- First TechTOgether Outdoor Summer Social
- Reactivating users who didn’t subscribe during their trial
- Email copy and lessons from reaching out for “partnerships”
Resources
https://www.techto.org/events/techto-may11-2022
Automated Transcription
Alright, hello Tyler, right here. Appreciate you. Joining last night was fantastic. There was an event it was the tech hero Summer social series. I like love Textio also love the stacked market so this is an amazing sort of outdoor indoor shipping container operation. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe there and I fun fact lived in this apartment during COVID. During COVID there was a collapse in the Airbnb. Market as everyone stops traveling and so vatsal and I were lucky enough to get that 20th floor penthouse suite in this apartment for way less than what was reasonable and had a wonderful. You know, despite Toronto being shut down despite all this felt like we were living a life of luxury. Really enjoyed the time there and always looked at this place now. Not much was going on because of COVID but I was like this seems cool. I would love to spend some time there and then last night techno.
By the summer social Series and it was great to see people back together in person. If you’re in Toronto, you’re interested in taking this amazing community. Really have felt welcomed at all times as different subsets of these communities tech, you know, sort of like tech, sales, marketing, healthcare, legal tech, all these different ones. But together when they do more general events, it’s a huge audience of engaged people who care about the work that they’re doing or networking who are excited to connect. And I’ve always really enjoyed these events, and yeah.
Vote 20 minutes from where I live drive and then get some some good food, drink and then there was a little bit of sort of like panels and stuff. I will say I didn’t get to catch much of those. There were the speakers weren’t that loud. Bless people were I sort of talked about this in another episode of this or whatever the hell this thing is is that I think people are very interested. More in more in just connecting and networking than that was the experience that I had yesterday. So two couple interesting things that came up.
One shout out to this team ribbon early in their journey here, but was the first sort of crypto NFT pitch that I heard that felt somewhat practical to me, which was rewarding and recognizing employees with their accomplishments. Embedding sort of the meta details of that accomplishment and and then making them like beautiful, shareable things that can be added with sort of gallery walls and all this idea and sort of talked about this sort of ribbon, I mean. Even when I didn’t get that at first, but the ribbon, the culture that you also had growing up where you know if you compete participated in a sport, you would get a ribbon you could go back on your wall and that was almost like a stamp of an accomplishment or a stamp of something. So they’re early in their journey. If you’re interested in this stuff, you’re encouraged to check them out. Really enjoyed the conversation with them. Think they’re doing some awesome stuff, so thanks to the to Sharon and actually giving me a little bit less skepticism of a functional application. I really did enjoy that and then also.
Wanted to quickly shout out these guys from voice form who in many cases people would consider our competitor and we had an experience where actually advertised on their their branded name as a as a as a keyword. So it was like if someone was typing and voice for him I would type. Here’s the best voice form alternative redirect to you to the embeddable recorder on speak and had one of the funniest exchanges to me with owner of another company. Sort of playfully. I endorsed my skills and digital marketing on LinkedIn and so we had a good laugh over that, but I’m really. I know it, really love what they’re doing. A big fan and I think you know to me. While there is always these competitive barriers and moats and things that are trying to be established. What I’m more interested in is connecting with people who see the vision that I see that I’m, you know, have worked on for a long time that had trouble explaining and articulating to people for a long time and so just had to have a great conversation with their team, shared some laughs over some of the.
Shared challenges and iOS recording and people scared of recording voice online and all these different things. So that was a ton of fun. Met some other people and a lot of conversation around. Yes market volatility people trying to raise the the the fear of that and then you know just overall a lot of sort of macro trends impacting people who are then showing up to these events. And I think a lot of people trying to sort of meaning make while they’re at these events or understand or ask questions.
And I was lucky enough to have some good conversations. Meet with some people who shared very transparently, had some great insights. And so I learned a lot last night, and one of the feelings that I walked away with is like wrote this journey. You go through this period of like hyper learning and I found that. Feel like I have, you know. I mean, I’m I’m I’m dumb in so many ways but it’s just been forced to learn other things and I could tell that in some of the conversations I had that there were some insights that were valuable and I feel like I’m capable of more. I’m capable of giving more. I’m capable, I’m underutilized right now and so that’s something that I’m sort of wrestling with and dealing with and working through as someone operating in the constraints of obviously business, but also just wanting to help people and see their dreams and ambitions come to true.
