This startup sent a cowboy to Wall Street (it actually worked) 🤠

5 marketing ideas you should steal this week.

Happy Monday!

If your budget is small but your ideas are big - this one's for you. Here are 5 marketing ideas worth stealing this week.

Let’s go ↓

#1

A $3,500 stunt filled a startup’s pipeline for 3 months

Lunos is an AI startup that automates accounting.

Their pitch to CFOs:

We tame the “wild west” of invoices.

So they hired an actual cowboy, put him on a horse, and sent him to Wall Street.

How much did it cost?

$3,500.

They got thousands of site visits, hundreds of LinkedIn comments, and word-of-mouth spreading through CFO Slack groups. Alex Mann (head of growth) said every single prospect who entered their pipeline mentioned seeing them on LinkedIn.

It worked because it wasn’t random:

They took their own metaphor and acted it out. Literally.

I call this 📝 Literal Marketing 📝 → take a figure of speech from your industry and make it physical.

Like this dress code:

Ask yourself: If you had to physically act out your value proposition in a public place, what would that look like?

That’s your stunt.

P.S. When you send images of your stunts to the press (or social) → it’s best to use images where someone is taking a photo of your stunt.

Lunos did this perfectly in The Guardian:

#2

You don’t do the stunt for the stunt. You do it for the LinkedIn posts.

Speaking of cowboys.

At HubSpot Inbound last fall, Virio (tiny AI startup) hired cowboys to walk two horses around the conference.

The horses moved too fast. The crowd was thin. There was a 💩 situation.

By every normal event metric, it flopped.

But they still got 300+ qualified website visitors and some discovery calls.

Co-founder Emmett Chen-Ran said it directly: the goal was never the stunt. It was the social content the stunt would generate.

Eric Lay (co-founder) wrote a brutally honest post about the whole thing. Instead of a $40K booth, they spent it on horses. Got more eyeballs than any booth at the conference.

I love that.

The difference between a booth and a stunt is “shelf life”. A booth works for three days. Virio’s horses are still being talked about months later. You’re reading about them right now.

If you’re going to a conference this year, ask yourself: what would make someone stop and take a photo? 🤳

I wrote a whole playbook on this - 28 ways to generate buzz at events WITHOUT a booth or sponsorship.

Worth a read.

#3

Reddit just did something big. Most marketers missed it.

Reddit killed r/all last week. It means the universal feed is gone: Every user now gets a personalized feed.

I know, I know.

“Reddit did something” doesn’t sound like urgent news. But hear me out:

Your customers already use Reddit before they buy. Threads about your product rank high on Google and AI answers.

You just need to be there.

Most marketers have no idea how to show up on Reddit without getting banned. I found a proven way to be there. Readers who tried it said it works. What Reddit just changed makes it significantly easier.

Here’s exactly what changed and what to do about it 👇