🪄 How Koreans win Pitch Competitions

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 46th issue.

Today's topics:

1. How Koreans win Pitch Competitions

2. A tool to Access AI Models with Pay As You Go Pricing

3. One recommended video on How to Win by Daniel Gross

How Koreans win Pitch Competitions

A Korean startup founder was stuck at $2k MRR while he was doing a pitch competition.

His advisor gave him the most epic advice. The advisor told him that his traction, product, and story didn't really matter.

"In Korea, all you have to do is say you're from SF and add as many pictures of famous entrepreneurs as possible to your pitch deck to win the pitch."

So the founder, while sceptical, did what the advisor said and made the ugliest PowerPoint while name-dropping the biggest Entrepreneurs:

"We are built on top of OpenAI, which was founded by ELON MUSK"

"Invested by Jason Calacanis, he invested in UBER, ROBINHOOD, CALM"

Not only did he win that pitch competition but he won several others making approximately ~$50,000 in non-dilutive funding.

You can see the slides for yourself:

The funniest part was no judge in the panel spoke English.

They'd stare at the founder making the pitch until Elon Musk's face showed up and then they would scribble things down on the notepad.

And then, the founder would win the competition.

The point is every startup, marketing channel, social media or a pitch competition has an underused exploit that will make you win.

You just have to find what it is for you. There are only going to be a finite set of variables that you have to tweak but once you tweak them right, you will win bigly.

For Instagram, the tweaks are 4x reels per day while having a nice hook and a looped-video if possible. Someone went from 0 to 650,000 followers in 2 months with a new account using this trick.

For TikTok, its kinda like Instagram but there are trends and music going viral which you can replicate to get more reach. Or it used to be tutorial videos that got more saves years ago.

For X, the tweaks are images and videos with a hook. With the new algorithm replicating TikTok, followers won't matter as long as the storytelling is good. But currently, I'm seeing BREAKING NEWS tweets doing well in recommended sections just like many years ago, just putting anime in your tweet used to make it go viral. I bet they will push Long Form articles soon.

The above list is non-exhaustive but you have to find the few tweaks that will give you leverage. This is how influencers like Logan Paul and Josh Richards grew initially.

Hat Tip to David Park for sharing his story.

A tool to Access AI Models with Pay As You Go Pricing

Russians are underrated in the online space. I'm a noob at this but a friend sent me a tool named GPTunnel.

This tool has a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

You can use ChatGPT-4, Claude Opus 3, Midjourney 6, Stable Diffusion 3 and many more tools in the same interface. It has incredible plugins like Marketer, Logo Designer, SQL Geek, and much more.

One recommended video on How to Win by Daniel Gross

This video is mind-blowing.

Its one of those Lindy Talks that covers the basics of how to maximize output.

The guy giving the talk looks so young but gave the most incredible speech.

The intro is real good:

"Sleep, Food, Exercise, Mind, and Leadership is kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of sorts to Startup Success where you can only tackle the stuff at the bottom after you tackle the basics."

This advice is good even if you are not doing Startups. So many people give up sleep when its a terrible long-term play.

Tweet of the day

If you are on Linkedin, do this to get more traffic to your site with 1 change.

LinkedIn is getting serious competition from X as X has recently launched Long Form articles.

This is good for creators to build their off-platform list.

Rabbit Holes

1. How James Clear is Writing His Next Book - James Clear is not only the habits guy but he is a master at SEO, Titles, and Writing. He gave a bunch of tips in this post that went unnoticed but what I liked are the screenshots of his next book. "If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly." ~ David Hackworth.

2. 🏹 How Tweet Hunter Became a Million Dollar Juggernaut - Tweet Hunter success story is interesting. It went viral on X because of X algorithm recommending similar tweets. They even created official engagement group which helped a bunch of people easily. Fortunately, they survived the X's $42,000 per month low-blow because their MRR was past $100k at the time. Its probably $200k-$500k by now.

3. I'm Bearish OpenAI - This might be the most interesting perspective I've read in a while. The problem of OpenAI compared to other AI companies like Google, Meta, XAI is that OpenAI doesn't have a billion-dollar cashflowing empire. And its terrible in the AI world where you need to burn a ton of money. Their headstart is what's keeping them in the competition but it might not last long.

Startup of the day

Exploding Insights makes it easy to find profitable market-tested ideas from marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, Shopify Apps, Chrome Extensions, etc...

Currently, it supports only Fiverr but a bunch of other marketplaces are work in progress.

The genius of this idea is you can spot early trends and build something in that niche for which people are already paying for. Copycat startups are the way to go.

Here's how I'd grow this:

1. Make 1000s of Programmatic SEO pages for 1 niche. If it uses AI, group them under AI pages like explodinginsights.com/ai/girlfriends as AI Girlfriends are trending. Now every single subpage like girlfriends can be used with boyfriends, writers, and every other problem. You don't have to think how to do it. Just steal the structure from theresanaiforthat.com and use Google Indexing software like google-indexing-script. For Programmatic SEO, this is all you need.

2. Use StarterStory's Lean SEO framework to rank on ideas. The entire StarterStory website is a goldmine for it. This product combined with StarterStory's SEO is a match made in heaven. If possible, do partnership with StarterStory for 50% cut as they have the perfect audience for it. The same goes for partnerships with Indiehackers and all Entrepreneurial communities.

3. Search for every "market research" article on Google using SEMRush, Ahrefs, or simply use Google to find articles ranking for that term. Exploding Topics ranks for it so send them an email to add it to the list. Do this for every keyword you want to target.

4. Do Bottom of Funnel SEO on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Hire creators who know how to go viral but are small. A good framework for TikTok that can be used on every other video platform. Basically, copy Tabs marketing strategy.

5. Build free tools for entrepreneurs like domain name generator, startup idea generator, viral X post generator.

6. Combine all of this with FB Ads targeting members of The Hustle Group. There are blackhat ways to this but partnership seems like a better solution.

Rank this by ease of execution and potential ROI. I'd personally go with pSEO first and then build free tools to get backlinks by launching over and over again on Startup Directories like Product Hunt while going viral on X, TikTok, LinkedIn by making something gimmicky like Viral Post Generator.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. How To Build Viral Clones (LINK)

2. The Permissionless Apprenticeship (LINK)

3. Hijack Attention (using Pattern Interrupt) (LINK)

Disclosure: Everything said in this post is for educational purposes only. Please follow the law. By reading this post, you accept full responsibility for your actions.