Overview

Layla is an AI powered travel companion that helps users find the perfect flights, hotels, and trips at unbeatable prices. Founded by a unicorn entrepreneur (co-founder of Flink, which raised $240M in 6 months and hit $400-500M revenue in 3 years), Layla had half a million monthly visitors but zero social presence.

They came to MediaMaxxing with one goal: prove UGC could scale faster than SEO.

The Challenge

Layla's founder didn't want to play it safe. They'd been building for 2.5 years through SEO, hitting 300K visits per month organically. But SEO is dying, and they knew it.

The ask was simple but aggressive:

• Validate UGC as the primary growth channel in under 2 weeks
• Beat their monthly SEO traffic (300K) in a fraction of the time through views
• Compete against established players like Trip.com and Trivago
• Target global audiences (US, Canada, UK, Europe) simultaneously
• Move fast. This wasn't a marathon, it was a sprint to Series A

The competitive landscape was crowded, but weak. Competitors were posting beautiful travel content with zero calls to action. They had millions of views but weren't converting them into product usage.

Layla wanted to flip that — Show the product → Drive action → Scale aggressively

What We Did

We launched a high velocity testing campaign designed to find viral formats fast, then scale them immediately.

Week 1: Discovery and Rapid Testing

Strategy:

• Recruited travel creators, budget travelers, digital nomads, and college students