Run paid ads cut by an agency from creators' raw footage

David BarnardSo much of what you did was UGC and trying to go viral, but did you take any of those videos and turn them into paid? And did you do any paid as you grew?

Brett BaumanWe tried and we don't do it anymore. I think that it's something that I would like to try again, but under our model, what would've been success for us was being first purchase profitable on the ads and we weren't able to get there. I think that looking back, it could be part of the market that you're advertising towards, but it also could be that, I don't know, Zack, I'm curious what you think of this, but I feel like neither of us took a ton of ownership there to really spend more than half our time or more than half our time on it. And so we kind of just slowly didn't get anywhere. And if we did it again, I feel like we could figure it out.

Jacob EitingYou kind of need, I mean, maybe not a full-time person, but I mean, you should always be doing growth and product all the same time. And so you can split that up. Maybe each of you is doing half growth, half product, or one person doing product, one person doing growth or engineering and product, however you want to split it.

Zack Hargett… it was certainly underexplored. I think it's hard. We worked with some very good and solid people, but it's hard outsourcing some things to an agency, because I think the incentives, generally speaking of an agency, I heard someone put it this way, is like, they will do enough to keep you happy, but they're never going to be as invested. And so I think aligning incentives in some really sharp way around performance marketing is a good idea.

Zack HargettOne thing that surprised me is we always thought you could just pour fuel on the fire. So those videos that are getting 30 million views, let's assume they convert well. Well, let's just run ads behind it. Why would it not work just as well? Surprisingly, that wasn't really our experience, that when we worked with an outside agency to do clips, so we would have basically B-roll and raw videos that were unedited from the same content team that was posting, and then we would upload that into a Google Drive and share that with a clip agency. They would chop it up and kind of make something specific to performance marketing that those, as a creative, that cohort outperformed our more organic approach. I found that really interesting because I always assume you could just pour fuel on the fire. With that said, we still really weren't able to get ads to work, and it's something that I think we can invest in the future.

David BarnardTargeting students, I imagine, made that especially hard. I'm honestly surprised at the whole story of Coconote in that college students and high school students are famously hard to monetize. So let's dig into how did you get kids to pay for your app and what was the price and did you experiment with pricing?