scite.ai, a revolutionary platform in the academic research space, sought to establish itself as a key player by providing valuable insights into scientific literature. With an ambitious goal to rapidly scale its B2C customer base and revenue, scite.ai hired me to run their paid ads function.

The Challenge

scite.ai built a name for themselves by helping researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. 

Breakthroughs with LLMs opened the door for scite.ai to build a ChatGPT-type product on top of their core technology aimed at individual researchers. While the product was revolutionary, success was continent on them being able to efficiently acquire customers outside of their current base. 

The Solution

After researching existing demand and internal data, it was clear that there was an opportunity to grow quickly with the right strategy. AI was seeing huge interest from the public and early adopters were looking for ways to integrate it into their workflow to improve their research process. 

I built a tightly targeted Google Ads structure that focused on capturing high intent traffic and optimized a conversion funnel that acquired new trials efficiently. Additionally we built an influencer strategy on YouTube and TikTok that generated new demand in an audience segment that skewed younger as well as drove the referral program. The components of the strategy were:

• High intent paid search and competitor targeting campaigns

• Influencer content that highlighted how to use the new tool

• Paid social the used influencer content as ad creative

The Results

scite.ai’s B2C business grew to $4m ARR within 5 months after launch. The ad campaigns remain profitable at scale with a payback period under 2 months and LTV/CAC ratio of 4x.