Closing our Seed Round and Announcing New Positioning
Anthony goes live to announce a new round of funding, new messaging, and a sneak peak into what we've been building in the months post Goldenhour.
This is the first, I think, or at least first in a long time,
type of program that we've run,
which is really meant to be a unrehearsed, unplugged office hours type of
presentation.
I think I was talking to Todd as we were preparing,
just getting kind of the systems all set up this morning.
This might actually be a really nice kind of recurring event for us to do.
To just check in, give you an update as to some of our thinking behind how we
're building audience plus.
What we're learning with the market as we're engaging more with customers,
and we're trying to execute this new playbook ourselves.
I think this could be potentially something that's a bit more recurring,
where if you're a marketer, there might be some interesting behind-the-scenes
learnings here,
from what does it take to go from zero to one with a brand and building an
enterprise software company.
But maybe also if you're a founder or entrepreneur,
there might be some learnings here as well around what we're learning in the
company building journey too.
It's meant to be transparent.
For better or for worse, I've chosen the build in public path to building
audience plus.
It feels like I can't put the genie back into the bottle now.
One of the things we'll commit to is being, again,
as radically transparent as we're building this company as well.
I think a lot of companies that aren't building in public have almost the
benefit of being able to go
and fail 100,000 times and no one would know about it.
We'll commit to failing publicly, often learning from it,
and being able to share those learnings with all of you in our journey here.
The other thing is we want to experiment with doing this live,
so I do have the ability to see your questions and comments here.
This content is going to be available on audience plus afterwards.
We're experimenting with how many folks can we drive to live experience,
how many folks are engaging afterwards on demand.
But benefit to being live is honestly, I can take your questions.
Definitely as I'm going through this,
please feel free to comment and we'll make sure to share.
With that, let's dive in.
Today, this is a big week for us at Audience Plus.
There's a lot that was announced this week and figured,
even I think the conventional wisdom,
at least from a PR comms perspective,
has always been to group a bunch of big things
into a meta announcement that you can use to get coverage
and be able to take to market.
Even just reflecting on the big LinkedIn post we did on Tuesday
that shared all of the things that have happened,
it's a lot.
It's actually quite a bit of different things
on the company news side, on the marketing side,
even on some of the product strategy side,
which I think we'll talk about at a high level today.
What we wanted to do is just unpack all of that
and be able to walk you through just a little bit of behind the scenes
of how we were thinking about some of those decisions,
why we did some of the things we did
and what we've learned in our learning in the first two years,
almost two and a half years now of building Audience Plus.
Let me jump in the first topic.
We raised another round of financing,
so we're fortunate to have raised another 7.3, 7.28 technically,
$1 million round.
And this is obviously incredibly exciting and validating.
I'm learning a lot about the fundraising journey,
but it was particularly interesting for, I'd say,
two reasons.
One, a very personal reason and one,
certainly a very interesting learning,
I'd say, from the company building journey.
So I'll start with the company building one.
So we're fortunate to have,
we raised our first round, which honestly,
I like incorrectly dubbed a seed round,
because we didn't have a product.
We didn't have anything, but effectively myself,
my co-founder and a PowerPoint,
believe that's called pre-seed if you want to get the taxonomy right,
back in March of 2022.
And so this was now sort of our second round,
which I think technically would classify as a seed,
but you can, everyone's going to have maybe a different way
of kind of drawing the line there.
And it was really great for several reasons.
First of all, Emergence Capital,
who led our initial pre-seed sort of double down on their investment in us,
which was incredibly validating.
Emergence is one of, I think, the best,
a tier one sort of investors in Silicon Valley.
And Santi, who, again, was the original investor in Audience Plus,
officially sort of joined our board as part of this transition, which is
awesome.
So we get a lot more time, of course,
and strategic work with Santi,
who, for those that don't know, was, I don't know where actually in their
journey,
but was integral to Zoom getting funded.
And I believe still sits on the board at Zoom.
So, really excited to have more of a sort of strategic kind of relationship
forming
with the Emergence Capital team, who's been, you know, unbelievable to us.
