The Exchanges

Q Okay, very cool. And then tell us more about the customers using it. You've kind of mentioned a bunch of different gamuts, but what is your kind of core audience? Are these CEOs, small business owners, CMOs, enterprise folks? What is it?

A Definitely the social media team, the people who manage the posts that go out on social media. So for, um, for companies like Dropbox, Outbrain, Autodesk, they all have Uh, social media teams, and these are not necessarily the CMO, which is a pretty high executive level, but there's usually a social media team that, uh, aggregates content, curates relevant content to their audience, and decides what posts to push through to their third-party platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer, and they're always sending links there, and so those people manage the links and therefore are a natural fit for using the Snipply platform because it allows them to make more out of the links that they're sharing, allowing them to generate more reports and analytics for their superiors.

AI assessment note: “Definitely the social media team, the people who manage the posts that go out”

Q I don't really see this a lot, but you've got an area that says custom plans, and it says, one, type in your usage volume, features you want, and then kind of name your price, and then log in for name your price. This is very intentional. This is working, or it's doing something for you. Break this down for us on the back end. Why are you doing this?

A Yeah, and, uh, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, at the beginning especially, we struggle with pricing. How do we price this product, especially with something like Like Snipply back in, uh, was definitely a first of its kind. Um, and that was one of the first initiatives we did, a name your own price approach that allows us to draw data and insights on what people are requesting, uh, what features they're requesting, and how it correlates with the price range, their willingness to pay. Um, and that's actually something that we've kept ever since, because not only does it allow us to capture audiences that fit in between two plans, it'll also allow us to make Great exceptions for nonprofits who may not be able to afford our smallest tier plan. But all in all, it gives us a lot of insights over a long period of time over how to price our product, what features are more valuable. As we introduce new products, it gives us a better idea of where it fits based on how people request these in combination with others. And so overall, it's been a great initiative for us.

AI assessment note: “allows us to draw data and insights on what people are requesting”

Q 2000, and where did most of these guys come from? Did you just upsell these people that were already using Snipply, or are these new users to Lumen all together?

A I think the, the first hundred or maybe first couple hundred was probably Snipply, uh, email blast, getting people just coming, coming up with a beta user. And I recommend this for anyone else who's listening. If you previously have a product and you're launching a new product, make sure that there's some synergy between the two. For us, Snipply users were the perfect Lumen five users. Snipply users were the people who were sharing links that are now trying to adapt to a multimedia world. And we built a multimedia solution. So it was the perfect cell to introduce it to them. But since then, I think we've grown organically the same way we've done with Snipply. Building a product in the marketing industry is really interesting because all of our users and customers also have their own blogs and podcasts, so they love talking about new tools that they've discovered, and so there's a lot of evergreen content out there that talks about, you know, top five tools you have to try, top three tools and whatnot, and that's how we've acquired a lot of our customers and users.

AI assessment note: “the first couple hundred was probably Snipply, uh, email blast... But since then”

Q company comes and looks at this and they're about to sign up and they go, wait a second, they have this thing where you can just name your price. This must be like a cheap tool. Like you can get it for like nothing. And then like, do you have any way to measure The downside of having this on your pricing page? Um, do you know what I mean?

A Yeah, I definitely know what you mean. That's more of the psychological aspect. It's hard to measure that if somebody actually came, had that thought and left. Uh, but what we usually do find is that because we have a dedicated page, uh, for the enterprise plan. So if you're on the standard pricing page, you'll see, uh, the smaller plans, which goes up to 150 dollars per month anyway. So an enterprise customer coming to this page is going to say, oh, this only goes up to 150 dollars a month. This may be a small, uh, small tool, but then in the enterprise plans, you'll see that the standard plans are laid out 300 to 2000 dollars a month. Um, and so in that sense, the custom plan is, Is expected to, to, to kind of leverage the standard plans as the, uh, as the guideline for how to make a reasonable request. So that's at least the thinking behind it. I don't think I have any way of proving whether they have that thought and leave and never end up contacting us.

AI assessment note: “It's hard to measure that if somebody actually came, had that thought and left.”

Q Yeah. And then what about customer acquisition cost on average?

A So customer acquisition costs is very interesting. We've never invested in a customer acquisition costs outside of my own time. And so we don't do ads or anything like that. We don't pay for any customer acquisition. Uh, what we've done from the very beginning is really cultivate relationships with bloggers. Uh, so I would classify that, uh, under earned media. So, uh, cultivating those relationships. Um, one of our key customer acquisition method is evergreen content. There's over Uh, one thing we've noticed is that when serving marketers, marketers also tend to be bloggers. And that's helped us a lot in the sense that as marketers pick up the tool and they enjoy the tool, they tend to write about the tool, which other marketers read about. And that's why you see a lot of marketers on our testimonial page. Um, and so I don't have an interesting value in terms of customer acquisition costs because we haven't really invested in ads, but you, you can kind of take my salary on, on that as cost, I guess.

AI assessment note: “We've never invested in a customer acquisition costs outside of my own time.”

Q And how many of these kind of form submissions will you get per month on average, would you say? Just curious what the cohort of data stream kind of looks like.

A I usually get, uh, probably at least one or two a week. Um, so one thing that I find is that people are very reasonable. You know, the first thought that people come, that comes to mind when you see a custom plan is, oh, when you ask people to name their own price, they're just going to name whatever or unreasonable prices. Um, what I find is that while that may be true, if you're running a consumer model, um, but with businesses, you know, businesses have a budget. They, they have great respect For other tools and platforms and the price requests that come through are very, very reasonable. Um, of course it's a, it's a custom plan requests, which means we always have the rights to reject them. If for whatever reason they're requesting a plan, that's one dollar for all of our features. So it's not necessarily a pay what you want. It's a, it's a custom request form. It becomes a negotiation at that point.

AI assessment note: “I usually get, uh, probably at least one or two a week.”

Q What's your fully weighted CAC right now for new customers on Lumen Five?

A It's, that's also an interesting question. I think we talked about it simply as well. When we grow organically, it's really hard to calculate CAC. We've run some ads to try and Uh, on, on our efforts with ads, it's about 200 dollars CAC on a 600 dollar lifetime value, but it's also really hard to calculate because we haven't been around that long, so lifetime value just goes up as the months go by. Um, but other than that, we haven't really explored too many growth strategies. Snipply is a great source of leads and just users coming through, uh, but also with users coming through evergreen contents, uh, these are earned media, and we don't have a clear idea on what CAC looks like.

AI assessment note: “on our efforts with ads, it's about 200 dollars CAC”

Q Have you given them any reason to have to keep paying you or want to keep paying you when they're not creating a video? Things like potentially like analytics or other, you know, hey, we'll store your media assets for you, you know, things like that.

A What we're investing right now is in content and education. I think there's, I mean, people who are really deep into the social media space know the power of stories, know the power of social, sharing videos every day. I think it's our job to establish ourselves as a thought leader and show people the impact and case studies of why you should be sharing videos every day. So that's what we're doing right now. Um, we don't really do anything in the analytics vein right now, but still we feel like the problem is in the education and the desire to be able to see the impact of sharing videos on a regular basis, as opposed to these one-off projects that we're seeing. And that's more of a traditional mindset. You know, you're not going to go out and produce a video every day. You're probably going to make a video every quarter. Um, most people are not doing super heavy ad optimization and stuff like that. Uh, but I do, what we moved into this industry for is that it's a growing trend. And I think it's a matter of time before people Realize that videos are much more valuable than any other forms of content, and they'll continue to share more.

AI assessment note: “we don't really do anything in the analytics vein right now”