Brex startup spent only $300K to cover San Francisco with billboards

Pedro Franceschi (left)
and Henrique Dubugras are the cofounders of
Brex.
Brex

• San Francisco is covered with billboards for Brex, a
  startup that provides corporate credit cards to
  startups. 
• Plenty of startups find opportunities to brag about
  spending so little money on marketing,
  but 
  Brex cofounder and CEO Henrique
  Dubugras says the ads were worth every penny.
• Brex, which has raised a total of $57 million in
  funding from Peter Thiel and Y Combinator, spent only $300,000
  on the ads plastered on bus stops, buildings, and
  billboards.

In San Francisco, there are few places to escape them.

Jet-black billboards advertising
Brex, a startup that offers the first corporate card for
startups, loom over the streets and sidewalks. 

The startup appears to have gone all-in on marketing, with
posters on bus stops, sides of buildings, and billboards
concentrated in the South of Market neighborhood, which is home
to many startups.

In a Thursday night fireside chat with Business Insider and Brex
cofounder and CEO Henrique Dubugras, a member of the audience
asked Dubugras to explain his thinking behind “taking over San
Francisco” with billboards and reveal how much the campaign cost.

“How much do you think all those billboards cost?” Dubugras said.

The man guessed between $2 million and $3 million.

According to Dubugras, the billboards cost about $300,000 —
one-tenth of the man’s guess. The audience let out a gasp.

It made sense for Brex to advertise in the San Francisco Bay
Area, Dubugras said, because it’s the epicenter of the tech
industry. He estimated that 40% of his potential customers —
emerging companies without access to traditional corporate cards
— grow their businesses here. He wanted the whole city’s eyes on
Brex.

“The cost per qualified view of a billboard is so much lower than
the cost per qualified view on any online display platform,” such
as Facebook or Twitter, Dubugras said.

Plus, $300,000 was a drop in the bucket for venture-backed Brex.
The company has
raised a total of $57 million in funding from investors,
including Y Combinator, PayPal Mafia members Peter Thiel and Max
Levchin, and early Facebook investor Yuri Milner.

To spend or not to spend on marketing

In Silicon Valley, some startups, such as electric
scooter-sharing company
Bird, find opportunities to brag about spending zero dollars
on marketing. They wear it like a badge of honor.

According to Dubugras, entrepreneurs get excited about succeeding
without a traditional marketing budget because it shows they
found a market for the product. Their popularity grows by word of
mouth.

“It proves people are talking about it,” Dubugras said. “That’s
the only possible source that they would be hearing about a
product.”

Brex took a different approach. The company had a private beta
giving select startups the ability to use Brex’s corporate card.

“We were very confident of our product-market fit, because even
in a private beta, a lot of people were using the card and using
their card a lot, and the numbers were just growing,” Dubugras
said.

“So we had six months of no marketing, and it was working great.
Now, we can do marketing, because we’re confident that
product-market fit exists.”

In San Francisco, a few people are having fun with Brex on
Twitter: