Our Audio-Sharing App Grew To 55K Monthly Users And Over 1 Million Followers Online [Update]
This is a follow up story for Blerp . If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Derek Omori, CMO and co-founder of Blerp. We’re a universal extension for streamers to enhance fan engagement and monetize their stream.
Since our last update we’ve grown to over 55K monthly active content creators, 1.2M followers on Tiktok and our creators now generate millions in revenue each year on Twitch, Kick, and YouTube.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
We’ve seen a large increase in usage and creator revenue in the last two quarters. We’re now profitable with a team of 11 employees. We’ve seen a lot of success as we expanded from one platform to multiplatform support.
The move to multi-platform was ahead of big changes like Twitch allowing multistreaming as a partner. It has shown to be a big win as platforms like Kick have no internal channel point system or extension store. Additionally as more streamers on Twitch multistream having an extension to support them on multiplatforms is ideal so they don't need to manage multiplatforms and the viewer experience is consistent everywhere.
Additionally we’ve seen a lot of momentum from in person events. Investing in organic and relationship building doesn’t usually pay off quickly and all at once but in the long run it's so much more effective and will save you hundreds of thousands.
Ad spend continues to become less and less effective with data and targeting laws and the actual reach of an ad is so much more expensive than one organic video that promotes your product.
Even working with small influencers that can create good videos can reach a much larger audience for cheaper. I think brands will live or die on their ability to adapt and create an organic content strategy.
Validate, validate, validate. It’s easy to start with a solution when it comes to a new feature or your whole product. It is always better to start by validating a problem your customer has, making sure it's worth it.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The biggest problem we’ve been trying to solve is starting to shift our focus from creating the best tools for our creators and looking at what we can build for viewers that will make their experience and by extension make the experience better for the creator.
With this focus, understanding what we can add that will make the viewer experience better but not at the expense of the creator is what we are aiming for. We have some key features that will be released the next two weeks we are quite excited for as the viewer market and monetization is much larger than the creator market.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Be where your customers are and invest in organic content creation. We post organic content every day that reaches thousands of our core customers per day.
If we were to pay for this exposure we’d have spent well over $1M in ad spend. By being where our customers are and creating content that is valuable to them (not about our product just about what problems they are facing) we gain their trust and then can find times to upsell or promote our product in between.
We follow Gary Vee's 90/10 rule around content and it works amazing for us. We estimate we’ve generated over 100,000 installs of our product from organic content and over 5 million impressions.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We have some big stuff coming that will allow us to own the live-streaming content creation space and take us out of the sole audio engagement space. We’re excited to share more in the coming months!
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Book: Monetizing Innovation
Podcast I'm addicted to: Lenny’s podcast
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Validate your customer. Invalidate assumptions as soon as possible. Be where they are. Invest in organic.
Lastly I'll say validate, validate, validate. It’s easy to start with a solution when it comes to a new feature or your whole product. It is always better to start by validating a problem your customer has, making sure its worth (they are willing to pay for it to be solved) and then building to address that problem.
It's dangerous to create features that simply fit into the company's goals/vision and not the customers.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re looking to hire an engineer with experience in chrome extensions.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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