{"id":145185,"date":"2025-11-20T19:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/145185\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T19:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:11:07","slug":"why-these-founders-ditched-social-ads-for-taylor-swift-concerts-and-prison-tablets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/145185\/","title":{"rendered":"Why these founders ditched social ads for Taylor Swift concerts and prison tablets\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Build Mode is back\u00a0with another episode! This\u00a0season\u00a0is\u00a0highlighting lessons learned from the world of go-to-market strategies. Startup Battlefield editor\u00a0Isabelle Johannessen sat down with Luna<\/a> co-founder\u00a0Jas Schembri-Stothart\u00a0and Untapped Solutions<\/a> founder Andre Peart for their unique perspectives on\u00a0reaching\u00a0niche\u00a0customer\u00a0segments following their own candidacy during the 2024 Startup Battlefield competition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If our first episode, with\u00a0Deon Nicholas, co-founder of Forethought AI,\u00a0we explored what it takes to create a company with a customer-first approach<\/a>. And in our second episode,\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0diving into guerrilla tactics and experiments that worked in\u00a0reaching two\u00a0very different\u00a0target audiences: teenage girls and formerly incarcerated workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For\u00a0Luna, which is a well-being app for girls, the difficulty in reaching that audience was clear: Neither co-founders\u00a0were teenage girls anymore. To get the feedback and insights they needed,\u00a0Schembri-Stothart and her team toured U.K. schools, \u201cbasically getting grilled\u201d by students and getting harsh but clear feedback and even interest in helping build their app. They in turn became the beginning of a swarm of brand ambassadors, who were both \u201cbehind the\u00a0scenes\u00a0queens\u201d working on the app itself and creators making social\u00a0content\u00a0to promote the app, becoming a go-to-market team of their own and setting up activations at major events like Taylor Swift concerts, where they knew their target audience would be gathered en masse.<\/p>\n

Untapped Solutions had a different challenge. As the \u201cLinkedIn for the formerly incarcerated,\u201d Peart had to find a way to make sure that the platform could\u00a0actually be\u00a0deployed into the many places where\u00a0currently or formerly\u00a0incarcerated\u00a0individuals could access it in order to help them\u00a0attain\u00a0employment. And to do that, in a space\u00a0largely untouched\u00a0by tech solutions, they hit the speaking circuit\u00a0hard, and\u00a0even began their own National\u00a0Reentry\u00a0Coalition and their own event, which kicked off this April.\u00a0That, alongside partnerships with agencies working with the 600,000 people released from\u00a0prison\u00a0annually, has led to an increasing ubiquity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in almost every prison system,\u201d Peart said. \u201cSo\u00a0if you\u2019re on a tablet, you already have Untapped.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the full episode\u2019s worth of insights, check out the video above, or listen and subscribe to Build Mode wherever you like getting your favorite podcasts<\/a>. And if\u00a0you like what\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0doing, give us a review\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or if you have feedback about the show, reach out to us at podcasts@techcrunch.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Build Mode is back\u00a0with another episode! This\u00a0season\u00a0is\u00a0highlighting lessons learned from the world of go-to-market strategies. Startup Battlefield editor\u00a0Isabelle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[97675,10286,111,139,69,46291,145,97676],"class_list":{"0":"post-145185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-build-mode","9":"tag-luna","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-startup-battlefield","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-untapped-solutions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}