The Founder Hotline

The story of how a $100 advertising budget led to $25,000 in revenue

When I was at Day One, our CMO Jake came to me with a unique challenge. He wanted to brainstorm ideas on how best to create marketing without spending <$100 in ad budget.

First-time founders were one of the main customer personas at Day One. Yet this is a highly contested space to acquire customers from given how many programs and brands target this persona. So we decided to create a project that added tremendous value to this specific persona in a novel way without spending more than $100 and yet create a ton of positive word of mouth and buzz in the industry. Value + novelty. That was our goal.

We bought a 1-888 toll free number (1-888-890-2656) and created the first ever founder hotline on the Internet. We called it .. well “The Founder Hotline” — a retro radio-style live call-in show.

Season 1 opened up access twice a week for an hour with me as the host. We were inspired by Frasier, the TV show and various dating advice hotlines.

In that hour, founders from anywhere in the world can call in (anonymously or with their real names) to share what they are struggling with in a safe and empathetic environment. Founders are encouraged to call in to ask questions "on air" that they would never ask in a fancy Fireside chat or surface the topics and personal struggles that they would never bring up in a video AMA.

The conversation was raw, real and relatable and many others tuned in just to listen and feel ‘seen’.

In 2022, many founders were under tremendous stress (due to the markets, layoffs or general challenges of being an entrepreneur) This is an ecosystem-wide problem that we believed was worth giving a shit about.

I was the main host but I also hustled to invite a hand-picked roster of founders and leaders who’ve seen difficult circumstances and were willing to help share lessons from their past:

We sent tons of cold email pitches to all sorts of interesting top 1% guests who we believed would make the show great for founders. We pitched folks like Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian & Gary Vee. While many politely passed, Gary said yes :)