Hypergrowth Marketing Playbook: The OpenAI Case Study
Part 2: Marketing Techniques for Hypergrowth
How do marketers juice hypergrowth? Yesterday, I covered how market dynamics, product excellence, and distribution partnerships may matter more than most marketing techniques. Today, I explore what marketers can and must do if they have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity:
Fanning the Flames: Earned Media is Way Better than Advertising
Welcome to the Social Age: Where Market Momentum Goes Viral
Content as Currency: Building Trust Through Value
The User Content Engine: Amplifying Authentic Voices
Fanning the Flames: Earned Media is Way Better than Advertising
One commonality of the highest-growth companies is frequent media coverage. If a company has successfully broken into broadcast news and global media, the reach can be staggering: CNBC reaches 355 million people per month, and the Wall Street Journal reaches half of all US business leaders. Coverage in top media generates more brand awareness than you could ever afford in paid advertising and is much more trusted.
Salesforce's early success was significantly influenced by this strategy. When I was a PR manager early in my career, I worked for a company that was the same (tiny) size as Salesforce. But Salesforce got 4x the coverage - because they spent 4-5x, even then! In addition to having charisma and storytelling chops, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made BIG investments in communications. What looks to us like a beating drum of independent news coverage was a carefully curated, successful strategy.
These days, earned media is further amplified through social sharing. When a reputable outlet covers a company, the story often spawns numerous follow-up articles and is shared extensively on social media. For hypergrowth companies, this creates a virtuous cycle: meaningful media coverage drives organic social sharing, which in turn attracts more coverage, creating sustained growth and brand recognition.
Sam Altman’s success as a constant face on global TV and digital news gives OpenAI a massive amount of earned media that is far beyond the value OpenAI could ever pay for advertising.
Welcome to the Social Age: Where Market Momentum Goes Viral
Social media influence has been growing over the years and is now a central, go-to source of news and entertainment for people of all ages. OpenAI has been able to maximize Sam Altman’s personal social media on X with his 3 million followers. But OpenAI has also been aggressive across social channels - with:
7.2 Million Reddit Followers
6 Million LinkedIn Followers
1.29 Million YouTube followers and 57 million views of their content,
1.7M Instagram followers (showcasing Sora videos especially)
86k Github Followers
Sam Altman even personally has 56k followers on ProductHunt
Not only is OpenAI surfing the wave, but social media itself is far magnifying their earned media multiplier as people around the world use social media to talk endlessly about OpenAI and ChatGPT (Help, I’m now in a circular reference to even this blog.)
Focus on Winning the Tastemakers
Instagram seeded early success by getting the top artists to be some of the early and prolific users - giving a design eye and sophistication to the photo-sharing platform. Slack had unique strategies for winning tastemakers - focusing in the early days on journalists, super-hip startups, and more. Many hypergrowth companies win influencers first and use that leverage for more effective word-of-mouth expansion.
OpenAI is everything for everyone (a difficult marketing challenge), but you can see through some of their specific marketing investments that one focus is to win over developers, who are often considered the tastemakers of tech (As was our strategy at Atlassian). OpenAI hired Krithika Muthukumar as their VP of marketing, a marketer with deep strength in technical and developer marketing from her days at Retool and Stripe. They have hosted a major in-person developer conference for two years running and have developer tools as the only segment journey on their website. It’s always difficult to figure out where to spend time and money — but it looks like they think if they win the developer, they can win the enterprise.
Content as Currency: Building Trust Through Value
This was one area in which Atlassian really focused for many years. Our #1 ranking on an extensive and helpful “What is Agile” page drove a majority of our organic paid conversions for years. But that was just the start. We had a dozen evangelists helping across all mainstream developer sites and built a community site of our own with social ranking. We created helpful webinars, team playbooks, code samples, dedicated team collaboration best practice sites and infographics, spoke at conferences, and more. Atlassian was notorious for not gating any content (requiring email or contact information). We wanted to get people as educated as possible with the least amount of friction and the most value. Deeply helpful, not salesy content is hugely valuable for building awareness, leads, expansion, and happy customers.
I personally feel like Open AI is earlier on its ultimate journey here. They have a ton of information about product releases, performance results, eye candy of video and image across social sites, and insights into how and why they have built and tuned the model across ever-expanding features, but not as much content training and teaching people how to be successful. Their Discord is promising, but I find it hard to navigate to what’s most relevant for me. Right now, the ecosystem around them of entrepreneurs, influencers, consultants, and more do more hands-on training and ‘helpful’ content for specific sub-audiences. From the outside, it appears that limited time and unlimited demands have them focused on head-to-head proof of their excellence over teaching people to use it. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how hungry people are for OpenAI-granted credibility through certifications.
The User Content Engine: Amplifying Authentic Voices
Generally, companies don’t have enough resources to drive hyper growth themselves- it is about the customers spreading word-of-mouth enthusiasm across many touchpoints. Sometimes, it happens without the company’s efforts. Sometimes, companies can maximize it by providing vehicles for customers, partners, and experts to share more. At Atlassian, this happened through our user groups, online community, and user conferences, but we also ran dedicated campaigns to extract it. One of our most popular social media campaigns was #BuiltonBitbucket. The campaign went viral as developers around the world proudly shared what they had created. It cost very little and was more interesting and genuine than anything we could have created ourselves.
OpenAI is absolutely killing it on user-generated content as everyone tries to establish themselves as experts and share voraciously across all channels. OpenAI is also highlighting the best of the best; OpenAI’s Instagram, for instance, is a delight to explore with artistic images, fanciful videos, and some fun, helpful videos like “Should you be nice to your AI” and “Chat GPT for Dad Jokes.”. They also have an active Discord community covering use cases, GPTs, APIs, and DALLE. The breadth and visual nature of their products give them an advantage here. Images and video are infinitely more shareable and consumable than most technical products.
Part 3 is coming next:
This is just part 2 of a 3-part article. Tomorrow, I’ll cover:
Friction-Free Growth: Make it Easy to Learn, Buy and Expand
The Community Catalyst: Turning Users into Advocates
The Expansion Playbook: Growing Beyond Core Markets
The Perpetual Chase: Why Hypergrowth Never Sleeps
The Hypergrowth Playbook Applies to All of Us
And if you missed Part 1, you can read it here.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.