Startup Marketing Masterclass: How OpenPhone Grew to 100k Customers | Daryna Kulya
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2024
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daryna Kulya is the Co-founder of OpenPhone, the world’s best business phone
This episode is a masterclass on startup marketing, chronicling the first six years of OpenPhone, how they acquired their first customers, and inside all the different channels they used to scale the business to over 100k customers, including FB Groups, Reddit, SEO, and cold outbound.
We also get into why founder-led content is so important today, and why design is a crucial core competency.
For full show notes, visit: https://highlightai.com/share/28b95226-9936-4ae9-882d-6c68a1b578d5
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:10) OpenPhone’s new API launch
(06:41) Why a better business phone is a big deal
(13:18) Immigrating from Ukraine to the US and building OpenPhone
(15:39) Hacking a custom business phone
(25:29) How OpenPhone got its first customers from Facebook Groups
(33:02) Tricks for unlocking word of mouth
(39:11) Transitioning from free to paid users
(43:05) How OpenPhone cracked word of mouth on Reddit
(46:29) OpenPhone’s YC experience
(49:01) Why the Seed round was hard to raise
(53:49) Using Slack to aggregate all customer feedback across the internet
(57:38) How YC helped redefine their ICP
(01:01:33) Tactics for sending cold emails
(01:06:24) How to get and benefit from press
(01:12:18) Daryna’s “behind the scenes” approach to founder-led content
(01:16:26) Using long-tail keywords to kickstart an SEO strategy in 2020
(01:23:05) When to do founder-led content vs SEO
(01:28:38) How your customers should pull you up-market
(01:30:18) Why OpenPhone cares about design
Referenced:
OpenPhone: https://openphone.com/ Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/
Follow Daryna: Twitter: https://twitter.com/darynakulya LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darynakulya
Follow Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It would be crazy if every single tactic I tried worked. |
| 0:04.0 | That's not how life works, right? |
| 0:06.0 | It's absolutely the power law. |
| 0:07.5 | Sometimes founders are looking for something so perfect in the early days. |
| 0:12.4 | I didn't really have any marketing experience going into this. |
| 0:15.0 | Maybe there is something a lot better I could have done, |
| 0:17.6 | but there is no need to have this perfect channel from day one. You just need |
| 0:22.9 | a couple of things to work. Welcome to the PEO! I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of |
| 0:27.9 | capital. Today's guest is Dorina Kuya, co-founder of OpenFone, the world's best business fellow. |
| 0:33.7 | Small businesses, they wanted something that just works. A conversation is a masterclass on startup marketing, chronicling the first six years of Open Phone, |
| 0:42.3 | how they acquired their first customers, and inside all the different channels they use to scale the business. |
| 0:46.3 | True word of mouth happens when you are really exceeding those expectations. |
| 0:51.3 | But the one thing that we did to really, really compensate, |
| 0:54.3 | which I think more founders should do, is just incredible customer service. |
| 0:58.6 | We talked about how they cracked marketing on Facebook groups and Reddit. |
| 1:02.0 | The only reason why I even came across this because of constraints, like we did not have any money. |
| 1:07.8 | Constrains are a blessing because they make you more creative and they really think outside of the box. |
| 1:13.8 | What you learned racing money after YC. |
| 1:16.2 | It felt like things were going well because we were having a meeting after meeting after meeting. |
| 1:21.6 | But in retrospective, that is not a good sign. |
| 1:24.0 | How their customer base evolved over time. |
| 1:26.1 | What is the exact job that they're kind of hiring our product to do? |
... |
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