#55 Bobby Ghoshal — 100M+ TikTok views with sticky notes and sharpies (a viral marketing masterclass)

All right, cool. So I first saw Dupe on Twitter with your viral video. It was a sticky note. You guys might have seen this. Listeners might have seen this. It was a sticky note goes into it. You got Nikita Beer kind of featuring it and it blew up the internet. We talked for a bit. I, I jumped on, helped make a couple street interviews. I love Dupe. My wife and I love duping things. So would love to hear more about kind of your viral marketing strategies for Doop and tell the audience, you know, people who aren't familiar, who somehow live under a rock, what is Doop?

Well, go to doop.com immediately if you haven't heard it, especially if you're buying furniture. It's going to change your life. You're going to save a ton of cash. It's basically a visual search engine. We do visual similarity searches on products across the internet, millions of products. How people use it, they either go shopping online and they see a product that they really like and they type dupe.com, D-U-P-E.com, in front of the product URL, or they're on their phone. And this is the videos that you did for us walking around New York. They take photos of things, whether it's furniture, clothes, what have you. And we help them find that product for as low price as possible. But honestly, a lot of people use it to find higher quality products too. They take photos of stuff in the real world and they want to get like the OG and they're willing to spend, you know, thousands of dollars on it. And we help them. We call that duping up, like we help them find those products. So yeah, like it's, it's, it's gone bananas viral, which is Awesome. We launched this thing 3 months ago. We have 2 million shoppers on the platform, grown completely organically. I don't know if you saw this, Jason Levin. We were on the Today Show a week ago. Did you see this?

I did see it.

It's the most bananas thing. Like, how? Like, that's just crazy. That was crazy. So yeah, we were on the Today Show. I'm so grateful for the launch. Like, these are, you know, it's been a 3-year journey to get to this point. We came through another product called Carrot. We pivoted that product. It was a AI shopping assistant. We built this one feature in that product called DealHop. It was our AI deal finder. And we basically pulled that feature out of, out of Carrot and pivoted it into, into dupe.com. So wild 3 months, and I'm having the most fun that I've ever had building a startup. It's, it's nice to have something successful.

All right.

And this one's pretty successful right now.

So I'll take it. It's so much fun to use. And I, so when I was filming those videos, I was with a friend and he had a pair of, you know, Nikes. Actually, they look kind of like your shirt floral, right? But Nike makes so many different, different models. And it was like, you know, 5, 6 years ago. And we were like, he was like, what is this model? Like, I don't know. I've never been able to look. And now, boom, you know, we found his, whatever they were, tie-dye 2005 special one from StockX or something.

That's it.

You could buy the exact one. And that is for like a sneakerhead or somebody like that, so sick to be able to do that on a friend's sneakers or whatever.

Oh yeah, so nice. Um, dude, I love it. I love these stories. People dupe like really weird shit too. Like they try and dupe— man, it's crazy. Like we see people trying to dupe like their exes. Like they put up photos of their ex. It's weird, man. In the internet, look, once you hit millions of users, the weird— you get the weirdest people coming out of the woodwork. So, you know, I'd say finding a floral shirt is just a day's work, no problem. You know, we definitely have like harder searches that happen on the platform, but it's been kind of fun.

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the viral marketing ideas that you had. Was there a lot of iteration to get to the sticky note? I mean, I saw the other day you posted your entire marketing budget you spent on sticky notes and Sharpies at Target. I was like, that is how you do it. That is organic.

This is my marketing budget right here, baby. Let's go. So, so it started with sticky notes because I really don't— I didn't want to be on camera. I don't really use social media a lot outside of Twitter, like, or X. I actually use that to connect with smart people. But I didn't want to be on camera because I just didn't know how to talk about the product, really position the product. I tried 3 sticky notes, I think 3 or 4 sticky notes. The first one used a brand name like, here's how to get Brand X's products for less, right? And then I tried— actually, dude, I've got— I've literally got all of my sticky notes on my desk. Like, every single thing that I've ever tried is just here. Let's see. So here, I'll show you a few that just like didn't work. All right. So is this in reverse or can you actually read this?

It's in reverse.

It's in reverse. Okay, let me read it. It says, interior designer showed me how she gets furniture for a steal. My mind is absolutely blown. Didn't work. Too many words. Then I tried. So this one actually did work. I'll save that one. I stumbled into this kind of crazy interior designer secret and I'm shook. That didn't work. Too many words. Rumors have leaked that interior designers use this hack for furniture. This one kind of worked. So I tried a few different things and then like, two that I tried, this is one of them. So this one is going to go into a frame. If Dupe gets to where I need it to be. This one says my interior designer just showed me this... What the fuck? Question mark exclamation mark. So that got like 17 million views. Super crazy. And then the The first one to go viral said, I fell for a furniture price scam and I built this to fight back. And like, people love a good revenge story. And I think they stuck around past the hook to see what I built. And so what I essentially learned is you have to be spicy in your marketing. And like, my basic theory in marketing is like, no one likes lukewarm milk. You want hot milk or you want cold milk. And we chose hot milk, right? Like, lukewarm is like the worst milk. It tastes like shit. It feels like it's been sitting out all day. You know, it's kind of, eh, to drink. So we chose hot milk. We go super spicy and we have a ton of fun with our, with our Post-it note strategy. But eventually, I mustered up the courage to go up on camera. And the one on camera that really blew up, and again, I used what I learned from the Post-it notes, something spicy that builds anticipation. The one that went super viral of me in person is me saying, I accidentally revealed this shopping, this Pinterest shopping hack, and now it's going viral. And it's like, everyone wants to know what accidentally leaked. Like, oh, wow, this guy didn't mean to leak and it went super viral and I'm the only person who doesn't know about it. This is crazy. And then I paired it with these little props. I always have these like stupid props. I either—

nice.

