Tommaso Di Bartolo walks through his go-to-market playbook: pick a narrow audience, find the right channels, and measure what works. For Swag, a social app for girls aged 8-18, he used Instagram influencers and leaderboards instead of likes to drive growth, then killed channels that didn't convert.
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consumer-oriented approaches and always tied with a very, very strong sense of product strategy. That is the way that I give back out of my learnings, right? So, and this is actually something that is the biggest purpose, what motivates me to do what I'm doing, right? Because we don't do technology for technology. You know, after the first company regardless if you fail or you don't fail, you keep on going if you are a bold entrepreneur, right? So, we make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give. So, this is a sentence I want us to repeat all together.
We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give.
So, you in 15 years, in 10 years, in 5 years, you know, being in a situation of sharing your lessons learned, I think this is also what's unique here in Silicon Valley which is not very common elsewhere. Actually, I've experienced exactly the opposite in many other countries, that the people are closed, they keep the things for them, right? That's what makes this vibe in Silicon Valley being so unique, sharing your lessons learned so that you basically can plug in into what others have been doing, right? And?
That's it.
You keep on doing it and doing it again, right? You keep on doing it and doing it again. So that's it from my side. So who actually wants here the presentation?
Yes. Awesome.
I have prepared here the presentation for you under b.whatittakes.es. You can go there with your mobile phone and download or share on Twitter the presentation. And yeah, at the end I'm more than happy to do some pictures with you and I think Q&A. Questions?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Can you go a little more into detail on how you've got the influencers?
Sorry, what?
How you got the early influencers for Swatch? Can you explain more?
Sure.
Like your strategy on how to— like where this stems from. You mentioned some of them, but can you explain a little more on that?
Sure. I mean, my go-to-market approach is always very, very similar in terms of the way I take it and I take it to market and I approach my go-to-market. I always say, okay, who is my target group? And what I mean with that is I try to be very— I try to segment a lot. And I have a couple of blog posts about segmentation. Many people, especially at the beginning, say, I am the app for everything. No, guys, you are not the app for everything. Because everything doesn't mean anything at all. Try to be at the beginning, in order for you to facilitate and make it easy to enter a market, say, Hey, Tommaso, I have an app just for nail studios in San Mateo. It's fucking very clear. Because what's your go-to-market approach? You knock on doors in San Mateo nail studios, right? So the simpler you— the more you can focus it, the better it is. Like for Swag, what I was saying is, OK, kids 8 to 18 that are on Instagram, Vine, and mainly 70% to 80% must be girls. So what are they looking at? Well, this was my— My initial thought. And I started looking on channels. So where are they? What kind of apps are they using, right? And Instagram and Vine was huge, right? And then I went to a couple of profiles where I saw younger singers or younger whatever, entertainer or sports. I focused on 3 verticals, sports, entertainment. You see, I focused sports, entertainment, and music, right? And then I just paint them. I mean, it sounds easy, ping them. I had people really reaching out, we setting up webinars, telling them the value proposition, preparing on what's the value proposition. How do you differentiate between you and Snapchat? Hey, because we have the leaderboard, right? And how do you differentiate to Instagram? Because how cool would it be you getting kisses rather than likes, right? So we did our stuff, right? And then We kept on going. But guess what? Based on our cost of acquisition, we saw that it wasn't the channel and it wasn't the way that we should activate it. And so we moved on, right? So think of it, segment it, execute of it, measure it, adapt. Does it answer your question?
Yeah.
And another question regarding that, like what about your offer to the influencers? what they get from scrolling?
Well, I mean, the influencers wouldn't be an influencer if they wouldn't have their fans. Does that make sense?
Yeah.
OK, so you are only an influencer because you have fans. Now, the app offers more fun for fans, right? Because you can express more, right? You can be on leaderboards. You can be part of this engagement. You can send kisses. So you can get more visibility in your interaction, right? So it's more— let's say engaging for them, right? And so for them it's important to have fans that are happy because our pitch was, you know, today they use this, tomorrow they're going to use Slack, so you better be on early on, right, on using Slack. That's how we— We have time for one more question.
One more question? Yes, I've got actually 2 questions. So one question is that has anybody asked you the question what is the problem that you're solving and what was your answer to that?
Well, in consumer business you are actually not really— I don't answer with we are solving a problem. I say we make it fun for somebody, right? And fun means a lot. Fun is experience, right? And I explained to you what is experience. But if you want me to answer, let's say, the technical business traditional what is the problem, right? I say, well, the kids are suffering offline and when they go online they get totally limited by experience. expressing the emotions, and that's what we are solving as a problem. But you see, right? It's not really the problem that we are solving. It's more a fun experience that takes them beyond traditional engagement. That's what we are doing. Does that make sense?