Come to life and and and also maybe. Avoid some of the mistakes that I had made or or I’m still making right now just by sharing, so that’s a couple pieces from that. Thank you techno for doing that. Of course be back at other events stacked always welcomed and I know that they’re doing a lot of work too. Sort of bring other events together so hopping onto another piece of this journey that we are on and so one of the things that I had talked about a couple days ago was this pricing calculator, which is fantastic. Let me see if I can.
Showed up quickly just so I can walk through it, but. The the challenge here is is not the challenge, but what what I’ve realized is that when you have when someone has to say a 14 day free trial, 14 day experience and they do not sign up, it’s relatively over. So if you don’t have a good onboarding, if they don’t find value in the product, most likely what we’ve seen happen is that you you you churn, you don’t sign up for the plan, you don’t want to hear from us again. You maybe find another vendor where you just give up on trying to find that. Solution and you unsubscribe from emails et cetera, et cetera. So that’s why some of these companies that are successful are so focused on making sure that the original onboarding experiences is very valuable and it gets it unlocks value creation for the people that are signing up, and I think especially in small, not niche use cases, but very defined products. That’s easy thing to to do sometimes with our case and kind of people streaming, and it’s been a little bit harder because of the wide range of use.
Basis and etcetera etcetera so. That is one of the reasons why we built out this pricing calculator. I’ll share this correctly. I won’t spam you, but I will spam myself on look at all these pop ups. Oh my God, I’m sorry I’m embarrassed Oh my God, get out of here. So this idea of build your perfect plan, sort of with the starter kit, custom premium and then all the plans include great. And then we’ve got the pricing where it’s sort of like hey I’ve got. You know I need 20 hours. I’ve got 1011 team members. I don’t need this. I don’t need this. I don’t need this. I don’t need this.
And now I’ve got my plan and I can switch six months, nine months yearly, 3 months, and really sort of custom tailor this to myself and so at least ourselves. Personally we think, hey, this is a wonderful new experience that you can have with speak and maybe people in the past who didn’t necessarily get the value out. Or maybe that the plan was too pricey or they wanted to experiment before they made such a big commitment because of the sort of rigid structure of our plans. And then maybe we should reconnect with them and see if there is a way that they will consider using speak again, testing, speak again and then. And maybe even personalizing a plan that actually makes sense for themselves this time. And so one of the ways that we’re doing this, and really, you’re limited to that, because it’s all you can do unless they sign back into the app, which is unlikely if they didn’t sign up during that free trial, most likely again, they moved on to another render. Or you know, whatever, not not going to solve this wasn’t big enough pain point to actually find even another product. So really, the only channel we have email we have that Channel through intercom right now is how we deliver emails and so the message is, say, hey, you know there’s a lot of.
Amazing stuff that has been added to speak to help you solve problems. Since you have since you first tested out speak we want, we’ve gone ahead. We’ve given you. We’ve reactivated your 14 day free trial. We’ve given you an hour of transcription. Would love would love for you to go test it.
Check out all the new features and if you enjoy the experience, there’s an entirely new pricing configuration that you can do where you can pay as little as $10 per month. For your specific needs, and then scale up based on that. So maybe that price point isn’t as it doesn’t have as much friction. Maybe during this time they’ve you know it wasn’t immediate forefront in their thought, but this message and then they built to customize plan then re sort of re retriggers that goal for them to solve this problem etcetera etcetera and so. And then also just like one last incentive of like hey if you do this we’ll give you one premium add-on like I you know I showed you here.
We have one of those to you for free because we wanna wanna make this valuable for you as possible. And that’s I mean. So that’s that’s the offer and I’m going to sort of share if any of that works. I think we’ve got an audience about 4500 people who have signed up. There’s a bunch of those who are active paying users already today, but then there are many who are not, and who are, you know, follow our journey who have not subscribed. They will get this email. Maybe open it, and we’re going our our goal there is to reactivate them. How can we?