And then we have some new investors, which we're really excited about.
So, two in particular that I'll call out.
One is high alpha.
So, for those that don't know, high alpha,
Scott Dorsey is the sort of founder of high alpha.
Scott Dorsey is one of the marketing automation pioneers.
He started a company called Exact Target that was eventually acquired by
Salesforce. And so Exact Target was in that kind of basket of companies like
HubSpot,
Marquetto, Pardot, and others that were really evangelizing this next wave of
marketing automation.
And so, having him, you know, from that perspective, just from the experience
perspective,
it's incredible. But Scott's also like one of the nicest guys I've ever met,
honestly, sounds, sounds crazy to say, but just an amazing human being,
which is extremely awesome and good and important to have around you and in
your corner.
But also something that I thought was really interesting is,
Scott is building high alpha in the heart of Indianapolis.
And we're here in Phoenix. We got folks everywhere, but we definitely have a
heart for building
audience plus locally here in the Phoenix market as well. And so, there's a lot
to learn around
building a company in one of these sort of other markets. That's not San
Francisco. That's not New
York City. And so, I thought there, you know, that'd be a really good kind of
partnership to learn
from Scott and the high alpha team on how they did that. And then on that very
thread,
we have Greg Scorsby from Phoenix Ventures, who is one of our emerging kind of
early-stage
venture funds here locally in market in Phoenix. And so, Greg is an
entrepreneur founder,
himself, a company called Campus Logic. And honestly, he has so much passion
for the local
market here. He cares deeply about category creation as well, which is part of
our journey here at
Audience Plus. So, a chance to partner with Greg was, you know, was incredible.
So, that was sort of
the round dynamics on the business side. And what's great about it, of course,
capital helps keep
the company going and helps us kind of invest more deeply, which for us, well,
likely majority of
that is going to be on building our engineering and product organizations and
scaling our kind of
development effort, being able to accelerate our roadmap for our customers and
be able to just
increase our velocity on the product side. So, that's really kind of the core
focus of this next phase
for us. Of course, I can't quit the marketing. There's going to be some, a lot
more surprises along
the way. But really, the predominant focus for us for this next stage is to
really triple quadruple,
name your multiple down on our product and make it great. So, really, really
excited about that.
On the personal side, I'll just share, I think, you know, some of you know, my
wife and I, my family
went through quite a bit last year. And what was really interesting was this
fundraising process
had sort of kicked off, right, as we were kind of in the tornado for everything
that was happening
to us personally. And so, it really required a lot of partnership, I would say,
from our board,
from the team and emergence, from others to help get this deal across the
finish line. And so,
I'm indebted to a lot of people to help support me in kind of getting the seed
round done. So,
just wanted to put that out there as well. So, there's a weird sort of
emotional kind of tone to
this achievement as well. And so, very, very grateful for everyone that
contributed.
So, that's it. So, that's the funding news, which we're pumped on. The next bit
we have a new advisor that joined Audience Plus, a strategic advisor, I should
say, in Colin Fleming,
who's the CMO at ServiceNow. And Colin, for those that don't know, has a stor
ied career in
marketing, but also a store, an orthodox kind of start to his career. He was a
F1 test driver for
Red Bull Racing, for those that are following F1, or perhaps watched Drive to
Survive on Netflix,
like I did. That was my onboarding and on ramp into becoming an F1 fan. Colin
was an F1 test driver.
And he then, I may be skipping a couple steps here, but went into Salesforce
and really built out his
kind of marketing career at Salesforce. And where I sort of caught wind of
Colin's work was when
they launched Salesforce Plus. And this was, I might be getting the dates wrong
, but back in 2022,
I believe, maybe 2021, actually, if I'm thinking about this sequentially. And I
've always thought that
Salesforce Plus was like the ultimate validation for this new movement around
building audiences,
using media, using digital events, building subscribership to your brand. And
so as I saw Salesforce
Plus come to life, candidly, that was sort of the confirmation for me to step
down from being a CMO
and start this company. And so it was a big, again, personal moment, but also
seeing sort of the rationale
and the reasoning behind why Salesforce, one of the largest companies in the
world,
has been investing in this, not just through the lens of creating content in
engaging formats
from the sort of like, media or doing it just to drive engagement, but
fundamentally,
believing in the premise and the promise of first party data. And seeing what
was coming around the
corner with AI and how important first party data was going to be to kind of
coloring all of these
workflows that we're now starting to see come to life within the B2B and
consumer use cases.
