Behind Kula's $12M Seed Funding News Playbook
Decoding the behind the scenes of getting Techcrunch, Forbes, and a dozen big media brands to write about us.
Wait! Let me catch my breath before I do this.
On 31st August, Kula came out with the seed funding news of $12 million. We had a decent idea of what to expect and we had a much better Plan A and a Plan B, given everything that happened during the last round of PR release.
This time around, it was fewer surprises and more results. Just how you would want the second iteration of an experiment to be. Here's what transpired inside of Kula and how we got the results we aimed for with our seed funding PR release campaign.
Before I even begin, let me put some facts aside for you. This playbook will not work for you if:
You don't have a CEO who appreciates marketing
If your CEO doesn't have a personal brand
You don't have a brand budget
Let's dive in.
Deciding the date
The date of the PR launch was decided to be 31st August. It might look completely random but there was some deliberate thought behind the date. We were working on a few pivotal features of the product (LinkedIn automation, advanced enrichments, global search, and the Soc 2 Type 2 certification) which couldn’t be 'perfect' before August. And then the team needed some time to test them out.
In September there was SaaStr (13-15 Sept) and the SaaSBOOMi Caravan (16th - 27th Sept). Which would have taken the attention away of all SaaS founders towards something much bigger than Kula.
This gave a clean window from 25th Aug to 10th of September. We wanted a window of about a week for our follow-up content calendar. We zeroed on 31st Aug - it being a Wednesday, made the choice easier.
Finding the right partner
We knew what we wanted this time around and we wanted to dive into it, fully prepared. It takes the right team and the right partners to get to bigger milestones - that's what we did. We brought a seasoned PR agent onboard.
We were tracking all successful fund release launches in the past year. Every start-up in our circle or our investors' circle that had the media placements we aimed for, asked for recommendations for their PR partners. We collated a list and found someone that aligned with how ambitious we wanted to be with our media list.
We gave him enough time to customize the story for each major publisher. We brought the PR agent onboard, 45 days in advance. These 45 days were used to jam together the narrative, our wedge in the market, and the angle we need to chase with each major publisher. These angles made our story to be accepted in places such as Techcrunch, Forbes, Business Times, Tech In Asia, Economic Times, and Your Story.
The leading narrative
During the last funding round (pre-seed), we led with our category - recruitment automation.
However, this time around, all our PR coverage called us 'Recruitment Platform Kula'. Why?
Have we given up arms on building the category of 'recruitment automation' this soon? Not at all. We will keep on building the category, but we did not want to miss the short-term benefits of going broader on our long-term goal of building the category.
We had done a lot of groundwork to get the top-of-the-line tech media and we wanted to get the readers interested. If anyone was facing a challenge in recruitment, they needed to check us out. Why would they check us out? Because Techcrunch was writing about us. Because we had a star-studded cap table. Because who the F raises 12 million dollars in a seed round.
Before Aug 31, 2022
Last-minute preparations to make sure the finale is flawless.
We re-did our entire website. Updated content and product screenshots. And a sanity check of the stability and security of the website.
We took team photos before we went live with the launch. The 12-member team photo you see everywhere is a result of that day.
Having a UNESCO-recognized documentary photographer as a CEO helps in more ways than you can expect.
We had an improved version of the 30-word, 60-word, and 90-word blurbs for Achu to share.
We had an internal concept doc for all our team members to share if someone asks about Kula.
We had FAQs listed internally for our teammates to just copy and paste if someone asks something about the launch or Kula in general.
We had social captions with a link and an image, ready to be shared on social media.
On Aug 31st, 2022
Here's what happened on the day of the launch.
The time of the release was 11.30 am IST.
We called a team meeting at 10.30 am to brief every team member to give them clarity on what was going to happen during the day.
The team meeting was necessary because it was a big day for all of us. And the entire team (outside of marketing) also needed to know what was in the store and how every hour was going to be.
The extended team didn't need to do as much, but we couldn't let anything be a surprise.
We took the social captions and created slack messages out of them. We scheduled it for the exact time each Kula employee had to post those updates on LinkedIn. They knew they will get the message when to post.
For social captions, we followed a similar playbook that was successful for the pre-seed round. Marketing is less innovation and more repetition.
The playbook was executed from 11.30 am to 6.30 pm.
We blocked our calendars for a 2 hours slot at 10 pm IST - to reply to the comments on Achu's post. So the algorithm pushes the post to his connections in the US market, for whom it was 10 am - morning.
It worked and we ended up with 1400+ likes on the post.
We got 20,000 people on the website in under 3 days.
After 31st Aug 2022
Did you see us on the Nasdaq billboard? That was item number 1 on our post-launch calendar.
We have a long list of items to capitalize on the launch, and some of those are already underway.
I look at our Asana board with pride, hope, and excitement. I will try to deconstruct the big wins (and losses) as and when we get there.
Till then,
To easy recruiting.
Rohit - marketer at Kula.