Host a press-only store event with a famous comedian and a hobby brand

Larissa Morimoto… I mean, we also kind of go into with the mentality that yes, you're a business owner, but you're also consumer first. Because you're likely already on Instagram, you're likely already on TikTok, you're likely already existing in these spaces. And that's also why whenever we run paid acquisition, we don't even try to optimize our creatives fully for businesses. We try to have a fun twist to it, because ultimately consumers can also be businesses.

Larissa MorimotoAnd when we tried applying that mentality to a campaign that we ran in Japan, it actually ended up backfiring in the most interesting way possible. So Japan is also a pretty big market for PhotoRoom. And what we ended up doing is we secured a partnership with Tamiya, specifically because a lot of our user base in Japan are also collectors. So that's a huge market. If anybody has an app in the collector industry, Japan is definitely where you should be. And what we ended up doing is we ended up partnering with Tamiya to host a community event in their new offices that they opened up, I believe, a year or two ago, and they wanted to increase the traffic to their store.

Larissa Morimoto… of Pete Davidson in Japan, to go in and host this event. But what we didn't optimize for was the actual foot traffic. And this was before the London campaign, by the way. So we took all these learnings and we keep on iterating. But we didn't optimize for foot traffic specifically because Kamuri's profile was very, very discreet and he didn't want anybody that he didn't know in the audience to randomly show up and potentially interact with him.

Larissa MorimotoAnd so we kept it very, very limited to 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 …