So Colin is one of the original thinkers of this space. And of course, has gone
on now to become
the CMO at service now. So I was fortunate to meet Colin kind of through the
actually the fund
raising kind of process initially and then sent him a cold email to be one of
our speakers at Golden
Hour to be our keynote speaker, I should say. And I'm very, very grateful that
he said yes. And honestly,
if you were there at Golden Hour, you heard that session of why Salesforce
built Salesforce Plus and
heard some incredible data around the power of that platform and the impact
that Salesforce Plus
is making on the business. And so if not, you can check out that that session
on audience plus as well.
But that was really kind of what started the relationship and I'd reached out
to him. He was in
transition to service now. But thinking about how we can, and again, very
grateful to have the opportunity,
tap into his vision for this market. What he started at Salesforce Plus now
thinking about how we can
scale this broader kind of audience marketing playbook to the rest of us, the
rest of the world.
Maybe folks that may not have the Salesforce budget, maybe folks that do. And
so really excited to kind of
have his fingerprints on this movement that we're shaping and looking forward
to that.
All right. So let's talk about positioning. So those were some of the big
company news
elements to the announcement. But there was a lot of work that we did behind
the scenes to get ready
for this announcement. You know, at the time we hosted Golden Hours, folks that
don't know, we hosted
this conference in April of this year. Had about 300 people live in person in
Brooklyn. And I think
it was like 1400 or so watching online, which was incredible. Honestly,
probably one of the best
moments of my career was being able to see what the team, what a very small
team was able to accomplish
with the initial gold hour event. But we were, I think around like seven or
eight employees at that
time. We still are sub 10 employees today as a company. And so really lean. It
's like super lean.
And when you're a lean company in like basically pre-seed mode, almost a seed
mode, there's only
so many things that you can really focus on. And again, I opened with this. We
're sort of
taken the pill of like building in public. So everything that we do is very,
very public. And so when
you're early and you're focused on product market fit and building the initial
kind of use cases,
serving customers, how can you also plan a conference? It's very difficult. And
so that took a lot
of our marketing time and a lot of marketing bandwidth, the limited bandwidth
we had to give out
was really focused on doing that conference. And I'm so glad that we did. But
one of the things that
felt just below the line that we knew was a problem was our product marketing.
We had again a
fairly compelling sort of message out to the market. And I'll unpack this all
as we step through this.
But what we didn't have was I think a really strong connection between the
brand narrative of what
we were putting out into the world and our product value proposition. And so
being able to tell the
world not just that owned media matters or you should build an owned
relationship with your
own the relationship with your audience. But also that you need an enabling
platform or an operating
system to be able to actually execute this at scale. And you should learn more
about our products.
So that's the work that we set out to do. And again, we knew we wanted to do it
after Golden Hour
from a bandwidth perspective. But we picked up that work literally the week
after. And if spent the
last three, I guess it might be almost four months now, working on that. And so
it started with a
product marketing project. And so we're fortunate to have worked with harmonic
messaging. Which if anyone
give them a shout out here, if anyone's looking for some incredible product
marketing work,
you should check out Kevin Wu, Mike Berger, Carson Swan. And we really kind of
got to the heart
of what it is that audience plus is observing in the world from a market shift
perspective.
We used language around owned media. And I believe owned media is a critical,
critical first step
of this journey. But honestly, like since we, from even the foundational days
of the company,
owned media was kind of a means to a bigger end. It's a critical input. We
believe that what's
happening in the creator economy was sub stack. Beehive, what's happening with
Patreon and some of
those other tools. This idea that people are subscribing directly to their
favorite creators or
journalists is going to make its way into B2B. And so the idea of building
subscribeership to your
brand is an important starting point for this next kind of chapter of demand
generation or whatever
we want to call it. But it sort of was always again part of this next kind of
thing. And so we
wanted to articulate that better. We wanted to hook onto that story, but then
again tie that to our
product value proposition. And so that project again went about two or three
months basically.
