How To Reach $1 Billion In

Revenue With No Marketing

Team
OpenAI’s mysterious, nontraditional approach to marketing
actually comes from Apple

Dave Schools
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Entrepreneur's Handbook

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OpenAI is one of the fastest companies to hit $1 billion in annual
revenue.

ChatGPT reached 200 million users in two months, 4.5x faster than
TikTok.

OpenAI’s blitzkrieg speed and sheer scale are historic, but what’s even
more mind-boggling is they did it without a marketing team.

Now with more than 350 team members, there still isn’t a marketing
team.

And from OpenAI’s career page, they don’t plan on creating one. Out of
the 71 open roles at the time of this writing, none are in marketing.

So how does OpenAI create a strong brand, become a category

leader, and grow to $100 billion in annual revenue without
spending a single dime on marketing?

You’re about to find out.

Zarina Stanik was the sole marketer working at OpenAI when ChatGPT
launched to the world.

Her LinkedIn says she’s still working at OpenAI, but in an interview on

July 13, 2022, she says, “I’m no longer with the company.” She hasn’t
posted on Linkedin in six months.

Stanik said she got the job when someone in her network reached out
to her as she was approaching her 8th year as “Director of Events &
Community” at Ceros, a content creation company for enterprise
marketing teams.

Her OpenAI role was called “Enterprise Marketing” according to her

LinkedIn. Her main focus was commercialization of the ChatGPT
product, helping the Go To Market team sell to large businesses
through sales enablement such as “telling customer stories.”
Stanik sent Walt Disney Company some OpenAI swag.
Stanik’s role at OpenAI may have been experimental, possibly a result
of a friend who opened a door for her. She wasn’t responsible for
OpenAI’s overall marketing strategy, growth, or top-of-funnel
performance. She didn’t build out a team or lead any broadscale
campaigns, but rather served as an extension of the GTM team to help
enable enterprise sales.

(If this is an unfair characterization and someone has more

information on Stanik’s role at OpenAI, please contact me and I’m
happy to make corrections.)

So if Zarina Stanik isn’t the marketing powerhouse behind OpenAI’s

growth, who is?

OpenAI’s marketing team of “ghosts”

According to the org chart of OpenAI on the website TheOrg, there is a
“Vice President Marketing” named “Jessica Braelynn” with 15 direct
reports.
Org chart of OpenAI’s “marketing team”

However, it turns out either none of these people exist or The Org has
erroneously listed them as OpenAI employees.

Here’s what I found about some of the “marketers” at OpenAI:

1. Ivan Chan, Content Editor and Copywriter, has many

indications from his LinkedIn profile that he is not a real
person but an AI bot. He’s worked as a security officer for
almost 11 years? His account posts every 3 hours about
random content, such as weather reports. His
website issihk.com redirects to his Linkedin profile.
 2. Alessandro Verdicchio, AI-Powered Consultant, states on
his Linkedin: Disclaimer: I am not a direct employee of
OpenAI.”

3. MD Mehedi Hasan, Senior Content Writer at OpenAI, is

actually just a freelancer based in Bangladesh who put
OpenAI as his “employer” on Linkedin.

4. Zack Cass, Head of GTM at OpenAI, who reports directly to

the COO, is a real person, but he’s not on the marketing
team.

So The Org is just a low-quality, inaccurate LinkedIn scraper trying to

piece together company org charts. For comparison, I took a peek at
Hopin’s profile on The Org and can confirm the site is severely
inaccurate.

Another dead end. Back to the drawing board.

OpenAI’s real “marketing team” isn’t what you think

Next, I go to OpenAI’s brand guidelines webpage, something that
Marketing typically owns. I scroll down to see who to contact and I see
this email address: partnercomms@openai.com. This may be the door.

I google “partner comms openai” and bingo — I find Hannah Wong, VP

of Communications at OpenAI, who posted two months ago on
LinkedIn that her team is hiring.
Hannah Wong — VP Communications at OpenAI

How OpenAI runs its marketing like Apple

Wong is exactly who I was looking for. She joined OpenAI at the
beginning of 2021 as Head of Public Relations right after OpenAI’s
Vice President of Communications and Public Policy Steve
Dowling stepped down.

