Solid Starts

A quirky ad backfired because baby feeding is a trust product. Solid Starts ran an ad showing fruit made into babies, which fit Instagram trends, and drew comments asking whether a company that made it should be trusted to feed babies.

Yuliya Lennox, who otherwise argues that ugly, scroll-stopping ads beat polished ones, uses this as the exception: check what your product sells before testing off-brand creative. One quoted comment: "should we trust a company that invented this like to to feed our babies." No numbers were given on what the backlash cost.

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Being new to the category brought huge organic growth, until it plateaued. Solid Starts had large organic reach because nothing like it existed yet, but that growth hit a ceiling as the niche saturated and competitors arrived.

Lennox puts Replika in the same pattern and says "finding something unique is like 50% of your success," while a generic product like a time tracker should not count on organic growth.

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A team joined out of passion for baby feeding, not for a job. Every Solid Starts team member messaged the founder asking to join because they cared about baby feeding, and Lennox puts the effect of that passion at 10 times higher than what she saw at Replika.

She links that drive to changing how parents introduce allergens, which she ties to fewer allergic people: "if you have 20 people that are just about that, this can change."

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