How OpenPhone Grew to 100k Customers | Daryna Kulya

The Peel with Turner Novak

Daryna Kulya is the Co-founder of OpenPhone, the world’s best business phone

This episode is a masterclass on startup marketing, chronicling the first six years of OpenPhone, how they acquired their first customers, and inside all the different channels they used to scale the business to over 100k customers, including FB Groups, Reddit, SEO, cold outbound.

We also get into why founder-led content is so important today, and why design is a crucial core competency.
Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(02:10) OpenPhone’s new API launch
(06:41) Why a better business phone is a big deal
(13:18) Immigrating from Ukraine to the US and building OpenPhone
(15:39) Hacking a custom business phone
(25:29) How OpenPhone got its first customers from Facebook Groups
(33:02) How to unlock word of mouth
(39:11) Transitioning from free to paid users
(43:14) How OpenPhone cracked word of mouth on Reddit
(46:29) OpenPhone’s YC experience
(49:01) Why the Seed round was hard to raise
(53:49) Using Slack to aggregate all customer feedback across the internet
(57:08) How YC helped redefine their ICP
(01:01:33) Tactics for sending cold emails
(01:06:24) How to get and benefit from press
(01:12:18) Daryna’s “behind the scenes” approach to founder-led content
(01:16:27) Using long-tail keywords to kickstart an SEO strategy in 2020
(01:22:56) When to do founder-led content vs SEO
(01:28:04) How your customers should pull you up-market
(01:30:18) Why OpenPhone cares about design
Referenced:
OpenPhone: https://openphone.com/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/
Follow Daryna:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/darynakulya
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darynakulya
Follow Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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