Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How a Founder Used a No-Budget PR Stunt to Land 50 Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: So I want to start today with a number: zero dollars. That is how much a first-time B2B SaaS founder — we'll call her Maya — spent on marketing in her first six months. No Google Ads, no LinkedIn outreach tools, no sponsor slots. But she managed to land fifty beta customers in two weeks. And the tactic she used is one that most founders overlook entirely. Luna: Okay, I'm hooked. Was it some kind of viral post? A cold email hack? Lucas: Neither. It was a PR stunt — but not the kind you'd think. She didn't hire an agency or even write a press release. What she did was create a genuinely weird, newsworthy event that was so specific to her industry that one reporter couldn't resist covering it. Luna: I love this already. What was the product? Lucas: A project management tool for small architecture firms. Super niche. Her target users were frazzled principals at firms with five to twenty employees who still used spreadsheets and sticky notes. Her product was barely an MVP — it was clunky, missing features. She knew she couldn't convert anyone with a demo. So she engineered attention instead. Luna: And the stunt was… Lucas: She sent a mock 'eviction notice' to twenty architecture firms in her city. Professionally printed, looked like a legal document, claiming that their 'inefficient project management' was violating city code. It was playful but polarizing. One of the recipients tweeted a photo of it, an architecture blog picked it up, and then a reporter from a major industry publication called her for a story. Luna: Wait — she sent fake legal documents? That feels risky. Lucas: It was risky. She consulted a lawyer first to make sure it didn't cross into fraud. The envelope clearly said 'humorous notice' in fine print, and it included a link to her landing page. But yes, the risk was real. A few firms were annoyed. One actually threatened to report her. But the majority found it funny, and the press coverage more than compensated. Luna: So the math worked out. Fifty beta customers from a single article — what was the conversion rate from that article's traffic? Lucas: She tracked it. The article got about twelve thousand views. Fifty sign-ups means a conversion rate of roughly 0.4 percent. That sounds low, but for B2B software with zero marketing spend, it's actually high. And those fifty users became her design partners — they gave feedback, helped her prioritize features. Luna: And none of that would have happened if she'd played it safe. Lucas: Exactly. The conventional wisdom for early-stage B2B is cold outreach, networking events, maybe content marketing. But those channels take time or money. She had neither. So she created news. And the key is that the stunt was native to her industry — architecture firms are used to paperwork, so a mock legal notice felt familiar enough to be funny instead of confusing. Luna: Right — it aligned with the audience's context. A generic stunt wouldn't have landed. Lucas: Exactly. If she'd sent the same thing to restaurants, it would have flopped. The specificity made it work. And this is a pattern I see in a lot of bootstrapped founders: they use a single, high-leverage action to create a domino effect. Luna: You know, it's funny — we talk about this kind of hustle on the show all the time. And I think it's part of why these conversations resonate. A couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to keep the episodes ad-free and focused on real stories like this one. And we appreciate it. Luna: So back to Maya — after the stunt, what happened? Did she keep up the guerrilla tactics? Lucas: She didn't need to. That one burst of press gave her a foundation. She used the fifty beta users to refine the product, then did a proper launch six months later. By then she had testimonials, case studies, and a referral loop. The stunt was the spark, not the engine. Luna: So the lesson isn't 'do a stunt.' It's 'find one high-leverage moment that fits your audience.' Lucas: Exactly. Most founders spread themselves thin trying to do everything at once. Maya did one weird thing, executed it well, and let it compound. That's the playbook. Luna: I've seen similar with a founder who staged a fake product recall for his own startup to generate buzz. It's risky, but when it works, it works. Lucas: Right — and the risk is real. If Maya's eviction notice had offended the wrong person, she could have gotten bad press. But she calculated that the upside outweighed the downside. For a founder with zero budget, sometimes the only way to break through is to be genuinely remarkable. Luna: Or at least, remarkably weird. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's a good note to end on. Next episode, we'll look at what happened after the launch — when the fifty beta users turned into paying customers, and the real work began.