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The classic funding announcement post is getting the Gen Z treatment. More startups, especially those led by young founders, are moving away from LinkedIn posts or X threads and turning to viral TikToks and short-form videos to stand out, Business Insider recently reported. With traditional media coverage harder to land and social posts quickly vanishing from feeds, founders are rethinking how they announce major milestones. Cluely, the cheat on everything startup, recently raised $15 million and announced it with a shot-for-shot homage to The Social Network. Earlier this year, they also launched with a video that cost $140,000 to produce. The 90-second narrative short, posted to X, shows a man on a first date being fed lines in real time by Cluely. The investment paid off. The video went viral and crashed Cluelys servers, founder Chungin Roy Lee told Business Insider. Cluely is out. cheat on everything. pic.twitter.com/EsRXQaCfUI— Roy (@im_roy_lee) April 20, 2025 For Hedra, a startup focused on digital avatars, the announcement video doubled as a product demo. Founder Michael Lingelbach appears in the clip as himself, as a Studio Ghibli character, a Pixar animation, and with a full tech bro makeover, complete with gold chain. Those viral baby podcast videos that were everywhere last month? That was them. @hedra.labs We’re hooked on the baby podcasts, so we made our own with Character-3. #ai #babypodcast #aibaby #aivideo #chatgpt #hedra original sound – Hedra – Hedra Not every announcement needs to be a high-budget production, though. British entrepreneur Grace Beverley turned to TikTok last year to announce two fundraises: one for her activewear brand TALA, and another for Retrograde, her AI-powered talent agency. Sign my businesss series a funding round with me, read the caption of one TikTok, where she signed the 5 million deal with a pink fluffy pen. Just a few months later, she returned with a white fluffy pen to sign the 1.9 million round for Retrograde. @gracebeverley a pinch me moment original sound – grace beverley Instead of relying on blog posts or LinkedIn updates, startups navigating a saturated market may find that a viral video is more likely to attract new customersor even the right investor sliding into their DMs.
Category:
E-Commerce
For many people, when a “For Sale” sign pops up in their neighborhood, one of the first questions that comes to mind is: how much will that place go for? This price curiosityfueled by house flipping shows on HGTV and doomscrolling on Zillowhas gone from idle neighborhood interest to multimedia obsession. Now that experience is being turned into PropQwiz, a live daily trivia sweepstakes, and accurately guessing the listing price will give players a chance to win up to $350,000 to purchase a home, pay off a mortgage, or make a down payment. [Photo: Popqwiz] Like a mix of the defunct daily trivia game HQ Trivia and the real estate listings on Zillow, PropQwiz is a live game played through an app that uses actual real estate listings to quiz players on the likely selling price of homes around the U.S. Every weekday at 3 p.m. (Eastern Time), the PropQwiz app will broadcast a three-minute video featuring one house currently on the market, offering five clues about the home, the property, the amenities, and the location, and then giving players 15 seconds to guess the listing price. The closer the guess, the more points a player receives, and each point counts as an entry into a periodic sweepstakes for the grand prize of $350,000 toward a home, or $175,000 in cash. According to PropQwiz’s rules, the first home giveaway will happen after the total number of plays on the daily game and other minigames within the app reaches 31 million. By comparison, HQ Trivia had 2.4 million concurrent users at its peak of popularity. “The more people who play this game and the more games that are played, the more homes we get to give away,” says PropQwiz creator Jim Casey. “In the beginning, it might be a home a month. We’re looking to quickly turn that into a home a week, and perhaps even a home a day.” A longtime television producer behind shows like Building Outside the Lines and The Dead Files, Casey says the idea for the game came from his own experience, walking his dogs in his Los Angeles neighborhood with his wife and quizzing each other on the prices of homes that were up for sale. “It was fun in our neighborhood, but we found that when we traveled and we were in unfamiliar areas, it was even more fun,” he says. That guessing game turned out to be a common one among Casey’s friends, and as he looked into it, he realized that there is an even larger pool of people who browse real estate listings just for the fun of it. Research from 2021 found that more than a third of Zillow users were not actively in the market for housing but were just using the site casually. “People were doing this everywhere,” Casey says. But there’s also a bleaker side to that stat, which is that many people are only casually looking at real estate listings because they can’t actually afford to buy a home on the market. For people in the Gen Z and millennial age range, more than half believe they’d need to win the lottery to be able to afford a