So that, that hat in the background, I don't know if you can see that, like that hat right there. I wear that in some of my videos. I do all sorts of crazy shit to, to get people to stop scrolling. And about 10 to 20% of the time it works and the rest of it's just throwaway.

Yeah, you got to do what you got to do. I— it's funny that accidentally, quote unquote, that I've used that for Twitter and there's something about it. That just works really well. Actually, when I launched the Street Interview, I started with, I accidentally created a new business. And it's true because I accidentally did it. Like, that wasn't my intention. And people just love that story. And I've done that multiple times now. And it is, there's something about, I accidentally did blank. I also think a really good point there is the sticky notes, the short ones are the ones that did best, right? When you try to do too many words, like people, nobody's, ain't nobody got time for that, right? You need something hot.

No one's got time.

And then, yeah, dude, spicy, spicy or cold, right? Like, that's the whole point of Memes Make Millions, right? My book and the whole philosophy is like, you got to do spicy marketing. That's how you get attention, you know? And yeah, and while writing the book, you know, I studied the history of marketing and like, they've been doing spicy marketing forever, right? And now it's TikTok.

Let me tell you something. So there's this guy, there's this guy that I learned about when I was in— I was like, I want to say I was like 19 or 20 years old. This is when I was just breaking into design as a job, and I worked for an agency, and I read, I read like a maniac about Mad Men. This is when Mad Men the show was blowing up too. This is when I was coming up. And so I got so interested in like the psychology of, of kind of Mad Men advertising, and I started reading all these advertising books about it. I learned about this guy from an agency called Young and Rubicam, Y&R. I don't know if they're still around. They were, they were like one of the top 3 or 4 back in the day, along with like J. Walter Thompson and, you know, a few of those. So this guy, his name's Rosser Reeves. All right, this guy is just a genius direct marketer. And he talked about something that I didn't realize I internalized you know, back in like 2004 or whatever that I started doing in dupe videos and it stuck. And I'm gonna kind of pull a thread here. So he said when he does advertising, and remember this is from the days of TV where ads were 30 seconds to the mark. He said in a 30-second ad, you need to say your product name 3 times and that will assist in brand recall. Now, I didn't realize I was doing this on all of the Dupe content that I was doing where I was on camera, but I always lead with, make sure you go to dupe.com. That's dupe.com. So I actually like spell it out, dupe.com. That's dupe.com while I'm showing the URL. And then toward the end I say it a third time. So make sure you tell your friends about dupe.com and you're going to save a bunch of money on your next furniture purchase. Right. And when I went back and I looked at my videos, he like I was because I was trying to analyze what about these videos were working. And the thing that I noticed, the thing that blew my mind is not that I remembered it weirdly, like without remembering it. It's that when other people started talking about our product, they were using the same exact— oh, it's like, I found it on dupe.com, dupe.com. It's so weird. And, and, and, and it's not like you need to spell the word dupe. I mean, it's a 4-letter word. I mean, Gen Z knows how to spell the word dupe, but they were doing it, I think, because we do it in all of our ads. And there's this, this app that just got released called PodScan. Shout out to PodScan, man. What a killer product. They're basically a search engine on podcasts. I didn't even realize how many podcasts had mentioned dupe.com. That when I use this product, almost, I want to say every single mention of dupe.com was followed by dupe.com. And my mind just exploded. I was like, holy shit. Even when the Today Show talked about us, they said dupe.com, that's dupe.com. So it just totally blew my mind. So anyway, if you're in marketing, there's something there. All right, there's something in the 30-second spot. Just keep saying your product name 3 times, find the optimal moments to say it. And I think it's going to assist with brand recall.

I completely agree with that. And an added thing on there, your Twitter is Bobby from dupe.com, right? And it could have been just Bobby, your last name or whatever. Or maybe even anonymous, which like, obviously you don't want to do that. It's like, if you want to build trust, use your face. But, you know, what I'm saying is like, yeah, dude, like the repetition of it. And I've seen that with Memes Make Millions with other articles I've written. Like I wrote an article called Cringe is the New Cool, Embrace the Cringe. And, you know, I read that. Yeah, yeah, dude, seeing people say your words and your slogans, it is very powerful. And the world belongs to like slogan creators, whether it's an ad man, a marketing person, Elon, whoever, like creating words and slogans and then the repetition again and again and again and reminding people until it's in their head and they're saying it too. 100%. Yeah, it's pretty sick. I got to ask. Dupe.com, 4 letters. How much was that domain? I feel like that's got to be expensive domain.

I mean, look, even our investors are afraid to ask me this question. No one asked me this question. What I'll tell you, what I'll tell you is like we had a few months of runway and I blew up most of our cash on that domain. So it was, it was— I mean, I'm here now. I'm talking to you.

dupe.com, dude, that is That's so cool. That's so cool to know the value.

