How to Make Your Startup Known

1. The most challenging and expensive stage of promoting a startup is making it known. After all, you can only convince people to buy your product if they know about it 😉
2. It turns out, you can find a way to get your startup mentioned completely for free. To do this, you can even release a regular product — but with one controversial feature!
3. This method is universal, and it can be applied to startups in any field. Here’s a recent example of a startup that succeeded in this aspect in its niche:

Project Essence

Score is a dating application that operates on the same principle as Tinder: a feed of options with the ability to swipe left or right.

The only, but significant difference is that only Americans with a credit score of “good” or higher (675 points) can register in the application.

The credit score check is only performed at the time of registration. After registration, the credit score value does not affect anything and is not even displayed in user profiles.

675 points is actually not that high. If you look at the table of average credit scores for different generations of Americans, you can see that even for the “least reliable” borrowers aged 18 to 25, the average credit score is around 680 points.

Thus, the registration threshold is chosen not to highlight outstanding individuals, but to screen out those who are worse than usual.

The Score app was published on February 14 by the startup Neon Money Club on Valentine’s Day. Some even say that the app will only be available for 90 days, after which it will disappear from the app store.

The main product of Neon Money Club today is a bank card for which they are currently collecting pre-orders. The specific feature of the card is that the points earned on it for transactions can be used to buy stocks through the startup’s application.

Neon Money Club raised $10 million in investments, $6.83 million of which was raised last spring.

What’s Interesting

The “politically incorrect” approach to choosing a partner for dating based on credit score has attracted the attention of the press and the blogosphere.

The image shows only a part of the list of articles published on this topic in various publications, including Bloomberg and the Financial Times. The common theme of the articles is “can you love someone for their credit score” and “is a person with a low credit score unworthy of love.”

So, at the very least, the startup has achieved one goal — it has drawn attention to itself. As a result, many have learned about their main product — the bank card. Otherwise, the startup would have had to spend significant money on advertising to achieve a similar audience reach.

The lesson is simple. The most expensive thing for a startup is attracting attention to its product. Because you can only convince someone to buy it if they know about the product 😉 And as it turns out, the cheapest way to attract attention is to add to your product a controversial or contradictory feature, albeit minor.

Neon Money Club’s strategy is much more ambitious than just releasing and promoting a bank card. They see their goal as “creating financial products that will be relevant to a new generation seeking new financial opportunities.”

The tactic of Neon Money Club, reflected in the release of the Score application, is to “make caring about financial health an integral part of everyday life.” To do this, they plan to introduce “financial hygiene even in places where it was previously considered inappropriate” — few people are likely to be interested in the credit score of a potential partner on their very first date 😉

Today’s startups can also learn from the formulation of strategy and tactics.

Because for an ambitious startup, the goal should not be the desire to release and promote a specific product — but the choice of a common problem they want to solve, or the opportunity they want to give people.

This allows the startup to test different product hypotheses until they come across a demanded product that meets the set goal. And besides, it also allows them to release different products within the framework of the same strategy — which will engage the audience on different hooks, better retain users through the synergy of different products, and open up different sources of revenue.

A strategy formulated in terms of one product, on the other hand, either falls flat when that one product is not in demand, or forces continued promotion of the product even if the horse has already died ☹️

A good tactic, meanwhile, is to find ways to implement your strategy in areas where it was not previously applied because it was not accepted, or simply because no one thought that these things could go together.

And if this combination turns out to be controversial and contradictory — even better 😉 At the very least, we’ll be able to attract attention to ourselves again. And ideally — get an unexpected chance for success.

Where to Run

The main conclusions from today’s review are general and can be applied to startups operating in any field.

The first necessary action is to formulate the strategy of your startup without tying it to a specific product that you are already making or only planning to make.

After that, you can search for answers to the following questions:

• Can you create some simpler and faster product within the same strategy framework to get to the market quicker?
• What other products can be created within the same strategy to have other hypotheses to test?

The second direction is to try to “combine the uncombinable.” This is very similar to the method of focal objects, which is one of the effective methods for stimulating creative thinking. The essence of the method is to first take what you want to improve and then try to apply the properties of 3-5 randomly selected objects to it.

There are many articles about the focal object method in business; here’s an example from one of them. Let’s say you want to create a website building platform. The randomly chosen object is a car. Random car properties are “stalled” and “two-door.” Application options for the method:

• “Stalled website creation services” — support and development of websites that the previous contractor has stopped servicing.
• “Development of ‘two-door’ websites” — a platform for creating simple websites consisting of 1-2 pages.

Moreover, as mentioned earlier, special attention should be paid to generating controversial and contradictory options. After all, the idea of Score is a combination of “finance” and “dating.” By the way, after formulating the task in this way, other controversial ways of combining these concepts immediately start coming to mind 😉

So, how can you formulate the strategy of your startup in a general way? What other products can you create within the same strategy? What application options for the formulated strategy in unexpected areas can you find? Are any of these options controversial and contradictory enough for you to attract attention to your startup?

About the Company

Score

Website: joinneon.com

Last Round: $6.83M, 19.03.2023

Total Investments: $10M, Rounds: 2