The Toucan AI Blog
Toucan AI is what an outsider might call my first real startup. It’s the first one that received any kind of notable publicity, and it’s the first one for which we scrounged together the marketing efforts that help a company appear “legit” in the eyes of strangers and online followers.
First and foremost, this started with the advent of our company blog. While we weren’t writing new blogposts every single day, we made it happen on a fairly regular schedule, at least throughout much of late 2019 and early 2020, with only a team of 4 writing/editing contributors!
Personally, this is probably still my favorite of our blogposts, though this is undisputedly the most important, and this probably marks the most notable for our company’s trajectory.
Quick sidenote—if you’d bought Shopify stock when we published this article (when Shopify had already been growing like crazy, and long before anyone knew about the impending pandemic), it’d be worth at least 4x that amount now.
My First Sale
My First Sale is a podcast in which I interviewed small e-commerce business owners and tried to paint an honest and authentic picture about their successes and struggles. Many of the interviewees were early Toucan customers and advocates, and many of them are people I now consider to be friends.
We started the podcast at the beginning of 2020, initially releasing episodes weekly, then dialing back a bit when the pandemic started ramping up and other concerns took over for people. During the time that the podcast was active, we had a small but dedicated following of people interested in stories from small business owners!
I conducted, edited, released, and promoted My First Sale interviews on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
Snacks for the Socially Distanced
When the pandemic first began, my friend (and the co-founder of Toucan) Vishnu and I realized we were looking at several months (or even years) of collective isolation and inability to safely eat food at restaurants. We were roommates at the time, and have always shared a deep and intense love for trying new and exciting foods, so this seemed like the only way to make up for the gaping hole that had now been introduced into our lives.
Thus, we began Snacks for the Socially Distanced, the podcast.
We went to our local grocery store(s) and racked up as many weird and exciting snacks as we could find to review in great detail, seriousness, and frequency.
While we now only record the occasional episode, there was a while in which we were recording, editing, releasing, and posting on social media about a new episode every single day. And despite no true coordinated marketing campaign, we not only managed to amass a loyal (albeit small) following of listeners, but we even ended up receiving a ton of free snacks to review from various companies.
Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, and Twitter!