And it resulted in what you see today on the website. And so I thought I would
do before we get into
kind of the website work is to just walk a little bit through that product that
what we're seeing
as the evolution of the category itself and how that impacts what we're
building with audience plus.
So I'm going to share my screen here. Hopefully this works. Oh, there we go.
Let me see.
All right. Hopefully folks can see this. Todd text me if not or shoot me a
slack if not.
But we but a lot of this is sort of taken taken shape on our sales deck or just
our be able or this
might be the easiest kind of interface for me to be able to tell this story. So
a big part of this
is really aware of positioning kind of narrative and our research and our
talking to customers and
our talking to folks in the market is really thinking about how we've generated
pipeline for the last
two decades as a company as an industry. And a lot of it has looked we've
looked to a funnel that
kind of has looked like this right and call this the serious decisions
waterfall the HubSpot inbound
marketing funnel the you know, Marquettos marketing automation all of these fun
nels are widely
accepted, widely understood and nearly every digital company is doing something
that looks a little
something like this. Now our observation is that what this funnel optimizes for
that is really
really great is to convert the 5% of your audience who is in market today for
your product category
or your service category whatever it is. And so our intention is to transact
and convert
all of the folks that are coming into this funnel into a demo right or into a
product-led growth
motion or whatever it is that we're doing at the conversion stage. And again
there's a lot of merit
to that like I'm not here to suggest that this like it doesn't matter for the 5
% of your audience in
market this is great. But what about for the 95% what about for the people who
are trying to learn
or they're within your ICP they're paying attention to the content that you're
producing but they
don't have the active project today they don't have the budget maybe they don't
have the buy-in
internally yet. What about them? What does their experience with our brand look
like? Well it ends
up looking something like this right? We're in it's very interruptive we're
trying to convert folks
that aren't even ready to make a purchasing decision. Often when we get them to
fill out the ebook
form they're inundated with phone calls or they're put into a nurture sequence
and what that often
results in is an unsubscribe or them not wanting again to move forward in any
sort of sales process.
So my question to you as a potential buyer of technology is does that
experience work for you?
Where you're there to consume content to attend an event to learn to connect to
belong to sort
of self-actualize in your career with the hopes of maybe one day being a
customer but you're just not
there yet how does that experience for you? So we think about our experience
then as marketers on
the other end of these campaigns right? A lot has changed since the series
decision funnel was first
introduced. The type of content that we produce is no longer just performance
articles that are
built around optimized for algorithmic ranking on Google to drive qualified
traffic to the site
and convert one to two percent of those that traffic into demos. Again not
hating on SEO I think
there's a role for it for sure in this next generation but the content formats
have very much changed.
We're not just reading performance articles or 100 page ebooks anymore. We're
watching short
form video clips. We're following our favorite creators and we're listening to
podcasts and joining
live streams just like this one. So how has our content marketing team evolved
in terms of the
type of content that we're producing? How we're producing it? How we're
distributing that content?
From any companies we're still on the early days of this shift from the
performance content
to more of this editorial value and more of this human value. For most of us
marketing is still under the gun from a efficiency perspective right? Like we
're still have this kind
of post-Zerp era kind of marketing budget was free flowing and now there's a
lot more pressure
from finance from FPNA on how we're actually deploying capital as a marketing
organization.
And so for many folks that scrutiny starts on the marketing program budget and
we're of course we
want to protect our team and so when we look at the finding more efficiency out
of the program spend
typically not always but typically the line item that is the most scrutinized
is paid.
Paid is a big budget there's a lot of discretionary kind of elements to that
spend but also
increasingly it's harder for most companies again not all to find incremental
efficiency on your
paid spend. So our attention then turns to organic and we go to LinkedIn we go
to YouTube we go to
these channels and what we find in those channels is that between us and our
brand and our followers
on these networks sits in algorithm that is throttling our reach into our very
audience.
