Howdy Founders 🤠 

Short one this week because I have a million things going on!

We’re going to talk about:

• Getting hundreds of influencers to post about your business (without forking over all your cash) 🤑 

• My latest hobby project that I’m building for your kids 😄 

• Business Idea of the Week 💡 

Do you have a consumer business?

You should get a bunch of influencers to post about it

I know you probably read that and thought “Well yeah, no kidding”. Or maybe your response was more like “No way, they’re too expensive!”. Well, what if you didn’t have to spend your cash and could get them to post about your business for “Free”?

The Unfinished Story of Showroom

My buddy Sam has a great AI Search Engine for Fashion called Showroom and like any startup, he had the age-old problem of wanting thousands of users without forking over too much cash. He knew that fashion influencers would be an important piece of his go-to-market puzzle but wasn’t prepared to drop tens of thousands of dollars on partnerships without some real market validation first.

After a brainstorming session, we came up with the idea “What if we don’t pay them cash and they just ‘unlock’ a bit of equity with each post about Showroom?”. The Showroom VIP Affiliate Program was born. Showroom’s lawyers came up with the brilliant idea to structure the influencers’ compensation as a “Sale bonus” so you can pay them in increments (for each post) without actually impacting your cap table. A sale bonus would essentially mean the same thing as equity, in the event of a sale, but doesn’t create a taxable event, before an exit.

So, with the big plan in place, we got to work solving the various smaller problems like “How do we contact these people?”, “How do we keep track of the value of each person’s sale bonus?”

Notion to the rescue

Obviously, there was no existing platform for this hyper-specific use case so we had to build one. Fortunately, Notion is a thing. You can build ANYTHING you want in notion, even somewhat sophisticated CRMs with many automations.

One great benefit of using Notion was that we were able to give every influencer their own dashboard so they could see how much they’ve earned and which of their posts are pending/approved, as well as a Typeform for submitting their posts.

Results so far:

Now, because I’m writing about this in my newsletter, you’ve probably deduced that this has been a success. You would be correct. In just 2 months since we had the idea, here are some of the stats:

• 515 Influencers Onboarded

• 18.4m Total Instagram Followers (35.7k average)

• 38.5m Total TikTok Followers (75k average)

• 100+ posts created

• Tens of thousands of views

More awesome posts are coming in every day and Showroom is growing in a way you would expect from paid media, without actually forking over any cash. Everybody wins?

Want to try this with your consumer business?

Hit me up! Just reply to this email and let me know if you want to dive deeper into the stats, various automations, and all that nerdy stuff.

I’m building StoryPath - “Choose Your Own Adventure” bedtime stories for kids.

I have a 10-month-old whom I hope to raise with minimal screen time. Studies seem to demonstrate that too much screen time for children reduces their ability to develop empathy, in addition to shredding their potential attention spans.

So, I wanted to build something that would help foster creativity and curiosity in my kids (and your kids) while reducing their screen time. I wanted it to be interactive but without the hyperstimulation component that comes with playing a game on an iPad.

StoryPath was born

My buddy Ron and I decided that rather than creating another AI tutor, we would go the narrative route and build fantastical fictional worlds and stories that your children will help shape using just their voice (and their big brains).

StoryPath is in its infancy right now, but I’m already excited to see where it could go. I love the idea of allowing parents to select a “Theme” for the session such as “Sharing is caring” or “The importance of being kind to classmates” or even harder topics like “Why some parents don’t live together”.

If you have kids (or particularly enjoy beta testing things) I hope you’ll give StoryPath a try and let me know what you (and your kids) think!

Business Idea of the Week 💡 

Use AI to call and negotiate down medical bills

There are plenty of “Medical BIll Advocates” like Resolve that will negotiate down your medical bills and take a percentage of your savings.

This is the simplest Business Idea of the Week EVER:

Go train Vapi to call and negotiate down medical bills for people for some super low flat rate like $300 (if they save more than $1,000 for example).

If this doesn’t print money, I’ll give you a full refund for the idea.

THE END

That’s all, folks! Thanks for reading 🙂 

— John