Why these founders ditched social ads for Taylor Swift concerts and prison tablets 

Build Mode is back with different episode! This season is highlighting lessons learned from the satellite of go-to-market strategies. Startup Battlefield editor Isabelle Johannessen sat down with Luna co-founder Jas Schembri-Stothart and Untapped Solutions laminitis Andre Peart for their unsocial perspectives on reaching niche customer segments pursuing their ain candidacy during the 2024 Startup Battlefield competition.

If our archetypal episode, with Deon Nicholas, co-founder of Forethought AI, we explored what it takes to make a institution with a customer-first approach. And successful our 2nd episode, we’re diving into guerrilla tactics and experiments that worked in reaching two very different target audiences: teenage girls and formerly incarcerated workers. 

For Luna, which is simply a well-being app for girls, the trouble successful reaching that assemblage was clear: Neither co-founders were teenage girls anymore. To get the feedback and insights they needed, Schembri-Stothart and her squad toured U.K. schools, “basically getting grilled” by students and getting harsh but wide feedback and adjacent involvement successful helping physique their app. They successful crook became the opening of a swarm of marque ambassadors, who were some “behind the scenes queens” moving connected the app itself and creators making social content to beforehand the app, becoming a go-to-market squad of their ain and mounting up activations astatine large events similar Taylor Swift concerts, wherever they knew their people assemblage would beryllium gathered en masse.

Untapped Solutions had a antithetic challenge. As the “LinkedIn for the formerly incarcerated,” Peart had to find a mode to marque definite that the level could actually be deployed into the galore places where currently oregon formerly incarcerated individuals could entree it successful bid to assistance them attain employment. And to bash that, successful a space largely untouched by tech solutions, they deed the speaking circuit hard, and even began their ain National Reentry Coalition and their ain event, which kicked disconnected this April. That, alongside partnerships with agencies moving with the 600,000 radical released from prison annually, has led to an expanding ubiquity. 

“We’re successful astir each situation system,” Peart said. “So if you’re connected a tablet, you already person Untapped.” 

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