A PR legend, Dowling reported directly to Sam Altman according to

The Information’s paywalled org chart of OpenAI. He previously
served as Apple’s Vice President of Communications for 16 years,
working closely with CEO Tim Cook.
Interestingly, guess who also worked for Apple as a PR manager? Yep,
Hannah Wong. Before OpenAI, she managed PR for key Apple
products for seven years including Apple Pay, Apple Card, iCloud, and
iPad. She probably worked under Steve Dowling during their overlap at
Apple.

This caliber of professional corporate communication experience is

exactly what makes ChatGPT’s headlines and press coverage, its main
marketing channel by far, make way more sense.

Hannah has hired a team of ~10 PR specialists. “Our Communications

team includes PR/media relations, employee communications, events,
design, and other external-facing functions,” wrote an expired OpenAI
job posting.

So we may have solved our mystery — there is no formal marketing

organization at OpenAI, but a high-octane Communications team.

But I still had questions. Did the Communications team really build the
website? Design the brand? Do they run ads? SEO?

Who built OpenAI’s brand and website?

Turns out, OpenAI outsourced their website entirely to a brand and

digital product agency in Paris and New York called Area17 which
designed the OpenAI brand, website, everything, top to bottom. As
someone who used to work at an agency like this, I can tell you the
project was easily in the mid to high six figures.

By the way, OpenAI’s old logo looked like this:

Who runs OpenAI’s paid ads?

OpenAI doesn’t run ads. At all. It makes sense when you see OpenAI’s
marketing channel breakdown shows almost 90% of traffic is Direct:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/openai.com/
It’s truly remarkable to achieve $100 billion in annual revenue without
running a single paid ad.

What about OpenAI’s content marketing? Who writes the blog

posts?

OpenAI’s blog posts are authored by its teams of researchers. For

example, the blog post announcing the launch of ChatGPT on
November 30, 2022 was contributed to by over 100 people. It doesn’t
read like content marketing, it’s very technical. Same for all of
OpenAI’s content. They publish engineering research and product
updates. Not even an tiddle of marketing content.

What about OpenAI’s social media? That’s DEFINITELY

marketing.

OpenAI posted a “Social Media Lead” job two months ago and it
confirms everything we’ve covered so far.

 The role sits on Wong’s Communications team.

 “Works closely with Product and Research teams.”

 The job posting doesn’t even mention the word

“marketing.”
Sam Altman’s marketing philosophy is on full display at
OpenAI
His view is summed up well by a few of the things he said in his Y
Combinator lecture “How to Start a Startup”

1. Don’t focus on marketing, focus on building a great

product. “A great product is the secret to long-term growth
hacking. You should get that right before you worry about
anything else. PR, conferences, recruiting advisors, doing
partnerships, you should ignore all of that, and just build a
product.”

2. How do you know when your product is good enough?

“Breakout companies almost always have a product that’s
so good, that it grows by word of mouth,” says Sam Altman.
“One way you that you know when it’s working, is that
you’ll get growth by word of mouth.” How do you know
when “word of mouth” is kicking in? Growth in your
branded search and direct traffic channels.

The Takeaway
As one LinkedIn user pointed out, it doesn’t seem like OpenAI
intentionally marketed ChatGPT at all but simply leveraged the power
of a phenomenal product to generate interest and momentum.
This seems true, but how does a billion-dollar company simply not do
any marketing at all?

Quite successfully, it turns out.

Once you have a great product, hire your Hannah Wong. Look for a
sharp Communications professional with an eye for design, who can
build out a small team and work with your technical Product and
Research organizations to maintain the brand, control the narrative,
and adroitly handle the crushing amount of inbound press when the
rocket ship takes off.

PS. If you enjoyed this, I write one of these “deep dives” every
Thursday — subscribe to Entrepreneur’s Handbook to get the next one!