If you go to Google Trends and you just look up the word dupe on Google Trends for the last 10 years, it is literally a freaking rocket ship. It just goes through the— exactly, it goes through the roof. And that gave me the conviction to know that I needed to own the.com if I wanted this concept to go, especially because we're telling people to type the domain name in front of your product URL and you can't have a long domain name for that. So to compete with us, you basically need something as compelling, at least on that URL hack that reminds that, that people will remember. Uh, and then your marketing is going to have to be just as good, if not better, uh, at reminding them to use it. Right. I mean, it's like every day I wake up and I make a new video and the video is almost always the same. The hook is always different, slightly different. And the rest is exactly the same. And that repetition, if you're on Instagram or on TikTok and you run into that product, it's just going to— it seeps so deep. People reach out to me, they're like, yo, I've seen your ads everywhere. And it's like, I don't do ads. This is not— this is not an ad. We spend no money on marketing. Like, this is all organic. And they're like, man, but I've seen it everywhere. It's like, yeah, I don't know, man. The algorithm's weird. I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think speaking of that, the send ratio that you tweeted about. Yes, I found that really true. So I, you know, when I was going viral a lot on Instagram and spending a lot of time making those videos, I noticed the ones that were popping off were the ones that had an insane amount of sends to friends. Yeah. And I wish you could see that for Twitter. I hope they add that at some point because that's a really powerful kind of, you know, it's Twitter's proxy is bookmarks.

Twitter, Twitter's proxy is bookmark. That's their version of sends.

Yeah, but I send a lot of tweets to friends too, and I do feel like those are the super powerful ones. And I think they probably take that stuff into account, but you just can't see it. And so, um, I think whether it's making something really helpful like you do with Duke, um, like those videos, like everybody wants to help their friends save money, right? You're like tapping into something just so, you know, valuable where it's they want to save money. Everybody likes showing cool products, like you know, it's, uh, it's just a core thing where like you send it to your mom, you send it to your dad, like whoever, right? Um, yeah, it's pretty, pretty cool. Um, so I, I curious, did you think about doing paid ads or influencer, uh, campaigns, or, um, has that— did you think about that at all, or—

well, we did, we did paid ads with my— the last, the last version of this product, Carrot. Uh, we did, um, influencer marketing, and what I've learned about influencer marketing is it's mostly smoke and mirrors. It's not most influencers just don't have pull, um, in with their, with their audience, especially TikTok influencers. They really don't have pull with their audience. And so, uh, like, uh, as a knowledge bomb, like, one of the things that I'm doing now that, uh, I didn't do last year on the marketing side that's really working for us is we have a lot of accounts on TikTok. You don't know it. I don't talk about it, but they're run by people there. I wouldn't call them influencers. I would call them good creators who take direction really well. It's got their face, it's got their name, but all they do is make dupe content in, you know, in, in our vein, basically. They try and mimic our core account and then their content finds new audiences. And so we have multiple, like, I think what's going to end up happening by the end of summer, I'll probably have like 15 creators working for us and they're all going to post one video a day. We're going to have 15, 20, 30 posts a day go up and it's just going to spread on TikTok and I'll take the most viral one of the day and put it on Instagram the next day. So that's, that's going to be—

I'm seeing that strategy more and more. So I— we're running an account right now for Autopilot, which is, you know, the Pelosi trader, and it's just a totally separate account where like You know, every day we post and then they repost the best ones. And I'm also seeing that my friend runs a SaaS, you know, around like $60,000 MRR and it's all been via TikTok, all that stuff. And this month they have 15 different influencers, like you said, you know, all over the world in every, you know, geographic domain and different, you know, demographic, like running these accounts. And it's so sick.

You know, just to be clear, these are owned accounts by the company, right?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's the key. That's the key.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly. And so when they, you know, if the creator doesn't work out, take the account, put somebody else on it, you know?

Well, I mean, so we've had a few creators that didn't work out on our side, and I just sunset the account. I just move on. Yeah, because it's just— yeah, I don't, I don't give it to another creator. I want this other creator to have their own voice, their own personality, their own way to approach the problem. And I think like what I've found to be most helpful with them is I'm way more in the weeds when it comes to how to talk about our product because I'm trying more things because I'm more invested in the product. And so I just like feed them an article like just like as an example, last week, Business Insider broke a story about how much, you know, Dior pays for a handbag or whatever. And they're like, oh, Dior pays their manufacturer $57 for a $2,000 handbag that they sell to you. Right. Perfect. Love it. Exactly the kind of story we want. It's spicy. It's right. Like, it's like flies in the face of everything people think when they think high brand name equals, you know, high price, quality, all that shit. And so I sent it to all of our creators. I was like, here's your topic for the day. Go make a video about this. Right. And I kind of spoon-feed or—

That's so smart.

Exactly. And they're all making content about it. And like, great, boom, it's out there now. And so today, I sent them like a triangle chart, a pyramid chart of like the tiers of brands in the furniture space. And, and I sent them the image. And I was like, guys, here's your image of the day, go make content about this. And like, they all find their own little version of how to tell that story. And like, some of them just go insanely viral, like super, super viral. So and like, look, like most of the time it doesn't, it hits like 2 or 3,000 people and that's it. I think that's totally fine.

Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, you can't have everyone be a hit. Uh, it reminds me of, um, you know, Isaac, uh, from Samurai Swords. Uh, I had him on the podcast, Isaac Medeiros. He has a bunch of creators working for him, and very similar where you can't do it well without the founder being the creator first, right?

Yes.

You kill it because you know it better than them. And when somebody who's not a creator tries to manage creators, you get like, you know, shit. You get a bunch of shit. You get shit. Because they don't know what they're doing.

By the way, that is what I got for Carrot because I was not in the marketing world at all. I was in the paid ads world, which I don't consider marketing. That's just, you know, paid ads. But I was not doing our socials and it just literally, dude, our Carrot Instagram account I handed it over to our first, whatever, social media manager. It had, I handed it over with 900 followers. I was able to get 900 followers in like a month. This was back in 2021. Then the influencer, the social media person was able to grow it to like 1,100 over the course of the next 6 months. I was like, what? Like, why is this not working? This doesn't make any sense. Like this, this is a shopping product. It should be really fun to make viral content for it. Then I got another person to do social media. She grew another, like, I don't know, 400 or 500 people over the next 6 months. And then another person who grew another 3 or 4 people. And when I stopped focusing on Carrot, the reason I started doing social myself was frankly out of desperation. I needed to— I needed to understand why this was not working, because it works for everyone else. It should work for us as well. Our product is better. It's got a better brand. It's got everything going for it. And so I literally, I took the reins of it and I discovered all these little tactics. Like, for example, the send ratio. Like, you want to go viral on Instagram, you need a 2 to 4x send ratio to like ratio. The send to like ratio. Right? So for every 100 likes, you need 200 sends. If you don't have 200 sends, I don't care how good your video is. It's not going viral. Because that's what Instagram cares about. They care about our friends sending this to other friends because Meta is about friends, right? On TikTok, I discovered they care about a 50% retention rate at 5 seconds. If your video is at 50% or more at 5 seconds and a couple of things, they want a 10% engagement rate. So they— between likes and sends, they want 10% of viewers to engage the video. If you hit those two benchmarks, you'll go supernova. I, like, I had to be in the game to discover these little things. And luckily it happened very quickly because I tried a lot of shit that didn't work. And then eventually for the things that did work, they worked so big that I just was able to repeat it a few times. Right. And so I think if you're like a founder today, you've got to be a marketer. I mean, you have to know how these platforms work or, or go in with the knowledge that you're going to spend $10 CPMs to get access to these viewers on all of these platforms and raise adequate amounts of money to do that. But I look back at this, if I was to pay CPM on like the distribution we've gotten on Dupe in the last 3 months, I think we would have spent a million bucks on marketing. Yeah.

You spent a target run. And a Sharpie.

Exactly. Exactly. Like, exactly like $25, right? $25 and Sharpie and Post-it notes.

Yeah. And then paying those creators to run their accounts.

Totally.

How much, how much does that cost? I'm curious. Like, so we pay $100 a day.

We pay $100 a video and they do, and they do 30 videos a month. And for anyone, anyone that hits outlier, like millions of views, I bonus them.

Yeah, yeah. And they have Dupe in their bio, I assume?

Or no, no, no, no. Just to be clear, like, really? No, I don't need any of that.

Wow.

Really? Literally?

Yeah, I guess when you got Dupe.com, man, you know?

Oh, I mean, no, no, no, it's— but it's not even that. It's, it's— I don't care about their personal TikToks because TikTok is not a place to build community. We already know this. Like, TikTok followers don't build a relationship with the creators. Very few TikTokers have been able to do that, and not even that well. If you want that sort of relationship, YouTube is by far the best. You want that relationship, you go to YouTube. On TikTok, it's purely— I, at least I treat it as just a numbers game. I— what's my target for this? Like, I think I want to hit like 100 million views this month. So like, I don't know, like, can I do it? I don't know. But if we try enough things, probably.

Facts. That makes sense. Curious, what was it like working with Nikita? Big fan of his work. Big fan of his personality and goofiness. Yeah. Just curious, what was it like working with him?

Yeah. So it's one of the hardest things being a founder when you're building a company, like when we were building Carrot, uh, it's really hard to know what about your product is redeeming in the face of like 3 years of work where you're not hitting stratospheric growth. No one's really talking about the product. You have a contingent of very loyal users, but the contingent's too small. Like, we had a quarter of a million users there. It's just too small. And it's just like, well, if you're in consumer, if you don't have word of mouth, you're paying for your growth. And if you're paying for growth, you need to be making revenue. And we weren't really making that much money. So everything about it was wrong. So when we brought Nikita in, he had one job, really. We told him, find us anything in this product that is redeemable. And within, I want to say, a week, because he really spent some time in the product trying to understand it. We identified something that the Carat employees already knew, that we had built a feature called Deal Hop. Deal Hop was the most interesting feature. It was an AI deal finder. It was the stickiest feature. It was the most magical feature. It was also the reason people were signing up to Carat, but we put a lot of walls. Like, we needed you to install an app, sign up for an account, go through onboarding, set up the Safari extension, then go shopping, and then remember to hit the button. I mean, it was an insane amount of work. And what we did with Nikita was we redesigned the solution to invert the time to value from minutes to near zero seconds where you don't need an account, you don't need to sign to install anything and you still get value. And what ended up happening and the bet that we made, and honestly, when we were working through this with Nikita, we knew we were gonna rebrand. We were gonna call the company something else, this new product something else. Nikita had some thoughts, we had some thoughts, and Nikita didn't anticipate how bullish I was on this new concept that we bought dupe.com and we told him that we bought it and he had like a semi-mini freak out. He was like, dude, we haven't tested anything. That's crazy. I was like, well, fuck it. Let's just go.

