI clones of us down to the mannerisms. It was scary and exciting.
5. we invested in high-quality mics (Hollyland Lark M2s are tiny but amazing for sound quality and noise cancellation) and did all the voiceover ourselves instead of an AI dub that would have not been natural.
6. we used remotion for generating product shots that emulated our product design to the T. our designer has a whole playbook to do this right with any product in literally, minutes.
7. no matter how good a launch video is, no one cares if they don't understand your positioning. best way to write product messaging is to dig through customer conversations to look for 2 reactions "finally, someone who gets it" (problem) and "wait. it can do that?" (solution).
8. finally, product needs to deliver, or else all that inbound would have turned into dust. our free trial needs a credit card but that has not stopped users from using us. we had scaled our infra for 10x traffic before the launch. we were not ready for what was about to come.
we went viral twice this year, once of HN and now on linkedin. does lightning strike twice?