Aarthi Ramamurthy finds unlikely customers at Hustle Con

TL;DR

Lumoid is a try-before-you-buy service for medium-to-high-end gadgets, launched after previous ventures at Microsoft, Netflix, and True & Co. The founder shares five lessons from building Lumoid: doing unscalable customer acquisition tactics, measuring fundamental metrics, leveraging happy customers as free marketing, using Yelp and influencer reviews, and discovering that the true target audience

Key insights

• Initial customer acquisition used unscalable tactics: running along the Embarcadero handing out cards to photographers, partnering with community colleges whose issue rooms had outdated equipment, and
• An offline referral program using a beautiful card included in every shipment drove traffic because customers wanted to share the card with friends.
• Measuring fundamental metrics (customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, retention, churn, AOV) is essential; many startups claim their business is “different” but are usually the norm.