Let's just go.

We're all in, all in here. This flow makes sense to me. The product makes sense to me. It feels magical. And for the URL hack to work, anything more than 4 letters and a.com is not going to work. And if you're picking 4 letters, you need the one thing that every Gen Z knows and shops for, which is bloody dupes. You go, you go get the.com for the dupe. And if you've got any shot of this working, that's going to help it. And I mean, he obviously was over the moon. He was like, fuck, this is the craziest thing. And like, okay, great, let's go for it. And look, ever since then, and he was very generous, like we didn't ask him to post his, his viral Twitter post. He actually messaged me on a Sunday afternoon. He's like, yo, I'm thinking about tweeting about you guys. You down for that? And I was like, yo, I don't, No, but what are you gonna say? He's like, I don't know. Leave it to me. I was like, alright. He puts it up. He's like, send me, send me your best TikTok video. And I sent him one of my Post-it ones. And then he put that up. And I shit you not, Jason Levin, my phone for 48 hours did not stop vibrating.

I lost it.

I was like, this is crazy. Like, the growth here is insane. Everyone talking about it. People are excited about it. I was expecting a lot more pushback from people. No one pushed back. Everyone was like really into it. And look, like Nikita made that happen. He injected the first dose of virality into the product. The challenge is because there are no network effects in the product and it's a single-player distribution model, we saw a huge spike and then a huge crash down, uh, 2 days, 2 days after that, but the tech sphere learned that we existed. So Nikita made that happen, and then we deployed the TikTok strategy of Post-it note, more Post-it note content and, and the human content, and that's now built this, like, huge, this huge traffic machine. And Nikita, we still work with him. We meet with him every other week. It's great.

That's awesome. Nikita is a legend. Absolute legend. It's cool, man. I feel like there's not much pushback. Everybody wants cheaper products, like, even my wife works at luxury, luxury fashion. Yeah, you know, ex-LVMH, now at another brand. And, you know, we're searching for cheaper dupes too, you know, like, hey, and, you know, it's how it goes, man. Like, everybody wants cheaper good clothes and furniture, etc.

So I would, I would kind of reframe what you're saying. It's people want their dollar to go further. We've been, we've been beat over the head for the last 3 years with everything costing more. There's a cost of living crisis, clearly, even in a market where we purport 3% unemployment. The employed people aren't making that much money. If you buy groceries, you know what I'm talking about. It's just really expensive to survive. And then people don't want to give up their standard of living. They still want to be surrounded by beautiful objects. How do you, how do you reconcile the two things? I can't afford these things, but I want these things. Something's got to give. And when you realize, and there's a reason we picked furniture, that was also something that we spent a lot of time talking internally about with Nikita, which is what is the right first category to to bulldoze. And we realized how much price variability existed in furniture, because so much of the furniture you buy is made in the same factory, sold under different names to different brands, and they all sell at different prices. Now, that pitch is one of our top performing videos on TikTok. Like, what I just said is one of our top— because when people realize that, they start sharing it with their friends and their mom and their granddad people who are about to buy furniture and make a mistake of overspending. And so there is a level of prudence that I think consumers want to feel like they're deploying in their shopping journey when it comes to furniture, because it's so costly. It's, it's one of the least confident purchases people will make. It is generally at like a point in their life where everything around them is, is expensive. You're moving into a new apartment, you need to buy shit for your apartment, you need to buy new groceries, new clothes, you're moving into a new city, everything's super expensive. You're redecorating your house, forget it, everything's too expensive. You're moving into a new home, everything's too expensive. Your kids are going off to dorm, you need to buy something for their dorm, or going off to university, you need to buy something for their dorm, everything's too expensive. It's like one of those moments in your life where everything is so expensive that any relief on that expense is going to feel like a blessing. And this is one of the things that people have resoundingly told us, which is, thank you so much. This is amazing. I've saved so much money. I'm telling everyone about this. That it's no mistake that that happened.

Yeah, you guys are getting rid of the information asymmetry. And I wrote an article about information asymmetries recently, like information asymmetries is how you get rich, right? And for, you know, a fashion company, they have that asymmetry of they're producing bags for a dollar, selling them for $100, right? Furniture the same. And nobody has any clue on furniture, right? It's clueless. It's how car repairmen screw over people, right? They just keep telling you shit that you need to fix and nobody knows about cars anymore because it's 2024. And so you guys are getting rid of that information asymmetry. And I think that's actually like a I'm going to do some journaling, a cool business model of what other information asymmetries are out there that we can now use technology to get rid of and fix that gap because people love it and everybody wants it. It helps people. Yeah. Yeah.

I think like pricing, pricing transparency in furniture, we've seen this in fashion. We've seen this in accessories. There's certain things where it's not as effective, like vintage stuff. Right? Like vintage stuff is generally speaking idiosyncratic, bespoke, you know, like you buy a vintage piece of furniture. That's a piece unique or a one of one. And it's like, well, I don't— what is this worth? It's worth whatever this person is selling it for. And if I have money, I will buy it.

Right?

