Pay small creators in each country to read a script, then run it as Facebook ads

Ryan ThorpeYes. So, Reflectly was the original app that was built back in 2017. And then at the time it was the AI journaling app before AI was a thing. It was kind of just a combination of machine learning. And then from 2017 to 2020, uh we scaled that ride- relatively large, um mainly we had just a really good arbitrage with Facebook Ads.

Ryan ThorpeUm we were doing micro-influencers at the time. So, finding UGC before it was a hot topic uh is one way of doing it. Um so we had influencers, UGC content creators in local countries, speaking like the local dialect and getting them to convert really well on Facebook Ads.

Joseph ChoiInteresting. So you'd find micro-influencers, but you wouldn't have them actually post their content organically. You would just pay them to read a script and then you'd use that as an ad?

Joseph ChoiA- And you said it got to like 2, 3 million ARR, and then it was break-even, but were you profitable leading up to that, like before you got to that like bigger revenue number?

Ryan ThorpeS- Yeah, so we were profitable um before we started fully scaling. And then through 2018 to 2020, Darius, who's the CMO at the time, he really uh drove the I guess the the UGC playbook in the really early days when Facebook was kind of like TikTok where there was such an arbitrage of, no one's making these odd-looking, not so great UGC videos. Um, but they were converting like crazy, because all the other big companies and advertisers were doing polished graphic ads at the time.

Ryan ThorpeThen that became the strategy that kind of really rose Reflectly to the fame that it that it got to uh in in the industry.