5,000 customers, £20k spent: everything we did to market our AI startup (w/ free resources)

Hey all,

I wrote a forum post not long ago on marketing as one of the rising in importance hires for all startups. This is all the things we've done, with some results and free resources.

Keep reading if you're early stage, not a marketing background, or just looking for some inspiration and free help...

We get a lot of compliments on @Meet-Ting's marketing, mostly about the fun and creative stuff, but there's a whole bunch of more resourceful stuff we try that people don't see.

I'm getting asked more and more, especially by VCs (trying to work out if this question is reductive or fair these days...), about differentiation.

It's such a difficult question to answer honestly (stress, honestly) because how can anyone really differentiate when software generates itself?

Deep domain expertise is one good answer. Some categories are technical and complicated enough that you need someone who has really lived in that world.

But for this write up, let’s assume you’re not that person.

Then the other answers are usually product, distribution and marketing:

• A product so good it speaks for itself.

• Distribution so natural and low-cost the product starts lifting itself.

• And then brand/marketing. The part where you somehow manage to squeeze into somebody’s goldfish brain for a brief second and make them care.

My background is in marketing and community roles locally, globally and by business unit at adidas, then TikTok platform and family of apps at ByteDance.

This article is my attempt at a practical guide through the lessons of building the startup I co-founded.

Main lesson is simple: operate by the “if we spend X, we get Y” philosophy.

The question becomes: how do we achieve the goal in the most cost-efficient way possible?

Meet-Ting: case study

So far we’ve generated 50k visits, with an average session time of 2 minutes 48 on our site, over 5,000 customers signed up, and we’ve spent around £20k on what I’d class as marketing-related costs.

That includes web development, subscriptions (LLM, CRM etc.), video and content development, and some small paid tests across community, newsletters, creators, social and search.

We’re a small team. Only one marketer, me. But really the whole team acts as one unit. They all review my posts, even this one.

The following is a semi-structured list of all the things we’ve done in the last seven months.

Not a perfect playbook. Just a bunch of tactics with some views.

1. Narrative and PR

I’m putting this first because I think story is the most contagious thing you can do for your product. It gives people an easy way to talk about you.

That matters for press, for community, for social, for creators. For everything, really.

Our first story was: what if that meeting never happened?

We took famous moments from history and imagined a version where, instead of the meeting happening, someone sent a Calendly link and the whole thing died there.

The Beatles never got together. Larry and Sergey lost touch. That kind of thing.

People loved it because it landed straight in the imagination.

Then we told a different story: a more emotionally intelligent assistant. One that leans into the messiness of human meeting culture rather than pretending people are neat little calendar blocks.

That felt important at the time because there was already a growing anti-AI slop feeling online.

We showed a version of AI that works in the messy human gaps.

Then, most recently, bonus points if you upvoted us here on PH too, we told the story of our availability agent. Something that learns how you make decisions, then helps do it for you: https://youtu.be/MbrWxYrlXF4

It’s all the same product. Just told in ways that capture more imagination each time.

2. Personal network

At the start, you are the product. Your network is the distribution.

And your first users are probably much closer than you think.

Friends, old colleagues, people you used to work with, people who want to help, people who are curious, probably your mum too.

Also pro tip - milk the moment when you announce the new role or company on LinkedIn.

The platform gives you a lot of algorithmic juice around that moment, so if you’re strategic you can get a lot of visibility from it.

Early on, this stuff matters, those sparse likes and comments give you some social signal.

3. LinkedIn

We’re a meeting software tool, so we’ve pushed hard on LinkedIn. It makes sense for our category.

I’ve found personal channels almost always outperform the brand account, so we’ve leaned much more on mine than anything else.

People want people. True for most platforms.

I’ve also been testing recently to post a hot take on a big AI news story. I posted about ChatGPT ads and Google allowing agents to checkout for you just as the news hit the wire, and rode the wave of the platform ‘recommended posts’.

