Startup OS | The startup newsletter

Welcome to the first newsletter of Startup OS. 🥳 

If you’re reading this, you’re officially an OG member of this newsletter.

Thank you so much for signing up, my goal is to bring you a ton of value from my real life experience as a creator & entrepreneur.

If you’ve subscribed to Startup OS via my fitness newsletter Threshold Performance Club, you will know I’m a fitness creator with 98,000 followers on Instagram and 37,000 on Tik Tok generating over 30 million views in March.

What you may not know is I have a decade of experience scaling startups in the consumer & fintech sectors. Some brands you may know are Cheesegeek (backed by Steven Bartlett ~ Diary of a CEO), Lucky Saint, Seedlip and now DIRTEA.

Over the past 10 years, startups have retreated to venture capital to scale their companies. That is because if you have raised $1m+ in cash, you can put into marketing and grow fast.

Spending $1m on Meta advertising will generate 60 million views. Convert at a 0.1% rate and you get around 60,000 purchases of your product.

However, in the past 24 months VC’s have scaled back their investments and startups who once had treasure troves of cash available to spend now can’t raise money & need to find profitability.

That’s where becoming a creator becomes a necessity and not an option.

The truth is, most people don’t create content.

The truth is, most businesses don’t create content.

The truth is, everyone wants to generate more revenue.

Why spend money on ads when you can generate revenue for free?

In the past year I’ve grown my fitness newsletter to over 17,000 readers and scaled my online revenue by 400%, all from creating content.

I started creating content in May 2022 and in the past 4 weeks I’ve generated over 15 million impressions in 4 weeks.

If you work in marketing, 15 million impressions is approximately $225,000 worth of advertising spend on Meta.

I’ve achieved this from creating organic, free-to-create content.

Here’s how I did it, using the following Instagram Reels strategy:

Strategy of the week: 5-8 second Instagram Reels

Here’s the IG Reel Strategy I’ve used to generate 15 millions views from 10 reels with +1 million views. The highest viewed reel has reached 12 million so far.

Step 1: Choose whether you want to entertain or educate with your content. I generally prefer education as comedy is hard to execute.

Step 2: Decide a hook. Research the top hooks in your sector by typing them into. E.G. 30 million people have used the hashtag #runner on Instagram which is a big market. I look at the top reels and use word-for-word the exact hook.

Step 3: Create a 5-8 second video. Use a trending song which has a beat drop in it. For the 1st part of the music, write the hook. When the beat changes, change the video and place a CTA in the video. For example “read caption”.

As an example see my reel which reached 12 million people.

Here are 4 other reels I’ve created with over 1 million views:

Reel 1: 2.8 million views

Reel 2: 2 million views

Reel 3: 3.7 million views

Reel 4: 9 million views

It is that simple.

It will take 30-60 days of posting content every single day to get the algorithm to learn who you are.

So whether this week you’re in the office or WFH on your own startup, give this reels strategy a go.

Thank you for reading. I hope this becomes useful reading before the work week starts again.

Feel free to DM me here.

Have a great week,

Robert