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Affiliates exploded this AI Startup to $100k mrr in 223 days!

Affiliates exploded this AI Startup to $100k mrr in 223 days!

PLUS: learn to market like an Onlyfans model

Startup Spells 🪄
April 06, 2024

Hey,

The Startup Maester is here!

Welcome to the very first issue.

Today's topics:

Affiliates skyrocket growth of an AI startup
How many accounts does a single Onlyfans model own?
A tool to go down the rabbit hole of Reddit
One recommended video on how to win

An AI Startup used these growth hacks in the 1st AI Wave (text-to-text) to grow incredibly fast.

The 2nd AI Wave (text-to-image) used a few different hacks that we’ll cover later.

But, the 3rd AI Wave (ai agents) is upon us.

You can copy the playbook laid out here if you’re building for the 3rd wave.

1. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing works if you help affiliates make a lot of money through a generous referral plan. Incentives rule the world. And money is a powerful incentive.

Copy AI's best move was to give a really generous affiliate plan. They gave away 45% on every referral for a year.

Let's say you bring them 10 referrals. They are gonna pay you $49 x 45% x 10 = $49 x 4.5 = $220.5/mo.

Copy AI affiliate program source: https://affiliates.copy.ai/apply

This allowed everyone on Twitter go crazy by sharing their affiliate links to make money. Even today people share it if you search for copy.ai?via= on twitter.

Copy AI affiliates sharing their affiliate url on twitter to make some money

Mind you, the first link doesn't look like copy.ai because they are using a url shortener. when you click on that link, it goes to copy.ai?via= url.

Lots of youtubers made videos on copy ai spamming affiliate links everywhere to the point where people were complaining about it asking "how legit the tool is?" on blackhatworld forums.

Copy AI affiliates sharing their affiliate url by making youtube videos

They probably contacted specific youtube influencers in the copywriting niche to make videos on it.

Their affiliate marketing strategy was soo good that I kept seeing it in forums like blackhatworld & other not-so-well-known places on the internet.

2. Yearly Pricing by Default

Yearly plan is switched on by default. You have to toggle a button to see the monthly plan.

Yearly plan is priced at $35/month ($420/year) & monthly plan at $49/month.

This helped them reduce churn & make people used to the tool since they have already paid for it a year.

It also gave them upfront cash to reinvest in marketing efforts till they raised vc money!

yearly pricing source: https://twitter.com/chris__lu/status/1403114410982395906

3. Do Good

Positivity is contagious. Mr. Beast grows his YouTube channel by giving away free stuff.

Copy AI Founder did the same.

copy ai is free for non-profits source: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1384966950082777091

They gave many free accounts to students, non-profits & first-time entrepreneurs.

copy ai is free for non-profits source: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1384966950082777091

They extended the same courtesy to people who lost their jobs due to covid.

copy ai is free for the unemployed

4. Product as Marketing

They kept launching again & again with fun tools like a .com domain finder & a make more tool.

copy ai dot com domain tool source: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1349406675766276096

copy ai make more tool source: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1353031139854864390

You can see their free ai tools at copy.ai/tools.

They give away the tool for free, just like ahrefs, so users can try it themselves & get a dopamine hit faster.

source: https://twitter.com/BrianNorgard/status/1316022238408175619

5. Webinars with Influencers

They did webinars with influencers like pat flynn, the founder of smart passive income, to gain a portion of his audience.

Pat has 163k twitter followers, 290k youtube subscribers, & 6 businesses.

pat flynn webinar with copy ai source: https://superpeer.com/blake/event/webinar-grow-your-personal-brand-w-pat-flynn

Pat's audience got a 30-day free trial instead of a 7-day free trial & a whopping 40% off of first year.

special deal for pat flynn's audience source: https://www.copy.ai/spi

Who doesn't want 40% off? This goes back to the yearly plan which helps in reducing churn & gives you a long-time to make yourself familiar with the product.

They did similar webinars with others as well.

Onlyfans is a volume game

Startup boys get tired after marketing just 1 time to 100 people.

But not Onlyfans girls.

They use 10+ phones, multiple mobile proxies with anti-detect browsers like Dolphin Anty, & operate 100s of aged-Reddit accounts while simultaneously interacting with other models in their same niche like an engagement pod to get the upvotes party going.

A short 12-second video on China's Click Farm. Exactly how you manipulate the public on a massive scale to buy from you.

The best marketers operate in the adult niche. Learning from adjacent industry is such a game-changer. Not enough people do it.

Imagine SaaS boys marketed like Onlyfans girls operating 100s of Reddit accounts at the same time. It'll be so easy to get to $10k mrr by manipulating the social media algorithm.

Either you use Big Tech or the Big Tech uses you. Your choice.

A tool to go down the rabbit hole of Reddit

Avanka's Sayit is a tool that allows you to go down the rabbit hole of Reddit with a few searches.

It isn't updated for a long time so it has many banned subreddits but it works well enough to find subreddits.

If you're an entrepreneur looking for subreddits to join, just search "Entrepreneur" at https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/

avanka sayit entrepreneur

For more inspiration, search for "onlyfans" to find onlyfans creator-related subreddit, "crypto" to find crypto enthusiasts, "programming" to find coding subreddits, "chatgpt" to find ai-related subreddits, or "hollywood" to find hollywood-related subreddits.

Reddit has niche subreddits for everything from “feet” to “saas“.