Mortgage Hippo

Founded in Chicago, Mortgage Hippo was created to offer consumers a much-needed, streamlined, and completely digital home-buying experience. We knew that we had a very attractive and disruptive take on an outdated model, but we lacked the resources to compete with the abundant marketing dollars of the more established players in the industry. As an early-stage startup, we needed to come up with a cheap, creative way to burst into the scene. Our product was something of a rarity in the space, an unconventional solution to a conventional problem, and as such we knew we had to apply a similar approach to our initial marketing efforts. So we came up with a unique way to announce our arrival in the local startup scene: we put a hippo in the Chicago River.

It all started with a mysterious hippo sighting video that made the rounds on Reddit and social media. Soon, the local news outlets picked it up, followed by national news, but when international tabloids started covering it, we knew we were off to the races. We immediately filtered a second Chicago River hippo sighting video to add kindling to the fire, followed soon after by a reveal video.

The stunt was a success, and our website saw a significant traffic spike that got us the attention we were looking for. Signups to the platform started pouring in, and we got the momentum we needed to usher us into a fruitful Series A funding round and claim our rightful place in an extremely contested space.

Watch below to see how it all went down.