You buy a vintage watch, same thing. It's like, what is this worth? Whatever this person is selling it for? Is it tuned correctly? Does it work? Are they going to give me a warranty? There's all sorts of questions that come into mind when you, when you buy vintage. But if you're not buying vintage and you're buying contemporary, price transparency is a huge consumer leverage point. And I truly believe this is very powerful, not just for consumers, but for businesses. I mean, we drive tens of thousands of clicks to small businesses who can't compete on Google because it's so bloody expensive to show up at the top of their ads because you're competing with every major retailer. How do you do that? And we'll drive the clicks for free. Why? Because for us, it's just like, yo, if, if users feel like they found this valuable, whether or not we make money on this one purchase, they're going to tell 5 other people and those people are going to buy something where we make money. And like, that's our model and it works. And that's how we've, we've, we've been, I mean, we became profitable a month and a half into launching Doop and we've remained profitable. We're profitable. This is in, in our history, a huge deal. Because we weren't making money for 3 years and then now suddenly we're profitable. Why is that true? Zero time to value, magic in the product, high word of mouth, no CAC, extreme value for the user, right? Like all of these things came into being and created this like this machine that is growing itself, which is pretty dope.

I mean, that's how VC-backed companies are supposed to do it, right? You know, like take a few years, figure shit out. Lose some money and then you better figure it out eventually. And you're killing it. That's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, look, there was also no guarantee that we were going to figure anything out. You know, I think we made some bold bets in the past that didn't work out. I think you want to stay alive. That is rule number one of entrepreneurship. Do not die.

Yeah. Paul Graham.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Stay alive. And if you don't die, and you maintain your level of intensity and you show up with a level of motivation that you had on day zero when you first had your initial idea and you have partners to boot that honestly believe in you. And this is one of the things like, you know, at Carrot and Dupe, our investors, there's just a belief that we're going to figure it out. They haven't gotten in the way. They've been patient. That's very important in business is to be patient. The impatient plan almost never works. See Groupon. That they had an impatient plan, it just didn't work. And build solid foundations, report on things that are not working, learn from those things and move fast. And those things, I think, for the last 3 years have really helped us get to this point with Dupe. It was a lot of lead bullets, no silver bullets. We tried a lot of things that didn't work. One of the big things that helped us interestingly is niching down, like picking one category, furniture. It helped our marketing. It helped the website. It helped show users exactly how to extract value from us in the moment. It helped the algorithms on social media because they, you know, Instagram and TikTok send our content to people who are already looking for furniture. Like so many people have said, oh my God, this video found me at the right time. I moved into a new apartment. It's like, actually, That wasn't magic. That was Instagram. They know you moved into a new apartment and they connected dots that we didn't connect.

They connected. It's crazy. My wife, as we were getting married closer and closer, she started getting wedding stuff. After marriage, she's already getting like baby stuff and like, it's like, how the heck? Oh my God. Did you guys know that she posted these wedding photos?

Like, 100%.

Crazy. It's crazy. It's amazing though. It's very cool. I love that.

It's amazing. But you've got to know, you've got to know how to jiu-jitsu that algorithm in your favor. And if you're everything to everyone and you're lukewarm milk, it ain't gonna work, baby. You're wasting your time. Been there, done that. It didn't work.

I think that's true for Twitter as well. Not to the same degree. But the, you know, smaller accounts in general, like as growing, like, the more you focus in on one niche, once you're like huge, you know, like Bill Ackman or Elon, they could talk about whatever they want. But like, you know, under 100 or under 200, 300K, like I, you know, I try to talk really only like memes, startups, marketing, like that's it. You know, like that's, that's it. And when I try to talk about some random other shit like history books that I read, like it just doesn't do as well. Like unless I incorporate it into tech. Or, you know, earlier I tweeted about how I used to do psychedelics in college and like, I didn't really relate it well. And I didn't talk about like psychedelics, like it just doesn't do well, you know? And so people get pissed off sometimes about playing into the niche, but I don't know, personally, I love exploring this vertical that I'm in. I love my niche and I will never get tired of it. And if I want to tweet other stuff, I have other accounts for that. Right. You know, I've had a lot of people. Oh, it's, it, it really, uh, like, why can't I grow on Twitter? And it's like, dude, you're tweeting about basketball, like every other tweet, man. Like, obviously your startup isn't going to grow from your Twitter if you're tweeting about— have a second Twitter. Stop that.

What are you about? I think that's a good way to put it. You know, if someone, even I'm not good at this on Twitter yet, you know, like if you compare our, my company Instagram to my personal Twitter, my personal Twitter is still kind of all over the place. I make fun of politicians, and I make fun of, you know, certain F1 drivers and cricket, and then throw in some marketing shit in there. Like, I'm 100% with you. I'm so capped on the ceiling because I use Twitter as like my literal— my brain just thought, put it out there. And that's not the way to use Twitter. But if you look at, at our Instagram, it is— it has one job. It does one thing. It tells you 'Why you should use Dupe today.' That's it. That's all it does. And, you know, it's grown to over 200,000 followers and, you know, tens of millions of views and likes. And like, it happened because that is like, people know what to expect from, from that account. So I'm 100% with you on this. I think you're right.

