How Reslash used social media to land coverage in Quartz and the Wall Street Journal
Part three of my series on India's super cool startups
Ashwin Gupta, CEO and one of the co-founders of Reslash, has had a cameo earlier in my personal newsletter, East Coast Road. I was writing about chai, and about a time when we were flatmates in Pune.
I remember this one monsoon morning when a couple of my best friends had moved into my flat for a while, having been driven out of theirs. I woke up very early, as I’m used to, and found Ashwin up. We started talking. We talked for a long time, about products, marketing, life, and cricket. First we talked at home, and then got on my motorcycle and zoomed around the streets. We downed 5 cups of chai at 3 different tapris. We talked and talked and talked. I don’t remember any part of our conversation, but I remember the chill in the air, how the morning felt, and all that flavour.
I don’t know if he told me about his idea for Reslash that day. But he would have been talking about something else equally exciting. He is that kind of a guy. Brilliant, but also finicky and extremely detail-oriented, of the variety that can sometimes drive you nuts.
At Wingify, India’s bootstrapped SaaS success story, where we both worked at the time, he was the guy our CEO relied on to ask the tough questions, and do the things no one else wanted to do. He was there for close to 6 years, before calling me up late last year to tell me he was starting up.
I asked him what he was building. The next big thing after Zoom, he told me, a new kind of platform for a virtual-first world.
Now he calls Reslash the world’s first virtual estate company.
The team - 3 of them, all Wingify - started building in November last year, a couple of weeks after they left their jobs. They launched the MVP on Product Hunt a couple of days before Christmas, and were #1 on the platform for the day. In the first couple of weeks of January, they were trending on Hacker News and Reddit.
Ashwin had successfully launched two products at Wingify, so he knew the drill.
But he is also a digital native, someone who spends a lot of time on the engineering and product black holes of Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
He upped the game.
First, he made sure he got the messaging right.
The team regularly posted in relevant subreddits with the aim of getting early users. Most times the messaging failed. They would only get 10-15 upvotes. But they kept trying.
When they were experimenting, the messaging was mostly around having fun together in a crowd. This did not resonate at all.
They decided to fix that by calling themselves the 'anti-thesis of Zoom'. Ashwin says the idea of planting this thought was to have people be reminded of why Zoom did not work for them. This message really helped people imagine what a potential solution could be, and had enough intrigue for them to check Reslash out.
People started imagining the different ways they would use the platform - parties, classrooms, events, offices, concerts, museums and more.
As the feedback kept coming, they kept on refining the messaging. The hook of being a 'virtual estate company' came up naturally in one of the early demos, and they immediately liked it.
Once they got that right, they exploded on the r/entrepreneur subreddit: getting more than 1.1K upvotes. They used the same messaging on Show HN and got to the top of the charts again.
Second, he told the world what he was trying to do.
Ashwin kept on posting about remote work and the team’s progress on Linkedin. Remember, these guys weren’t influencers of any sort. But posting regularly with the messaging they now had helped them generate 60K+ impressions for their posts on the platform. This helped them land more conversations with potential users and buyers.
Similarly on Twitter, they rode the excitement around the #BuildInPublic movement. They posted regular updates. This again helped them amplify the posts they were promoting on Reddit, Product Hunt, and Show HN.
But all this hard work of getting the story right, and then telling it again and again worked out in another way for Ashwin, Akshay, and Divyanshu, the team behind Reslash. It got the attention of some of the most important business publications in the world.
Reslash launched in the last week of December. After trending on Reddit and Show HN, their story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, who wrote about them in January.
As they kept building in public and putting the word out, Quartz got in touch and featured them in March. This time, Ashwin had a say.
The mentions didn’t end there.
In June, the Financial Times featured them, the third international press mention within just 6 months of launch.
And remember, this is still a bootstrapped 3 people startup.
Though they aren’t short of money, not now.
Ashwin and team broke even last month, with 11K users on the platform, more than 200 paying customers, and $60K in ARR and growing.
In a time when even cash-rich startups find it difficult to get the word out, Reslash has not just done so, but used the coverage to move the needle on revenue.
Two things to take away: how hard they worked on getting the messaging and the story right, and how they hammered away with the final messaging again and again in channels where their potential user base was hanging out.
Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?
A reminder that this is the third of a month-long series on super cool startups.
You can read the introductory essay here.
The first dispatch of the series is on how CRED is building a brand that’s impossible to ignore. The second is on how Rocketlane built a marketing machine before it even had a product.
Subscribe below to get these directly in your inbox.