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I interviewed David Hauser, co-founder of Grasshopper, a phone system for entrepreneurs. He started Grasshopper while he was still in college and since then has started a number of other companies. Grasshopper is entirely bootstrapped and is known for their marketing stunts. I wanted to learn about some of the stunts he’s done to get new users.

The Interview

I’ve heard a little bit about some chocolate grasshopper stunt. Tell me what it was.

Sure, as a marketing campaign, we sent out five hundred bags of actual chocolate-covered grasshoppers. We didn’t send them to customers. We sent them to influencers — the media, popular people on Twitter, authors and everyone in the United States Senate — just anyone we could think of who we thought counted as an influencer.

We also created a video called Entrepreneurs Can Change the World, and part of that integrated with sending the chocolate-covered grasshoppers. But, we also drove towards a message which tied entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship to Grasshopper.

How did you come up with this idea?

When we look back at how we’ve come up with these things, there are frameworks of what creates buzz. Every time there’s been something successful for us we’ve gone to the extreme and then found what the limits were with it.

So, for example, when we were doing the chocolate-covered grasshopper campaign, we initially wanted to send live grasshoppers in the mail. Well, you can’t send live stuff in the mail. So, then we thought let’s send dead ones, because in Asia, you can buy them.

The ones we got were huge with big eyes. So then we backed off again until we got to the smaller chocolate-covered ones that were still extreme and different and controversial but palatable enough that someone would actually try to eat it. So, I think that’s the thing — knowing those limits.

What other crazy stunts have you done?

One time, we got a bright green bull mascot outfit, and we went to South by Southwest and got a professional mascot to wear it and run around for three days. He did backflips and drove around in a Corvette and did all sorts of silly stuff.

That was a lot of fun until he almost got arrested, because he was in the conference center. But, again, this was also unique and different.

I’ll be back with David next week to hear more of his story.

Illustration by Orissa Jenkins