Happy Monday!
This week I found a billion-dollar confession, a sneaky way to hijack critics’ audiences, and a reminder that Spotify Wrapped is coming (and how you can steal their thunder).
Let’s get into today’s inspiration drop ↓
#1
Fireflies AI admitted they faked their product (and became marketing legends)
This story is insane.
Sam Udotong (CTO of Fireflies AI, now worth $1B+) went viral on LinkedIn this week for revealing how they started…
They told customers an “AI” would join meetings and take notes.
But they had zero AI:
Sam himself would join meetings as “Fred from Fireflies”.
He’d sit there on mute (no camera), take notes by hand, and send “AI-generated” notes 10 minutes later. 😂 They did this for 100+ meetings.
Then they built the actual product:
Today, Fireflies is worth $1 billion. The AI has processed 2 billion meeting minutes for 20 million people.
The LinkedIn post exploded this week.
And then… Business Insider wrote about it. What could’ve been a PR disaster became a masterclass in storytelling. *Chef’s kiss*.
Here’s what makes this genius:
A messy origin story grabs more attention than a polished pitch deck.
People don’t care about “we identified a market opportunity”. They want to hear “we survived on pizza and manually did what we promised to automate because we had to pay rent”.
My take:
Tell the world how scrappy you were at the beginning. That struggle is your unfair advantage. Share the behind-the-scenes chaos that built your product.
Bonus: A good origin story gets free PR. Here’s how to make journalists write about you when you’ve got something worth telling.
#2
How to hijack influencer audiences for $0
Stripe launched a new feature this week.
After announcing it on X, they did something *really* clever: