Rent giant street screens where passersby try the app and see their photos

Larissa Morimoto… like I said earlier, we found our initial product market fit through our background remover software, but then now we've gotten to the point where we have so many other tools to help people selling goods online actually maximize their chances of conversions that we didn't have a clear way of showcasing it. And so this campaign started out with that kind of seed and it eventually grew into something that we could never have imagined it grown to.

Larissa MorimotoAnd so what we ended up doing is we found a smaller market to test in because we really wanted to have as much raw data as possible. And so that was the UK, specifically London, where we rented out kind of high footfall traffic places that we could find that had kind of a physical screen. And what we really knew that we wanted to do was we wanted to showcase the power of PhotoRoom. So we wanted to bring all of these different tools to life, whether it was in the form of a digital activation or anything physical that people could experience. Because like I said earlier, people really do resonate more with your brand if they can see humans working on it, especially in the age of AI.

Larissa MorimotoWe're a very AI-driven product, so it's always been important for us to have that human touch. And what we ended up doing is we rented out these huge LED screens so that people could walk in, they could experiment the PhotoRoom photo booth. So they would take pictures of themselves, they could edit their pictures, and then their images would get blown up on this huge screen. That ended up resulting in was a lot of user generated content.

Larissa MorimotoThat's my biggest tip for anybody trying to go offline, that you always have to factor in UGC or online distribution to maximize your chances of return, especially of ROI. And what ended up happening was that we had 15,000 people walk by this billboard, they were able to experience PhotoRoom, see pictures of other people on the screens. And it was such an amazing moment to not only connect with future users of PhotoRoom, but also to existing …

Larissa Morimoto… journalists and press. And we thought, "Okay, well, if we're already thinking about online distribution, then why not make it fully about online distribution?" So we relied 100% on press and journalists and TV coverage to maximize your chances of exposure. But since Kamuri has never, A, sold online and B, doesn't have a conventional business, his audience did not care about what we were doing. So what they were focused on was the comedy aspect.

Larissa MorimotoAnd of course, it doesn't mean that they don't care about PhotoRoom or that they don't know what PhotoRoom does, but we didn't see any uplift from the Kamuri campaign. Whereas in London, we saw an 18% uplift in branded search, for example. So for us, I mean, it was shocking that we didn't move the needle, and that was a huge learning and a very expensive learning to have made. If you're going to try this strategy out, please, please, please at least focus somewhat on your ICP or make it a very wide consumer event.

David BarnardWe talk about channel product fit and things like that. It's so funny to think about as you're trying to get attention, you do need to get attention with at least some kind of audience that's going to be at least tangentially related. And great examples, apps all the time want to get featured in the big tech publications or other places. But a lot of times those don't end up driving much download because people reading TechCrunch, it's like, they …