Entrepreneur-ing In Public: Journey Log #11
The great TikTok experiment begins
I teach entrepreneurship at Duke and I’m publicly growing a company — Autopest — from $0 to $100k/year in revenue in order to help entrepreneurs better understanding the process of building startups. Learn more about my journey here.
Last week’s update explained that I was going to focus on marketing — both inbound and outbound — for the foreseeable future. Lots to share, so let’s skip the pre-amble and jump straight into the learnings.
A few words on outbound marketing…
First, I’ll share some updates/ thoughts about an outbound marketing strategy.
In case you don’t remember, last week I wondered whether Autopest’s price point is too low to reasonably sell it using a cold emailing outreach campaign. After a bit more thought, I’ve decided I will attempt a cold, outbound emailing campaign. At the very least, it’ll be a fun opportunity to teach the process.
Unfortunately, launching cold emailing campaigns requires some basic infrastructure that literally just takes time. As-in, you can’t start sending cold marketing emails from brand new email addresses and expect them to avoid the SPAM filter, which means you have to “warm up” new email accounts over the course of a month or two so email services like Gmail and Outlook don’t automatically block your messages.
I’ve started that process of warming up new email accounts. Once I’ve got good deliverability, I’ll be able to share more details and begin the process of executing a campaign.
Inbound marketing via TikTok: Week #1
As I wait for email accounts to warm up before launching any outbound, cold emailing campaigns, I’ve decided to experiment with TikTok. While I’m obviously not the first person to use TikTok for marketing purposes, most people will tell you TikTok isn’t known for marketing B2B, SaaS products like Autopest. However, Aa someone who spends lots of time teaching TikTok, I figure I should at least give it a shot.
As a reminder, last week I committed to posting one TikTok per day about Autopest for the entire week. I’m proud to announce that I did, indeed, achieve my goal. The results were, honestly, exactly what I expected, which is to say that they were, at best, inconclusive. Still, it was a fun experiment, so let me walk you through the videos, the logic, the results, and the learnings.
A caveat about evaluating value
One of the challenges with TikTok as a marketing platform is that the videos can’t link anywhere, so the videos are difficult to properly attribute in the funnel. My only real data comes from internal video metrics such as views, likes, comments, and shares within TikTok, and those things only tell me about the videos themselves as opposed to how many people they drove to Autopest.
That caveat aside, presumably a TikTok that gets 100,000 views is going to drive some traffic, and that’s my goal. I want to see if I can produce a TikTok about Autopest that crosses the 100,000 views threshold.
For the sake of comparison, the TikTok I posted to my personal account last week crossed 200k views, so, yes, I somewhat know what I’m doing on the platform. However, not surprisingly, none of my Autopest content managed the same level of traction.
I’m going to share what happened with each video, then I’m going to share my analysis and next steps.
Day 1: Monday, June 12th - “Talking Head” Video
I actually showed you the first video in last week’s issue. It was a “talking head” video where I simply spoke to the camera to explain how I used Autopest to raise millions of dollars from venture capitalists.
Results:
Views: 677
Likes: 22
Comments: 7
Favorites: 10
Day 2: Tuesday, June 13th - “Secret Trick” Video
For this video, I took the approach of a “did you know?” or “secret trick” video where I tried to explain Autopest as though there’s a cool hack people can use to exploit ChatGPT when sending emails. It probably wasn’t “snappy” enough to catch people’s attention, so I think I’ll re-use this tactic in a few more videos to see if I can get the timing right.
Results:
Views: 588
Likes: 51
Comments: 6
Favorites: 16
Day 3: Wednesday, June 14th - “Response” Videos
I got a couple good comments on my first two videos, so, for Day #3, I decided to post responses. TikTok responses are rarely a great ways to drive new traffic, but they give the impression other people care about your videos (why else would people be leaving comments???), which is a useful way to make someone (or, in this case, something) seem more in-demand than it actually is.
Results (Response #1):
Views: 501
Likes: 11
Comments: 0
Favorites: 1
Results (Response #2):
Views: 445
Likes: 32
Comments: 2
Favorites: 5
Day 4: Thursday, June 15th - “Teaching” Video
People tend to like learning new things on TikTok (at least, the audience I’m targeting does), so I wanted to create a video where I taught something important/valuable about how to send good emails. Honestly, I thought this video was going to do great. It’s snappy. It’s informative. It looks decently polished. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, the results weren’t so great.
Results:
Views: 64
Likes: 8
Comments: 3
Favorites: 3
Day 5: Friday, June 16th - “Response” Video
After my “teaching” video bombed, I thought a quick return to a (somewhat informative) response video would push me back in the right direction. Clearly, I was wrong.
Results:
Views: 65
Likes: 5
Comments: 1
Favorites: 1
Day 6: Saturday, June 17th - “POV” Video
It was Saturday… not a great day for viral, B2B SaaS TikToks anyway. I thought a “light touch,” POV-style video might get some eyeballs (though, admittedly, I didn’t have much hope).
Results:
Views: 72
Likes: 5
Comments: 1
Favorites: 0
Day 7: Sunday, June 18th - “Secret Trick” Video
Another “secret trick” video. The quality isn’t great, which I did intentionally. I hoped maybe it could help the TikTok seem more “real” and less like a piece of marketing content. But, again, it was a Sunday and, even worse, Father’s Day.
Results:
Views: 65
Likes: 8
Comments: 1
Favorites: 2
Key takeaways and conclusions…
It might be easy to look at the raw numbers above and think that my first tranche of videos with 500 - 600 views wildly outperformed my second tranche from later in the week because the ones later in the week couldn’t even crack 100 views. But, let’s be clear: 677 views on a TikTok (which was my most viewed video this week) is nothing. On a platform with 1 billion+ users, 677 views is basically zero.
In other words, none of my TikToks this week got any sort of traction, and that’s the real story of my TikTok experiment. Like every social media marketing strategy, a new TikTok account doesn’t magically get millions of viewers and tons of new customers. It takes time. Lots and lots of time.
What you’re seeing in the numbers I’ve shared is roughly what you should expect if you launch a new TikTok account (personal or professional). I know this because I work with dozens of creators, and I’ve seen the same pattern play out over and over. On a new TikTok account, you’ll only get trickles of views for a while. This happens for three main reasons:
You’ve only just launched, and you need to figure out the right type of content.
As a new account, you don’t have any baseline of followers to pull from for initial views/traction.
Because you’re a new account, TikTok doesn’t trust your account yet and isn’t going to spread it to the world. You have to build up reputation with the platform by consistently posting over time.
Does any of this mean you shouldn’t bother using TikTok as a marketing strategy? Of course not!
What I’m hoping you learn from my experiment is that there’s no such thing as a “magic bullet” in marketing. Instead, getting good results from any strategy is going to take time and effort. Be prepared to keep trying for at least a month before even the slightest sign of success starts to appear.
That’s what I’ll be doing. What you’ve seen is Week 1 of my TikTok strategy. But let’s call it Week 1 of many. I need to keep doing the same thing for at least a few more weeks before I have any real data about whether it’s working.
This, friends, is why entrepreneurship is hard.