Cold Start and Growth Strategy for jenni.ai
Context (title): Cold Start and Growth Strategy of jenni.ai
Similar to most B2C products, the early cold start phase is very challenging. It took 1678 days to go from 0 to $4M ARR, with growth becoming exponential later on.
| ARR | Days |
|---|---|
| 0 to $500k | 1216 |
| $500k to $1M | 186 |
| $1M to $1.5M | 62 |
| $1.5M to $2M | 60 |
| $2M to $2.5M | 43 |
| $2.5M to $3M | 24 |
| $3M to $3.5M | 57 |
| $3.5M to $4M | 30 |
Growth can be divided into the following stages:
1. Cold Call (0-$5000 ARR)
Making calls one by one, similar to cold emails but different, requires strong mental resilience. The advantage is the ability to communicate with users in real-time. David’s approach was to introduce himself as a student seeking advice on specific issues. However, this method doesn’t scale, and a new growth strategy is needed after reaching a certain point ($5000 ARR).
2. Facebook Groups ($5000-$30000 ARR)
Join target user groups and become a core member, then engage with them and iterate on your MVP. If done well, they will promote your product voluntarily (if not, it means more work is needed). This can result in a group of users willing to provide feedback and a decent product.
3. Exploring Growth Momentum ($30000-$120000 ARR)
With the foundation from the first two steps, the product now generally meets market needs. It’s time to find a breakthrough point through various channels. David used the following channels:
- Paid advertising
- Influencer marketing
- Collaborations with other products, sponsoring school clubs, etc.
It’s important to explore before heavily investing in any channel. After extensive exploration, you’re likely to hit a breakthrough point (for David, it was a tweet from a major influencer, leading to a 4x MRR increase in a month). This is similar to short videos—constant adjustments and increasing exposure are likely to lead to a breakthrough.
4. Social Media Marketing ($120000-$600000 ARR)
After discovering the massive growth from an influencer’s tweet, David decided to heavily invest in social media, focusing on the short video market (TikTok), achieving 0.5B views. Details of this are covered in another article.
5. Finding Other Channels During Bottlenecks ($600000-$1740000 ARR)
Growth on TikTok will eventually hit a bottleneck. David chose to shift to other channels, such as:
- Invitation systems
- More influencer marketing
- Serious SEO
- Paid advertising
6. Strengthening the Funnel and Focusing on Internal Metrics ($1740000-$3000000 ARR)
Once external exposure reaches a certain level, growth points can be found in internal metrics, such as:
- Conversion rate (free users → paying users)
- Retention rate (user retention time)
- Growth loops (existing users bringing in new users)
These metrics were initially monitored, but now they receive more serious attention, with conversion rates nearly tripling.
- Before optimization (241,700 new users → $26,000 MRR)
- After optimization (152,300 new users → $48,000 MRR)