Run paid ads from the start alongside organic growth

Yuliya Lennox… There is no magic bill to go viral obviously. But if you find something that doesn't exist yet, this is where your potential for organic is huge. And this is why I will talk about it later, but this is why finding something unique is 50% of your success. And with both these apps, it was very fun experience to have just money flowing in without, and you didn't have to rely only on being profitable day-to-day to actually grow the company.

Yuliya LennoxBut it is a double-edged sword. And if you think that it'll make you super happy to have huge organics, at some point it'll play super against you because you will see that, for example, you start with the US because you know English and you are an American person and there is no niche that would cover all the people that leave. So you need to find your niche. And at some point your niche will be all your Instagram following, TikTok following. Everybody who could have joined in five years, they will all join. And you will see that your organic stagnates. And for example, you will be like, "Oh, I want to sell my company. I want to show them great results." But your organic is already very stable and you cannot show growth. So you're like, "Oh, I will go into paid marketing Because my product is so good, everybody likes it and I can get even more money by promoting it."

Yuliya Lennox50% of the time it will be cannibalization and you will not know what to do with it. And if at any point you will have investors and people pushing you to grow, it'll be very, very hard to grow without just bringing in the same money but spending more. And I have noticed it a couple of times now, this is a sad story, sad lesson, but it is a very nice feeling at first, but then you have to think about the future or always think what will be happening five years ahead. So with Replika, it was fun because it was also super ahead of its time. And in five years we didn't know that it would become super commodity because ChatGPT will be there and everybody will be doing these wrappers and stuff. So you cannot predict that all this organic will, for example, drop.

Yuliya LennoxAnd when you are building performance marketing, performance is more or less stable. You see every day what you are getting, you are adjusting, you are obviously stressed out every day, but in the same time you can influence it with organic, you cannot influence it per se. So what do you need to do? You like, "Okay, Yuliya, you just told a situation, what's the solution for it?" Yes. So what you need to do is when you start a brand, start with performance marketing as well, because it'll definitely help you grow your organic as well. So every ad that you're showing on TikTok or on Facebook, it is bringing you new subscribers. And for example, with EWA where we have a 10 million Instagram, probably seven million Instagram, it was just a small idea and we started it and we started getting a lot of people from the ads that were just coming for free.

Yuliya LennoxAnd then when you became a big Instagram account, you became also organically... So it grew up your organic. So a lot of people are thinking, is PR important? Is putting out things on TechCrunch? And I don't know PR, so I don't know. Is going on TV important? It is not for your performance, but in the end, it will bring you a lot of organic. But it is all only possible if you have something unique to offer to people and that's it. So if you are …