Startups don’t need to go viral to win customers

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Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Getting initial customers as a startup can be one of the most grueling challenges in business. Even when companies manage to snag some early interest, there’s no guarantee those customers will stick around. At TechCrunch Disrupt last week, Elia Wallen, founder and CEO of travel startup Engine, Gamma founder and CEO Grant Lee, and Crystal Huang, general partner at Google Ventures, shared tips on how to attract and retain customers. In the current era — when young AI companies like Cluely and Instinct are building big audiences not just through their products but also through their founders’ colorful online presences — social media can seem like a magic bullet for reaching early customers. But founders who want heighten their business strategy with modern marketing, have to be strategic, according to Lee. Gamma, which sells AI-powered presentation software, managed to scale its business exponentially with a social media strategy that deployed influencers through its Ambassadors (or “Gambassador”) program. The company adopted the plan before influencer-based marketing was a tried-and-true strategy for smaller companies, eventually reaching a multi-billion dollar valuation. But simply giving influencers a platform and telling them to promote your brand online doesn’t automatically translate to sales, said Lee. There’s more to it than that. “If you have a product that can serve many different segments or use cases, then you want to basically have creators that can target each one of those,” Lee said. “If you have folks that are in consulting versus people that do all their marketing and create all the decks for their CMO, there’s all these different segments you might want to go after.” Lee said sometimes founders seem to treat creator marketing or influencer marketing as a sort of set it and forget it thing.