How We Got Our Food Allergy App on National Press Overnight

A timeline of the PR stunt that made our startup famous

In the spring of 2017, our little startup pulled a PR stunt that gave us instant name recognition, unprecedented user growth, and a national press feature.

This is the story of how we pulled it off.

February 1, 2017: The Startup competition

For all of this to make sense, you have to understand that in the spring of 2017, I was a 4th-year university student and our company was competing in an entrepreneurship competition hosted by the University of Michigan (go Blue!) called “The Startup”.

Each week, companies would be tasked with a challenge related to building a scalable business, and then would be given between 1–2 weeks to try to complete it.

Week 1: The pitch

Week 2: Market research

Week 3: User growth

It was in this third week that we decided that we wanted to do something that would get our campus’s attention.

Something that was a little crazy, but if it worked, could get us overnight name recognition all across campus. It did a little more than that — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Each team was assigned an advisor who would work with them throughout their time in the competition.

Before embarking on our adventure, we consulted ours: Bill.

It was a brisk afternoon in downtown Ann Arbor when we met Bill at his office.

My co-founder met him in a cozy conference room where we made small talk before divulging our plan.

He listened intently. Before long his gaze turned from moderate interest to genuine excitement. And once we finished our pitch, he had just one thing to say:

“What can I do to help?”

March 21st: The trip to Ikea

With Bill on board, we decided to move forward with Operation Campus PR stunt.

Luckily, our presentation for the startup wasn’t due until after spring break.

We decided to use this to our advantage.

We carefully chose the night before students returned to classes to pull the stunt. If executed right… what we had done would become quickly noticed by students and Ann Arbor residents early the next morning.

Another bonus: we had just enough time to get the necessary supplies.

Most of the props we needed, I was able to order online, but there was one item in particular that we needed to go in person to retrieve: doormats.

We scoured the web to find where exactly we could buy doormats in bulk at an affordable price.

Eventually, we found a store that had exactly what we were looking for: IKEA.

We arrived at Ikea in the late afternoon. Being as large as it is, we thought it would take quite a while for us to find the exact item we were looking for.

It took about 10 minutes.

We took one and went to checkout. The cashier at the front checked us out. Total: $1.93 (It may well have been the smallest charge cashier at any IKEA had ever seen).

There was a reason for this. We needed to ensure that the spray paint we had purchased would actually show up well on the fabric of this particular brand of doormats.

Initial tests proved successful.

We went back inside and grabbed more.

Actually, we grabbed all of them.

I cannot begin to describe the confusion on the cashier’s face as we rolled into her checkout line, this time with 179 doormats instead of one (again, possibly a new IKEA record: most doormats bought by a customer in a single day).

March 5, 3:00 PM: The assembly

The day of the stunt had arrived. The first step of the stunt involved putting together hundreds of packages from the raw materials we had ordered.

We knew how much work it would be to do this ourselves, so we recruited some of our friends to help out.

Assembly started promptly at 3:00 pm and went to about 11:00 pm. I’ll skip ahead as nothing particularly interesting occurs until 11:29 pm.

11: 29 PM: App crisis

Thirty-one minutes before the official start of the delivery phase, I noticed something peculiar about our app.

It stopped working! Red alert.

I quickly grabbed my co-founder to help dissect. All the work we were doing was for nothing if the app we were promoting wouldn’t start.

11: 48 PM: Crisis averted

Just about 18 minutes later, the bug was caught and resolved. Crisis averted.

March 6: 12:00 AM: The troops arrive

At this point, all 179 doormats had been spray painted and dried, and packages assembled.

The night group rolled in right around now. They took the place of the day helpers who had helped with assembly.

Their job was primarily to help us with the delivery phase.

12:30 AM: The camera crew arrive

Now, for this stunt to really take hold, we wanted to be able to share a compelling story. So we hired a camera crew the film the entire thing.

We hoped that the stunt and video footage together would stimulate enough interest for the entire things to go viral.

2:37 AM: The Delivery Phase: Central campus

To cover more ground, we split into two groups with the eventual plan to rendezvous at North campus (where the engineering classes were held).

We’d hit the popular student destinations: The Ugli (Undergraduate Library), The Diag, the Law Quad, CCRB.

As per the residential areas, we didn’t have enough doormats for every house, so we decided we’d hit every other house.

3:45 AM: The Delivery Phase: North campus

On North campus, we hit: The Belltower, the Dude (Duderstadt library), the North campus Diag, the Commons.

4:50 AM: Wrap-up

There was one last stop we needed to hit before we finally: downtown. Why? Well, that’s where the news outlet lived: MLive & Michigan Daily.

It was important that they knew what happened here. It was there that we left a doormat and one of our 300 “packages” that we had put together.

By this point, you probably want to know what it was we were delivering.

Well, I’ll tell you.

Each one of these packages contained the following items: A piece of candy, a fortune cookie with a custom message that described the problem we were trying to solve, a $3 off coupon to a local restaurant, and a promotional card that had our company logo and an app store link.

6:06 AM: Bedtime

After nearly 15 hours of continuous assembling, delivering, and making sure everyone got home, my head finally hit the pillow at 6:06 am.

The only thing to do now was to wait.

March 6th, 2:00 PM: The next day

As I woke up mid-Afternoon, excitement filled my toes. The same excitement that you feel when you’re a kid on Christmas morning.

Instead of unwrapping presents, I was excited to see the reactions of all the students and Ann Arbor residents to our stunt.

I pulled my iPhone three inches from my face and started to scrolling through all the social media platforms.

And what I saw was…

Nothing.

Absolutely no reaction whatsoever to what we had done. I was shocked. Bamboozled. How could this be?

We had covered the campus with our care packages, doormats, and other branded merchandise.

At this point, the camera crew was busy editing the footage that they had collected the night before.

I hoped that the video would be our saving grace:

It wasn’t. A week after the stunt, still no noticeable growth in our userbase.

Failure.

What happened next

But then…a week later, something did happen.

We got press. Lots of it.

It started out small with just some local papers. The Michigan Daily, MLive, Detroit Free Press.

But then suddenly, we started to show up in papers like the SF Gate and Fox News.

That’s when things really took off. User registration went bonkers. Users started pouring in left and right.

Turns out that the PR stunt wasn’t something that really caught anyone’s attention. But the story of it all caught the attention of the press. It was newsworthy.

Even though we were eliminated from the Startup competition, we were quickly growing.

And before long, we secured VC funding. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow us to move to Los Angeles after graduation and start scaling.

A Word of Caution

While doing fancy PR stunts and getting press is great and all, it’s all a waste if you have a leaky bucket.

A ‘leaky bucket’ describes a company that can’t get users to come back to their product. It means that you haven’t solved a real problem.

And if that’s the case, a PR stunt will do absolutely nothing for you.

Just like what happened to us, you’ll get articles written about you and thousands of new users to download your app… in the short-term, but just as quickly they’ll lose interest and move onto something else.

If, as an early-stage company, you’re focusing on PR stunts, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

First and foremost you need to solve a problem and find a thousand true fans (hell, it could even be a hundred). And only once you’ve found a core audience that loves the story you’re telling should you think about fancy marketing tactics.

Lessons Learned

In the time I’ve spent building companies, nothing has worked quite like that PR stunt.

And the reason is that it broke through the noise. It was remarkable.

In his TED talk, Seth Godin said you would never pull over to the side of the road to take a picture of a cow. But now if that cow was purple, for some reason, maybe you would.

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” — Seth Godin

Because it’s remarkable.

If you want to break through the noise and have people hear your message, you, too, need to be remarkable.

Do remarkable things for remarkable results.