In this talk, the speaker explains how Rupa uses social proof as a core growth engine, especially for trust‑sensitive industries like health. The company treats YouTube as a collection of content clusters, targeting trending medical topics (e.g., nitric oxide, H. pylori, GI‑map) that are hot but under‑served by marketers. To dominate these clusters, Rupa hires doctors who can appear on‑camera, equips them with quality gear, and trains them to act as influencers, while emphasizing strong hooks, compelling titles, and high retention. The speaker also shares a Twitter growth hack: get the CEO to tweet regularly, even turning it into a follower‑count race, and use a ghostwriter to help the leader produce authentic long‑form posts. Personifying the brand through a real human voice, rather than a faceless brand page, is presented as the most valuable social strategy for early‑stage companies.
Chapters
So social, what is working with social right now? So at Rupa, we built our social primarily for social proof. I think this is a super underrated piece of growth, especially in the early days. If you're building a product, nobody knows who you are, you wanna like drive direct acquisition. But for us, if you're in any industry where trust is important, having a certain level of social proof is just insanely valuable. So we did it. It was really important for us to build trust with early partners and with early users. So I was gonna go over really fast what we're seeing is working organically in case this is helpful for anybody. So first of all, on YouTube, what we did was— I wanna say 80% of YouTube's success right now is content-based. You can kind of think of YouTube as collections of clusters of content. And for every one of those clusters, it's going to have different levels of competition. So what you want to try to do is you want to try to find clusters of topics that are trending and blowing up. For Rupa, it was really, really tricky because I am not a doctor. So things like nitric oxide was really hot. Things like H. pylori was really hot. Things like, like, GI map. Basically what I had to do is I had to hire doctors that was able to tell me what was cool. So if you're in like a medical industry, you wanna figure out what is the content that it like is trending and is cool that people have not, like marketers like myself haven't figured out to start creating content for. So we did that and then we basically worked with a bunch of doctors, found who was good on camera, dressed them up, gave them good cameras, taught them how to be influencers, and then that performed really well. But there's all of this. You should have a really good hook and you should have really good titles and like, You need to have really strong retention, but I swear to God, if you just have, like, really good topics and you create the best content available for that topic, your YouTube will perform really well. On Twitter, best thing we ever did at Rupa was we convinced our CEO to tweet. We were on a car ride and I was like, hey Tara, she's super competitive, I was like, hey, I'll race you to 20,000 followers, we'll see who can get there first. If you can convince your CEO to tweet, do whatever is required to get them to do this. I swear to God, it's one of the most valuable things your companies will ever do. People don't really follow brand pages. Even like the trick to a brand page is you try to like personify it, right? So you'd be like, "Hi, I'm the intern behind the brand page and I'm doing this like crazy thing." It's so much better if you just get like the CEO or someone that is an actual personality to start engaging with your audience. It's wild. So get your CEO to tweet. Get them a ghostwriter. Like, teach them how to make long-form stuff. There's no substitute for the actual authenticity of having a human actually push out content that's a leader within your organization.