Get them to see the value of speak and with this new price and configuration, see it as a viable, affordable, cost effective option in their technology stack. So there you go. That’s the reactivation part and one last part that I think is worthwhile talking about is this. Reach out for sort of partnerships, and I have an early in testing this because we released this affiliate program, and but what we found a couple things we found early is that as you reach out for affiliates, people are who have websites. The website traffic they are looking for pay to play, so they want you to pay to they want you to pay to be able to list your site on and we were sort of trying to work our way around that by saying hey, here’s an affiliate plan and you, you know we don’t want to pay up front, but if you drive any sales and you’re going to get 30% or sorry 25% recurring Commission on an ongoing basis, it was a great way for you to make money sort of feedback response is that we don’t really care. We want to pay for listing.
We don’t know how much of this. We can’t guarantee how much of this traffic is going to convert your sign up. Flow could be broken. All this stuff could lead to people not signing up and us not getting that affiliate revenue. So why would we take that risk? We’ve got high value spots on web pages, that’s high traffic and high intent, and it doesn’t make sense for us to do that. So that’s been a little bit of our journey today. We have found a couple of opportunities and some people finding out signing up for the affiliate programs, but generally if you’re reaching out to people who have big organic search volume on their site.
Like listicle tool articles, they are paid to play and then you know, maybe if you’re if you can find people who love what you’re doing, are passionate about, or or smaller audiences and see an opportunity, then you’re more likely. So what I’ve gone through I’ve done is actually start to reach out a little bit on some more of a partnership option. This is a variation of the message that is going out now. I would love for people to critique me on this. First of all, the subject line.
Asshole quick question. Now The thing is I’m seeing wonderful open rates to this and actually seeing responses for this as well too. My first variation of this was a lot of opens. Not a lot of responses, and I know I’ve got this quick question email before. I’m pissed a lot of people off.
It pisses me off when I get it so I don’t want to feel like I’m tricking someone. I am asking a question at least in the email. Sometimes you get like quick question and there’s not even a question in the email. But really, you know I guess just a couple pieces discovered you on LinkedIn. First of all, I’ve got feedback from one person which makes sense is like hey, my email is not on LinkedIn. How did you find me? I have to let this person know there are a lot of tools to get your email pretty easily just by knowing who they are. Congratulations your growth. Yes, a little. You know a little generic, but I think it’s important that like.
Reached out to these people for a reason. Tyler Bridge and CEO Link linking not maybe always a good idea. It could get you caught in emails or people. Obviously nervous to click on those and then trying to put a little bit of experience or credibility here. Originally we had some of the customers who were in our who you speak which added some credibility to where we tried to move instead of sort of bragging about our customers asking the question so we get to the question quicker and then grateful to share. So grateful. That’s nice.
Yes, already creating new revenue streams for some incredible people and organizations. I didn’t say like where, maybe I might. But then the sentence starts to get really long and then talk about how they do it. They white label or no quote software too, and then three points cost effective automatic professional transcription, testimonials, feedback, content scale, transcripts and reports for research, and then so they’ve got three pretty concrete examples of how they would use our platform and then sort of aim for shared value creation, open, disappoint and grow. So a little bit of you know, we’d love to hear how you think.
This would best work, showing that we’re open to working with them, and that we care about. You know the best setup for them, and then if you want to connect more and send me a note back or use my calendar link. Easy. So I had a couple people book meetings with that already and then thank you so much. Thanks for taking this time and I just try to say that right off to stop. Really appreciate you even opening this email, checking this out and then enjoy the rest of your day so continuing to do that, continuing to find more people who could be fit fit for that partnership role. That is something that is not, you know, never and nothing is.
Never ever as easy as you think it is, but share it a little bit of the email overreach if you have any feedback on that. Would love to hear you hear from it as well as, say, reactivating users and you know, if you’re finding other events here in Toronto or things techtel related or whatever, send me a message. Let me know. Look forward to connecting with more people. I really enjoyed the time last night and was excited to to see some great people out there. So thank you so much. This has been Tyler Braden. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye.
