If you’ve never experienced what California summer in 1996 was like, just imagine sunny weather without the global warming, $1/gallon for gas, and good vibes all around.
Now thanks to serial entrepreneur Marty Bell, he’s bringing the summer vibes every day with Poolsuite FM, an online radio station that’s had over a million listening sessions in 2020 without any marketing.
Designed for Nostalgia
With Bell living in the Highlands of Scotland, where it’s often gray and rainy, he would listen to a certain type of uplifting music on Soundcloud.
And from that, he built Poolsuite to be a type of virtual vacation to make him feel like he was living the American summer dream in sunny California.
He then teamed up with developer Grant MacLennan to launch the initial version of the Poolside.fm website, which quickly got attention on Twitter and had articles written about it.
The website wasn’t updated for years, but continued to see thousands of visitors per month.
Turning Virality into Sustainability
They have since relaunched the website with a new look that resembles a Mac desktop from the 90’s, with an even similar user experience.
The updated website has seen 1.5 million listening sessions from more than 900,000 individuals, with much of the listening taking place across the U.S. (32%), Japan (15%), and U.K. (8%).
“The bills are like, I don’t know, I would say for both Firebase and the hosting, the whole thing is probably under $100 per month.”
That’s because the video and audio come from Youtube and Soundcloud, which handle the bandwidth load. The actual service itself is very light.
And because of the traffic it’s getting, investors have been sliding into his Twitter DM’s looking to be a part of it.
But he’s not looking to monetize it, he has bigger plans for it.
Turning Vacation into Business
Until recently, Poolsuite made no revenue. In fact, Bell was losing money on its upkeep, he said, although the cost wasn’t very high.
Poolsuite radio station is purely an awareness engine for its sunscreen brand, Vacation.
With 100k followers, Poolsuite is far from the most-followed brand, but Bell said each of those followers has come organically, resulting in a highly engaged community.
“It’s that launchpad that made Vacation do so well from day one,” Bell told us. “We had a really big audience who are into that visual aesthetic and those types of brands and that messaging.”
These days, Vacation is big enough to promote Poolsuite in turn, having reached “seven figures in revenue within our first six months.”
And recently, Vacation launched on the Ronnie Fieg's retail store Kith.
“I think that’s what makes the difference. When you’re just channeling pure passion into something, with other people that are working on it because it’s fun — the kind of product that comes out of that is unlike anything that’s working towards KPI’s for investors,” explains Bell.
Key Takeaways for Your Brand
Get attention before starting a business
Brands are only as strong as the conversations they create. Most entrepreneurs starting out don’t have the money to hire mega popular influencers to build brand awareness.
They have to do it one step at a time.
But the good news is sometimes that one step can jump straight into going viral and you pass up any competition you may have.
And it all comes from awareness engines, which is what Poolsuite was for Vacation’s sunscreen line.
If Bell didn’t get attention from Poolsuite first, and just released another sunscreen product, he would have had to spend a lot of time and money on ads, influencer marketing, and social media content to try and convince you to buy their sunscreen over your current choice.
And none of that would have had as much impact as Poolsuite.
They would just be another company promoting a product, which doesn’t connect with people because they know you’re just looking to sell.
People love to buy, but they hate being sold to.
So by getting almost free traffic from Poolsuite, they’re able to funnel in a portion of them into the Vacation website, where they can learn more and connect with the brand on what they’re about.
And since they already have good brand perception through Poolsuite, the purchases come easier because they’re not trying to convince you on a superior product, but on brand affinity instead.
Awareness Engine Ideas:
Free content dedicated to a certain niche (newsletter, videos, podcasts).
A free tool that helps certain demographics (Find a Path for upcoming entrepreneurs).
Starting / finding a community and interacting with them to find their needs (Discord started in r/leagueoflegends, Grailed started in r/malefashionadvice).
So don’t be boring, get attention and community first, then sales after.