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.

It gets crazier.

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 did 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 learn about OpenAI’s very untraditional approach to marketing

• You’ll meet its marketing leader

• You’ll learn how OpenAI actually does do “marketing,” but in a different way than most companies

• You’ll get takeaways on how to apply it to your startup

Let’s dive in.

OpenAI’s first and only marketing hire no longer works at the company

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 ChatGPT to large businesses through sales enablement activity such as “telling customer stories.”

Digging around, 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, business growth, or top-of-funnel performance. She didn’t build out a team or lead any broadscale campaigns, but rather served as a support 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 wasn’t the marketing powerhouse behind OpenAI’s growth, who was? I kept digging.

OpenAi’s marketing team of “ghosts”

According to the org chart of OpenAI on the website TheOrg, there are 378 people under CEO Sam Altman. Under Brad Lightcap, the COO, there is a “Vice President Marketing” named “Jessica Braelynn” with 15 direct reports.

However, digging into Jessica Braelynn and her team, it turns out either none of these people exist or The Org has erroneously listed them as OpenAI employees based on their LinkedIn profiles.

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 the most random content, such as weather reports. His website issihk.com redirects to his Linkedin profile. The list goes on.

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 when he really just uses the tool to write content for him.

4. Zack Cass, Head of GTM at OpenAI, who reports directly to the COO, is a real person. 

Conclusion: Either The Org is just a low-quality, inaccurate LinkedIn scraper trying to piece together company org charts or there is a ghost marketing team at OpenAI. 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: [email protected]. This may be the door. Many times marketing functions are decentralized or spread across other teams like Product, GTM, or Partner teams.

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.

OpenAI is trying to run its marketing and communications like Apple

Wong is exactly what 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, Steve 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? 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 make way more sense.

Hannah has hired a team ~ 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 Marketing as a proxy lives under Communications — but I still had some unanswered questions.

Who built OpenAI’s brand and website?

Turns out, OpenAI outsourced it 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 probably mid to high six figures.

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

It wasn’t until March 2017 when OpenAI rebranded its site with its current recognizable logo:

…which has remained largely unchanged even through the redesign by Area17 in 2023.

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:

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. This is true across all of OpenAI’s content. They publish engineering research and product updates. It’s very “not marketing.”

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

OpenAI just 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 in 1 word: “Don’t.”

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

I won’t leave you with the only takeaway being, “Don’t do marketing, focus on building a great product.” There’s more to it than that.

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 what happens next? PLG, virality, and a wildly successful product don’t answer the burgeoning pile of journalist inquiries in your press inbox. You can’t just ignore them when you reach a certain scale.

So once you do have a great product, you’ll need to hire your Hannah Wong. Look for a sharp Communications professional with an eye for design, who can work with your technical Product and Research orgs and build out a small team to handle the crushing inbound press when the rocket ship takes off.

Thanks for reading.

Dave

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