Why did these founders abandon social advertising for Taylor Swift concerts and prison CDs?

Build Mode is back with another episode! This season highlights lessons learned from the world of go-to-market strategies. Startup Battlefield editor sat down with Isabel Johansen Luna Co-founder Gus Schembri Stothart and Untapped solutions Founder Andre Bert for their unique perspectives on reaching niche customer segments after being nominated through 2024 Startup Battlefield Competition.

If our first episode, with Dion Nicholas, co-founder of Forethought AI, We’ve explored what it takes to create a company with a customer-first approach. And in our second episode, we dive into guerrilla tactics and experiments that have successfully reached two very different target audiences: teenage girls and formerly incarcerated workers.

For Luna, a wellness app for girls, the difficulty of reaching this audience was clear: None of the founders are teen girls anymore. To get the feedback and ideas they needed, Schembri-Stothart and her team toured schools in the UK, where they were “criticized” by students and received harsh but clear feedback and even interest in helping build their app. They in turn became the start of a swarm of brand ambassadors, who were “behind-the-scenes queens” working on the app itself and creatives creating social content to promote the app, becoming their own go-to-market team and activating major events like Taylor Swift’s concerts, where they knew their target audience would congregate en masse.

Untapped solutions faced a different challenge. As “LinkedIn for ex-prisoners,” Burt had to find a way to ensure the platform could actually be rolled out in many places where currently or formerly incarcerated individuals could access it in order to help them get a job. To do this, in a space largely untouched by tech solutions, they entered the speaking circuit with force, even starting their own national re-entry coalition and event, which launched in April of this year. This, combined with partnerships with agencies that work with the 600,000 people released from prison annually, has led to its ubiquity.

“We are in almost every prison system,” Burt said. “So, if you’re using a tablet, you already have Untapted.”

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