It’s got nothing to do with Meet-Ting yes, but it brings new people into me, and then I will eventually post about Ting, so it all adds value in the end.

Look at the impressions:

4. Free AI newsletters

We had to build the site from scratch, so we had zero authority. That meant backlink hunting.

It’s highly manual, just working through lists of AI newsletters and smaller publications where we could get featured, linked, or mentioned.

There’s a community-generated list here which helped us: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MZca01TpCmuVrFmWeaBxl7fVesFY_87k-DVRAFgteYc/edit?gid=0#gid=0

This sort of work helps with discovery, helps with credibility, and helps create more pathways back to you.

5. AI-generated content

Important mention: you still need taste.

But AI-generated content lets small teams punch above their weight and make things that would have been much harder before.

We made a homage to the classic tech keynote before we launched and it helped us create something much bigger-feeling than a small team would usually be able to pull off:

That’s where AI is brilliant. It gets me so excited about the future of content.

6. Newsletters

We also worked with some of the AI-focused newsletters to create content that raised awareness of the product.

These were great for getting instant testers.

Less great for retention, because some of those people were more AI tourists than true ICP.

But at that stage, we wanted people to come in, test the onboarding flows, and give us signal.

I also found it personally enlightening to see how amazing writers told our story.

I sent this article to all our investors: https://aiadopters.club/p/the-real-reason-people-hate-your

7. Short video

We’re in an amazing window where you can still publish to Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts and get a lot of organic reach.

So my general view is: throw it up!

At worst you get 200 views of your product. At best, sky is the limit.

I wrote this guide to short video a few years ago, but the lessons are still true: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/create-viral-short-videos-cheat-codes-daniel-bulteel

8. Content marketing

We worked hard to define stunt-y ideas that could give us media efficiency because we didn’t have the dollars to spend in a bigger way.

Everything about Ting is supposed to feel fun and relatable.

We did a stunt with LookAdThat, cost around £2k, sending people wearing billboards across London.

But it was never really about the offline. It was about the online.

The point was to create something people would film, share, repost and talk about.

That’s where the ROI came from:

9. Founding creators

We identified a small group of incredible creators to work with early.

Not a massive scaled creator program. Not loads of volume. Yet.

Just a smart group of people we trusted, who felt close to our audience and could help us build social proof from day one.

That gave us ongoing support, trust by association, and proximity to the types of users we thought were most likely to care.

I think this is a really underrated one. Think about creators as business partners not just rented space.

Thank you Sophie, Elisabetta, Elf and Amelia if you’re reading this.

10. Instagram carousels

Instagram is a communal platform. Sharing matters a lot. And carousels show up in feed multiple times, which is (obviously) helpful.

We’ve recycled these for memes, testimonials, creator content, press mentions, user feedback, all sorts.

Not everything needs to be some massive original campaign.

Sometimes it’s just packaging proof in a format people already like consuming and sharing: https://www.instagram.com/p/DRw1a-DCOGa/

11. Analytics

As a one-person team trying to keep an eye on the funnel and all the different channels, I need a simple way to watch what’s happening.

Social followers. Website traffic. Traffic quality. Where we’re getting mentioned. Where we’re not getting mentioned. Whether answer engines are picking us up.

I use Dojo AI to pull a lot of that together into a simple chat-style interface I can query.

You need to know what is working.

12. AEO

AEO, or answer engine visibility, is really more of a by-product of everything else.

I don’t think of it as some totally separate magic channel.

It’s what starts happening when you do a lot of other things well.

You rank well. You have enough blog content for machines to understand you. You make the site easy to read. You show up on places like Product Hunt and Medium.

You create enough signals around the brand that answer engines have something to pull from.

We also added a button on our site that generates a ChatGPT query to encourage more people to ask about Meet-Ting directly.

Final thought

The main thing is that there isn’t one tactic that suddenly solves startup marketing forever, especially early on.

It’s usually a stack of small things, done with high focus, and minimal cost.

Hope this helps and thanks for reading!

Dan