Yeah. I wonder if almost a theme page on Twitter might do well. I've been really fascinated by those recently. I've been trying to buy a couple. And I'm building one myself because they won't sell me their goddamn pages. But, you know, like, I'm trying to build a cyberpunk kind of style one. I wonder if a, you know, a beautiful furniture aesthetics, you know, page where it's 3 tweets a day and that's it, and you're starting to share that from your account, maybe getting other people to— I've seen that work really well. I know George Mack, he has an advertising page and like it's anonymous. Nobody knows it's him, but if You know, he retweets every post. Other page retweets his stuff.

Yeah, I mean, they have like the— what, the car dealership guy, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Talk about exactly that. The marketing guy. There's a new guy every fucking week. Like, dude, a new category gets unlocked. The gamer guy.

It's smart. No, at the end of the day, or just a second page where it's just beautiful furniture, you know, like, right, every day the aesthetic of it. And it's smart because sometimes you do just want to tweet your bullshit. You want to just talk your shit, like, and have fun and like I don't want to do every post super serious marketing stuff. Like sometimes I like to talk about whatever with my wife or, you know, goofy stuff. Right. So, yeah.

I mean, like some folks like Nikita, for example, has his whole zeitgeist is shitposting. Like, you know, he's the best at it on Twitter, like hands down, period. And then he's, it's so funny. He's part of this like cabal of Twitterati, like the Twitterati. It's like him and Sahil Bloom and you know, Sam Parr and Sean Puri and like all these people that all have podcasts and stuff. And it's so interesting how each of them have their own— the character in the game, right? Like Sahil's like the positive motivator, ice, you know, ice baths and super fit, handsome, great hair. And then like, you know, Sam Parr kind of shits on people a little bit. But like, you know, Sean is like the I'm gonna break your brain today with some new, interesting fact that's going to make you see things a little bit differently based on, you know, all the conversations he has. So I do think those guys have blown up on Twitter because they follow exactly what you're saying. They have a raison d'être of why they exist. And people know exactly when they point to their accounts, like, oh yeah, this is the guy that makes me feel good. On days where I don't believe in myself. Thank you, Sahil, or Oh yeah, that's the guy who unblocks my creativity because he just gave me a new framework, right? Like Sean is the framework guy. And then like Nikita is just like the shit poster. So this is the guy that's gonna make me laugh no matter what. I know whatever he puts out there, I'm just gonna giggle. He's making fun of someone today. And so that's, yeah. And it seems to work.

Yeah, it is. And you know, even Nikita, he does post quite a lot of growth stuff too. And so that's kind of been my strategy where it's like, Smart threads, dumb memes. Like, have fun, do the smart posts, but also just like have fun, make goofy tech memes. And tends to work pretty well in the long term. But there's this idea of like your job to be done, right? And I forget who I read that post from. Maybe Torenberg, maybe Eric Torenberg. I forget. Maybe it was one of the A16Z people. But like, you know, everybody has this job to be done, right? And so, you know, take, take power in that job. I try to give marketing frameworks, me marketing, stuff like that. Speaking of that, actually, I wanted to ask you as well, I saw you're hiring, trying to potentially replace yourself.

Yeah.

What does that mean? What is it? How are you doing that?

I do all the design in the company and it's expensive from, you know, a kind of mental resource perspective. I'm doing design, I'm doing marketing, I'm, you know, helping, you know, whether I'm talking to investors or finding new partners for, let's just say it's too, I'm too spread thin. And design is too important to have only like 15 or 20% of my effort and mind. It is going to be and is currently a competitive advantage of our product and platform. People really like how simple it is to use, how it looks, how it feels. And I don't wanna lose that edge. I, I want that to always be a competitive advantage. So I'm hiring, uh, let's call it like a founding designer to come in and take the reins from me. Um, and, and do it in a way that I would, you know, maximal intensity, uh, thoughtful, right? Yeah. Like just like really like, like finding, finding glitches in the matrix that no one else is thinking about where it comes to user experience and stuff. Like the URL hack that we came up with, you know, there's probably like 5, 10, 15, 15 of those out there that we haven't even had time to think about. So that's what I mean by kind of firing myself. Like I need to fire myself from this design role so that someone can do that and I can actually focus on building a really, really massive business because that's the ambition.

Yeah, I'm going through that right now with some of my work as well where, all right, you know what, maybe having a video editor is a good idea. Like I was trying to do it all myself because I was trying to save money and do it perfect. And it was like, just let go of something sometimes. Like, you want to focus on having a great conversation and reading and doing the research behind a podcast and stalking their Twitter. And you don't want to focus on the video editing, right? So yeah, yeah, replacing yourself is important. It's hard to do.

Look, like, like if I can, can automate it in the next 3 years, you probably don't want to be doing it.

Yeah. Yeah, dude. I tweeted that the other day, like, God grant me the serenity to accept the things, or not work on the things that AI will replace.

Holy shit. That's a great tweet, dude. That's, I didn't see it, but yeah, we're on the same page. That's a great tweet.

I appreciate it. I'll send it over. I'm curious, design co-founder or just being a design founder. I saw you tweet the other day about Jordan, Jordan Singer. Dude is insane. Um, and, uh, I also have another friend. He's a design co-founder kind of guy. Um, absolute legend. Uh, what are your thoughts? What should we be bullish on design founders if I'm an investor? Like, oh, this guy doesn't know how to code. What's, what's your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I think, so first of all, I think Jordan falls into a different camp because he's both an engineer and design engineer.

