I want to find my first paying customer

Zapier is a simple workflow automation tool that allows you to move information between apps & connect them to create automated workflows. It gets ~2M monthly traffic & has 50k+ automated pages! It's vastly successful, thanks to its brilliant SEO strategy.

To drive traffic to their website, Zapier created two sets of pages. The blogs on "Best Apps" & the App Integration pages.

One of the top-performing Zapier subfolders is the /apps landing page. This set of pages accounts for ~15% of Zapier's total traffic with 235K monthly visitors! The idea behind creating these pages is simple. Zapier wants to target all users who are searching for ways to connect different apps.

This set of pages forms a 4 stage hierarchy, where each stage links to the next stage. The pages are, Main Page -> App Profile Page -> App-to-App Integration -> Zaps Page.

Next, the best app blogs are basically blogs that list down top apps in the market in a particular category. For example, the best URL shorteners, the best note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, etc. These pages get 900K monthly organic traffic, ie. 60% of traffic to their site!

Zapier ranks for really difficult keywords with these pages. It does that by writing high-quality SEO optimized content, internally linking all pages to flow the authority & acquiring high-quality backlinks.

All these pages are internally linked & are created using an automated template to reduce effort while creating new pages!

Unacademy started out as a simple college hobby for a co-founder, Gaurav Munjal. In 5 years, it was built into the actual company with a free tier and a subscription model.

Being the 2nd largest ed-tech startup in India, Unacademy enjoys a lot of attention from VCs.

Its current valuation is $3.44B, after it raised a $440M funding round in 2021. Much like any other VC-funded startup with deep pockets, Unacademy naturally spends a huge amount on growing its user base.

Given the wild popularity of IPL in India and that most of their target audience tunes in to watch IPL, Unacademy spends a ton on IPL ads.

1) Overall, in 2022, Unacademy spent Rs 40 Cr on IPL ads in 2022.

2) Their target audience accounts for over 40% of IPL’s total 20 Cr viewership, which is 8 Cr target audience.

3) Unacademy's paying user conversion rate = paying users/net users = 350K/30M *100 = 1.1%.

4) Traditionally, the TV ad conversion rate is 0.7%. So, net net the paying users = 8 Cr x 0.7% x 1% = 5600 users.

5) We finally get the customer acquisition cost (cac) = Rs 40 Cr/5600 users = Rs 72K/user

6) If we say that on average the course fee is around 10K. Unacademy still is burning ~60K per user acquired.

The origins of Amul date back to 1940s. Back then, Polson dominated the dairy industry in Mumbai by buying milk from farmers at lower rates and selling it to consumers at much higher prices. The milk sold was also adulterated with water to get higher margins.

To solve this issue, India's then Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, urged the farmers to create their own organization to supply milk to Mumbai directly. And thus, Amul or Anand Milk Union Limited was born.

Today, Amul is the largest milk cooperative in the world, owned by ~4 million milk farmers!

Right from the start, Dr Varghese Kurien was particular about creating a strong & unique brand identity for Amul. In 1966, he handed over the advertising to Sylvester da Cunha.

That's when the ICONIC Amul girl and her "Utterly Butterly Delicious" tagline were conceptualized. The Amul girl was actually inspired by Polson's mascot.

But, while Polson's mascot was a refined, soft girl, Cunha & his team deliberately conceived the Amul butter girl to be the exact opposite. That is, a mischievous and humorous little girl who took a dig at the current events in the country!

Of course, the iconic mascot was immediately a huge HIT among Indian consumers!

Now, Amul's success in business & advertising with less than 1% of revenue spend, is almost unreal! So, how did they manage this feat?

Well, Amul does not spend separately to create a brand out of each of its products. Rather it focuses on umbrella branding or family branding!

So, Amul as a brand is synonymous with "Taste of India" and consumers identify every product as coming from Amul.

This strategy of creating an umbrella brand only works when your products are related and you identify the same principles across all products.

We did some quick math to figure out the advertising spend by Amul Butter for every household. And, turns out, Amul Butter spends INR 48.8 Cr on advertising to reach 2 crore households.So, their customer acquisition cost is a mere INR 24!

So, Amul is clearly doing pretty well at spending less while earning MORE!