
Selling Yogurt on Instagram

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Kiki Couchman recently left a four-year stint in private equity at Alpine Investors to launch a new yogurt brand with Elan Halpern, her best friend and former roommate from college.
Beny Yogurt is an organic, Greek-style yogurt aimed at the health conscious. Kiki said she became interested in yogurt when — as a Human Biology major at Stanford — she saw how bacteria in our gut affects our energy, mood and immune system.
Aware yogurt is a crowded industry and without much of a marketing budget, she started to leverage social media to build brand awareness. She drops videos on Instagram to document her journey leaving PE to start the company.
Kiki shoots about 70 micro clips of 1-2 seconds that she edits down before laying over a voice narration. She said you have to be ruthless in trimming the length and disciplined in making sure that there is an arc to every story.
It takes time, but she’s been able to accrue 10,000 enthusiastic fans and the benefits when you are building a new company can be substantial, especially for a startup with limited funds for marketing, PR or advertising.
Kiki said social media has helped her to walk into rooms and meet people who already know her story, speeding up conversations. That visibility helped facilitate a visit to a co-manufacturing plant that normally does business with larger companies.
I find her content effective for several reasons. It’s fast and informative and varied enough so it doesn’t feel repetitive. At the same time, it hews to a consistent format promoting her story as the brand ambassador
Kiki has embraced the trend of chronicling her journey as it unfolds.
The ability to broadcast your own story is one of the most profound changes we’ve seen in communications in the modern era. Previously, You had to know a reporter or pay a PR person for access to a reporter. And then the media publication would decide if and what they would write about you.
Now, you can dictate your own narrative. And if its compelling, people will share it and often the media will discover you.
In spite of that access, older generations (particularly my own, Gen X) tend to be reluctant to talk about plans or products for fear they won’t pan out. They don’t want to take that risk. In addition, they regard talking about one’s own accomplishments as unseemly.
It’s something they will need to get over because there are substantial benefits to “building in public,” which is how startups describe their social media posts about business. Moreover, Gen Z has fewer hang-ups about sharing.
Kiki cited an example where she asked her followers to weigh in on a packaging decision. It’s real-time customer feedback, a kind of immediate A/B test. It provides valuable intel and also helps build customer engagement.
I can recall in my previous corporate job it would take weeks if not months to plan an A/B test, book clients to come in to a studio, record their reactions and analyze the data. That approach is simply too expensive and time consuming to be competitive.
Until relatively recently, everyone was gatekept by the gatekeepers.
Now, the doors are wide open.
You just need to walk through.
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