home, according to research from Zillow. “So we thought, alright, let’s give them a lottery, or at least a form of the lottery,” says Casey. (Legally speaking, the game is a sweepstakes; PropQwiz is free to play, and is supported by ads.) Ahead of PropQwiz’s first official live game on June 30, I tried my luck at a beta version of the game. I watched a three-minute video montage of a contemporary house while a narrator cheekily explained its stats and amenities: 5,200-square feet, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, walk-in pantry, saltwater pool, hot tub, all on three quarters of an acre. The final, and most important, cluelocation, location, locationis that the home is in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not knowing much about that particular housing market, and likely not ever being in the market for such a big house, I used my 15 seconds of guessing time to frantically suggest a listing price of $7.8 million. Within seconds, the true price was revealed: $3.45 million. “So you were pretty far off there,” says PropQwiz COO Daniel Tibbets. “But that’s okay,” he adds, noting that even a very bad guessone off by multiple millions of dollars, for exampleearns a player at least 100 points, or 100 chances to win. Somebody guessing closer to the $3.45 million mark would have racked up 5,000 points, vastly improving their odds of winning the ultimate sweepstakes. In addition to the daily live game, PropQwiz also features what Casey and Tibbets call minigames, which are multiple-choice quizzes that show a home and as for its current listing price, or in a version called Time Machine, its price decades ago. The homes featured in PropQwiz aren’t pulled from real estate listing aggregators like Zillow and Redfin but licensed from real estate photographers across the country. “They own the copyright on all these images,” Casey says. “So we ask them what are your favorite homes?” The PropQwiz team digs through thousands of images to find good candidate houses. Casey, the longtime television producer, says they aren’t always big expensive homes, but they do have to have some standout feature or unique quality. “We always want something that people are going to enjoy taking a tour of,” says Casey. “It needs to be something that’s either very relatable or very aspirational.” And, hopefully, entertaining enough that people tune in repeatedly, and get others to as well. “You bring in more people to play, you play more games, you get to have fun playing a game, and we get to give away homes,” Casey says. “That’s the goal.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Starting today, Costco is rolling out a new schedule that introduces exclusive hours for its Executive members. The schedule was first announced in an email sent to members earlier this month, in which the big-box warehouse club detailed its plans to adjust its hours of operations to add some attractive new perks for its highest-paying members. The plan comes on the heels of a strong financial quarter for Costco: Per its third quarter 2025 earnings report, the company notched 8% year-over-year sales gains, from $57.39 billion last year to $61.96 billion this year. Heres what to know about the updated schedule: How are hours and membership perks changing? Previously, Costcos hours at most locations were 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Today, the company is introducing an earlier start each day thats only available to its Executive tier. Throughout the week, Costco will now open at 9 a.m. for Executive members, giving those card-holders an additional hour of shopping Sunday through Friday, as well as 30 added minutes on Saturday. In addition, Costco will offer Executive members a monthly $10 credit for orders of $150 placed through the company’s “Same-Day” service or Instacart. Outside of these Executive tier offerings, Costco also plans to expand its Saturday hours to a 7 p.m. closing time for all members starting on July 5. Why is Costco making these changes? To shop at Costco at all, customers need to purchase one of two membership plans: either the standard Gold Star Membership, which costs $65 per year, or the Executive Membership, which costs $130 per year. In the past, Costco has primarily attracted its most loyal shoppers to the pricier Executive Membership with an annual 2% reward on qualified purchases, which can rack up a maximum of $1,250 in cash back per year. Now, though, the company is trying to sweeten the deal with an exclusive shopping experiencea strategy thats already in place at Sams Club, the retailers main rival. Costcos adoption of the concept makes sense, given how central Executive members have become to its overall financial health. On a May 29 earnings call, Gary Millerchip, Costcos executive vice president and CFO, shared that the company now has 37.6 million Executive members, up 9% from the same quarter in 2024. He also noted that at the end of third quarter 2025, Executive members accounted for 47.3% of paid members but a whopping 73.1% of worldwide sales. Early access to the clubs inventory (and its popular food court) is one way for Costco to keep its biggest spenders coming back for more.
Category:
E-Commerce
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