Yeah.

So, so I think designers just have this like very potent superpower where they can make something feel very real, very quickly, faster than engineers can. And you know, that's not to say that there are definitely many engineers out there that can work really fast and build, build products, but there's something about holding a prototype in your hands where you just get a sense of what that future looks like without writing a single line of code. You basically de-risk engineering. And all of the engineering effort by just showing someone a sense of how something might work while retaining all of the things that the consumer is going to value in the journey. Like having a sense of both of those things is really hard for engineers to do. It's just, you know, not to stereotype, but it just is what it is. I mean, look, my co-founder at Dupe, who's our CTO, has the special gift of having an intuition for the user. And so that is an insane advantage because I could die tomorrow and this product would still be good, right? Without him, like, I would never worry. Like, I think because he just has a— he has that sense, but he's honed his craft for many years in that vein, and he's worked with a lot of great designers. For a long time to help him hone that craft. But like, look, most engineers just don't talk to users in that way. And I think design founders can find, like I was mentioning, the glitches in the matrix. They have this like user intuition that understands, has a sense for things a user might want without the user understanding it themselves. For example, this URL hack on dupe.com. Typing dupe.com in front of a product URL is a very weird product feature to bring to market. But when you get the sense that users, like if you have the product intuition to know that actually users are going to think that this is magical because they've never seen anything like it, they'll want to try it. And then we're going to blow them away with the results where they realize they don't need an account. They can do it on any device. They could do it on any product and it all just kind of works magically. It's going to create a very fascinating, sticky experience. I don't know that an engineer would come up with that per se. I think you need a sense of like a design intuition on— sorry, the consumer intuition that most designers tend to have. So when I say bullish on design founders, that's what I mean. Just having, having a faster path to understanding what consumers want.

I love that. I really do. I was at the Cooper Hewitt yesterday, a design museum in New York. Design museums are my favorite. I went to one in London, London Design Museum, whole like, you know, room of Apple, old Apple stuff. It's just like designers think different. And I didn't realize this until, you know, Figma is a thinking tool. It's not just a design tool. Like, oh my God, my friend, my, my best friend Shane, he, you know, he's a designer. He, you know, invites me to do this FigJam. Like, I didn't know that was a thing before Figma. Like, I, oh my God, this is, this is so cool. Like, this is a new way of thinking for me. And I've, I've really been enjoying it. I feel like every, every marketer actually should, should know some Figma. At least be pretty decent to come up with ideas before you go, like, you know, put in some serious time, I think, I think it's a helpful thing. And definitely, yeah, every founder, like before you go pay an engineer, before you make the engineer go do all that hard work, at least getting something on Figma.

Yeah. Like put, putting something in your hand on a device that feels real and that you can do in an afternoon. I don't know. That feels like a superpower. That's like the fastest way to align a group of people as well.

Yeah.

Right. And so, yeah, like that is, that is why I'm just like, I've always been long design founders. And like, yeah, I think like designers who are focused on more look and feel, like I think that there's a time and place for that. I think what I'm really talking about when I say design founders is systems thinking, how does this, how does this work in the grand scheme of things? How does this fit into the user's day? Right? Like, for example, with dupe.com, it's like, well, you have your phone in your hand, you're out, you know, out and about on town, you see something really nice in a restaurant, you can take a photo of it that fits in your day very easily. You go to dupe.com, you tap the camera icon, take a photo, and we will show you where you can buy that product for the least cost. Or if you're shopping, you know, on like a midnight shopping spree, which tends to be work hours and midnight hours are like our most peak hours, people are shopping while they work. It's so funny.

My mom is on there.

100%. So, but if you're on a product URL, Dupe fits in because you'll remember us in that moment where you say, oh my God, this is too expensive. Let me just type dupe.com in front of the URL. You're on the page. You're on the product page. There's nothing to copy and paste. You can just literally type that on your keyboard. And having a sense for that, the fact that that fits in so seamlessly with the shopping journey, I think it just takes a little bit of a leap of faith and design founders tend to have that.

Yeah. I'm curious, what do you see the vision being with Dupe long-term? Is it building, going giant public kind of thing, or is it an acquisition?

No, where we're going is we're going to build the world's first hybridized marketplace. So we have infinite demand. We have growing— sorry, we have infinite, infinite supply and growing demand. So we have as many products as we want to put on these results pages and pull down, we can. And we have growing demand. People are showing us what products they want to buy, and then we connect them. Everything is affiliate-based. In the future, it'll be affiliate-based and direct purchase. So we're going to have buy buttons across Dupe, and you'll be able to— we'll be the first version of a hybrid marketplace where You can buy from us and it's also okay if you don't buy from us. We'll just tell you where else to go because we'll make commission if you buy from them. Right. And I think like that is a huge opportunity. You know, I think of comps out there like Alibaba is $150 billion company. MercadoLibre is an $85 billion company. Right. Like eBay, Etsy. Like these are large multibillion-dollar marketplaces where people are looking for a thing to buy, and we are going to partner with all of them. And we're also going to offer our own products to the user so that the user ultimately can vote with their wallet and we make money either way. So that is, that is the vision of where it's going.

Dude, this was awesome. I really appreciate your time. Yeah, I had a lot of fun. I feel like a lot of takeaways. So thank you so much. Love it.

Thanks, Jason Levin Levin. Thanks for having me on.