When you’re competing against a Goliath, sometimes it’s best to take notes from the Davids that came before you.
“As a small Canadian startup, we have to come up with creative ways [to promote ourselves], because every company can just go ahead and spend a couple million dollars [on] billboard ads.”
Shivam Mahajan, Floqer
That’s why Halifax-founded, Toronto-based customer relationship management platform Floqer set up a protest outside of Clay’s Sculpt conference in San Francisco last month. Complete with signs, slogans, and memes, Floqer got in front of prospective customers by picketing its biggest competitor’s marquee event.
“As a small Canadian startup, we have to come up with creative ways [to promote ourselves], because every company can just go ahead and spend a couple million dollars [on] billboard ads,” Floqer CEO Shivam Mahajan told BetaKit in an interview last Thursday.
Clay, which itself is Canadian-founded, is fresh off a Series D round that valued it at $7 billion USD ($9.8 billion CAD). By contrast, Floqer announced a $2 million CAD pre-seed round earlier this year for its platform, which helps companies gather context on their customers in an “AI-ready format.” Mahajan considers Clay his startup’s only direct competitor.
Mahajan, alongside his colleague Aaron Joseph, explained that the protest was inspired by the guerrilla marketing tactics of Salesforce in the early 2000s and 2010s, when the now hundred-billion-dollar enterprise software giant was in a similar position to Floqer. Salesforce got its name out by hiring actors to pose as protesters outside a conference for its biggest rival, Siebel Systems. Salesforce used the protest tactic again in 2011 against Oracle.
Salesforce was competing against large legacy software companies that were not on the cloud, Mahajan explained. He said he took inspiration from the tactic because it was a way to get their message out without straining their resources.
Instead of actors, the Floqer team assembled its protestors from gig work platform RentAHuman, set them up with signs poking fun at Clay’s pricing model, and placed them at the conference’s exits. Most of the signs revolved around Clay users needing to spend credits to run actions on the platform, whether it was a slogan, a meme of Drake rejecting the practice, or of Will Poulter in We’re the Millers questioning, “wait, you guys don’t have to pay for action credits?” BetaKit has reached out to Clay to ask if the company has any comment on the stunt.
It was “very much lighthearted, and the whole team felt that,” Joseph said. “I think we felt that from the other side as well. It’s just lighthearted.”
Floqer already counts big-name companies like Perplexity and Wise as customers, and recently crossed $1.2 million USD in annual recurring revenue, Mahajan said. With less than $2,000 spent on the whole marketing stunt, he estimated the protest captured about $250,000 in leads for the company to pursue as the team witnessed their Slack blow up with new sign-up notifications.
“We’re standing there, we’re doing all this, and we’re all looking at our phones [seeing] sign up, sign up, sign up,” Joseph said. “Like, dude, this is awesome.”
Feature image courtesy Floqer.