I’ve been watching a lot of @garyvee videos lately, and he talks a lot about how you need to be marketing with a very specific goal. So I thought I’d share a story about how I took his words to heart, and made it happen for my startup.

I’ll start this with a slight backstory as to why I was even trying to get ahold of Pepsi in the first place.

A couple years ago, I was jogging with a @stevenray at Katy Trail in Dallas. I’ll be straight with you guys “I’m out of shape”, so when I saw a vending machine in the distance my ears perked up. I took off running for this machine dreaming about freezing water and gatorade, but when I got there I realized that I didn’t have my wallet. I only had my phone, cause I left everything else in the car. I looked at @stevenray and said “Why can’t I just log in to my Facebook, I’ll let them spam me forever, and they give me a free drink.” And that was the spark of the idea that became The LikeUs Network.

We ended up creating a startup that developed a piece of custom hardware that plugs into vending machines allowing them to accept mobile payment through ios, android, or a mobile browser. But more impressive, we allowed you to pay with Social Currencies: A Post on Facebook, A Tweet, Instagram Photo, X amount of Likes on a Instagram Photo, and pretty much any other piece of social marketing that any advertiser would want.

You can read more about LikeUs Network here or you can check out the official LikeUs Network website here.

So anyway…back to the Facebook Ads getting me a meeting at Pepsi.

So by this time we’re about 2 years into this startup. We’ve taken a ghetto idea, we got Mark Cuban to invest in our company, have a fully manufacturing ready piece of hardware that works in all of our test machines, and we’re ready to take on the vending world.

We should have been on top of the world, but there was always this weird thought in the back of my head. “Why isn’t Coke beating down my door, and why isn’t Pepsi tripping Coke to get in the front of the line with us?”

It kept me up at night wondering how we could have gotten a lot of press, been on tv, have small vendors calling us daily, but the big guys just didn’t seem to care.

So I had an idea

Using Facebook’s social graph, I would setup an ad that would only show up to people who work at Pepsi & Coke. I would target an older demographic, cause I knew that their execs and decision makers weren’t gonna be straight out of college. And I would make the ad something that I know they don’t have.

The ad read like this:
“No cash, No coin, No cards. Android, iOS, or any phone w/ a mobile browser.

I’m not joking when I say this…literally the next day I had a voicemail from a VP at Pepsi, wanted to talk about my product.

I quickly called him back, we had a great chat, he got excited, flew us out for a meeting with their tech/marketing/vending teams to see if this was something we could partner on.

1 day worth of a strategic Facebook advertisement instantly got rid of the void that was stuck in my head. There was no more wondering why they hadn’t called. I took a step, devized a plan, and I made them call me.

What’s the point of this post?

The point isn’t to brag about how well we made out, cause we didn’t. After all the great things that happen with LikeUs Network, we still shut it down. The point is that you shouldn’t stay up at night wondering. You shouldn’t ask yourself why isn’t this company calling me for a huge merger. If that’s what you want, you need to come up with a plan, do some digging, and MAKE IT HAPPEN.