This $1B startup was just 2 guys pretending to be AI 🍕

5 brilliant marketing stunts to know about today

Happy Monday!

This week I found a billion-dollar confession, a sneaky way to hijack critics’ audiences, and a reminder that Spotify Wrapped is coming (and how you can steal their thunder).

Let’s get into today’s inspiration drop ↓

#1

Fireflies AI admitted they faked their product (and became marketing legends)

This story is insane.

Sam Udotong (CTO of Fireflies AI, now worth $1B+) went viral on LinkedIn this week for revealing how they started…

They told customers an “AI” would join meetings and take notes.

But they had zero AI:

Sam himself would join meetings as “Fred from Fireflies”.

He’d sit there on mute (no camera), take notes by hand, and send “AI-generated” notes 10 minutes later. 😂 They did this for 100+ meetings.

Then they built the actual product:

Today, Fireflies is worth $1 billion. The AI has processed 2 billion meeting minutes for 20 million people.

The LinkedIn post exploded this week.

And then… Business Insider wrote about it. What could’ve been a PR disaster became a masterclass in storytelling. *Chef’s kiss*.

Here’s what makes this genius:

A messy origin story grabs more attention than a polished pitch deck.

People don’t care about “we identified a market opportunity”. They want to hear “we survived on pizza and manually did what we promised to automate because we had to pay rent”.

My take:

Tell the world how scrappy you were at the beginning. That struggle is your unfair advantage. Share the behind-the-scenes chaos that built your product.

Bonus: A good origin story gets free PR. Here’s how to make journalists write about you when you’ve got something worth telling.

#2

How to hijack influencer audiences for $0

Stripe launched a new feature this week.

After announcing it on X, they did something *really* clever: