How we helped the start-up IRL to get traction on the market and attract a 8 million funds.
With so many social media apps around we knew promoting IRL wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. It needed to stand out, it needed to be different, but that was a difficult task considering that IRL is a modernized version of something very traditional, a calendar.
As if to make matters worse, social media apps started to be accused of generating addiction among their customers to the apps. Harvard University released a study indicating that when people talk about themselves – which is very similar to what happens on social media - their brains’ pleasure centers are stimulated as much as by sex and food. And in a popular video that went viral, BuzzFeed was comparing Social Media to drugs.
PR
The Idea
Here’s the idea. We presented IRL as an app that improves the quality of our customers offline lives rather than another app that does everything to keep people on their phones. The app only connects users to an inner circle of friends, rather than opening up their profile to everybody on the web which makes it a tool for improving outdoor activities with friends.
SUCCESS
The Results
What initially seemed to be a contradiction - a social media app that promotes time away from your computer or mobile - was favorably seen by the media, and IRL was soon featured in top magazines. This positioning of the app in the market, as well as the attention generated by the media, generated traction and funds. IRL - soon had 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist - it attracted $8 million in Series A funding led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins.
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