I'm streaming to I think 30,000 or so followers on LinkedIn I don't have the
count front of me I'm
assuming it's a lot smaller of a number on LinkedIn right now than 30,000 and
that is something that I
think the creator economy and consumer has sort of woken up to kind of in the
past or before us
but increasingly in B2B we're starting to realize this throttle distribution is
creating a
challenge in our ability to connect with our audience. So how is this working
for us in our ability
to achieve our pipeline targets as a business? And so what we think has to
happen in this next chapter
of our industry is something that kind of comes before or above our traditional
understanding of
inbound marketing. Something that isn't just focused on converting the 5% of
our audience who's
in market for products and services but something that's focused on building
relationship building
meaningful relationship with the 95% of our audience who's paying attention. 95
% who identifies
within this movement that we're creating who's coming to us to learn to connect
to belong and the
belief is as they engage deeply when they are ready to buy they're going to
think of our brand first
they're going to think of your brand first and that's the power of what we're
calling audience
marketing and we think audience marketing again has so much potential to grow
into as a category
and we'll talk more about that year in a second but this feels like the missing
piece behind what we've
originally what we're currently doing today that isn't working trying to
convert everyone even
the folks beyond the 5% versus focusing on delivering value and building
relationship with the 95%
and so what we're building with audience plus is ultimately what we're now
referring to as an
audience marketing platform that helps you effectively cultivate those
relationships convert your
audience into subscribers and then understand at some really great depth what
your audience preferences
are and I'll step through this at a high level and so we think that audience
marketing is a lot
different than the traditional inbound marketing kind of motion in the sense
that with inbound we're
really focused on these transactions right improving our conversion rates and
so on whereas with
audience marketing we're focusing on building trust building meaningful
relationships with today's
buyers or or tomorrow's with inbound marketing we're measuring things typically
from an anonymous
perspective right we're using GA we're using web analytics tools we're
leveraging organic channels
and getting some you know aggregates of views and listens whereas with audience
marketing since
there's this conversion motion that happens from a subscriber perspective we're
building a first
party data set and that using that data to help us understand the audience much
much better I'll share
more about that and then finally because of the transactional nature because
all the data typically
is anonymous we're trying a bunch of things we're you know we're doing the
spray and pray marketing
to see what works and what doesn't work and then doubling down on the things
that work whereas
with audience marketing done right we can act on real data and using intent
signals to actually drive
decisions we're making around the type of content we should be producing how to
distribute that asset
or certain content for certain cohorts of our audience and then most at the end
of the day how all
of this engagement is actually driving revenue there's no we can take the guess
work out of this and
leverage this first party data in a meaningful way so I won't do a demo or
anything today but I think
this messaging is important to sit on so if you're hearing this for the first
time or wondering what
audience plus is we've started to really encapsulate the value we're creating
around this idea of
engagement understanding your audience with intelligence and being able to act
on those signals using
be act on that intent using these proactive signals and so from an engaged
perspective with audience
plus you can launch a digital media property as an extension of your website
and become your own
channel for content distribution the blog the resource center has not evolved
in 20 some odd years
and so we're bringing that kind of media centrity the community type of field
to the very top of your
funnel on your website so what does this mean holistically you can upload you
can host video
content audio podcasts written articles PDFs and many other formats coming soon
all this content
can be publicly accessible just like it is on a blog or it can be set as
exclusive just for your
subscribers helping drive value in that's and in the subscription to your brand
and the best part
of this is everything is turnkey with audience plus you don't need to hire an
engineering team
an agency distract your kind of core product engineers to help build or publish
all of this is built
for marketers to be able to honestly like run the whole platform within the
marketing team and as
folks are starting to convert into your audience this is where we're starting
to have a little bit of
a preview for what's coming next for us from a product strategy perspective but
we're effectively
using the first party data that your customer your audience is creating as they
're engaging with
all of your content as well as some AI workflows that we're starting to to talk
more about here
to effectively help you understand your audience in a way that we've never been
able to before
and I'll give you just one kind of visual for this as you know don't reveal too
much quite yet
but think about all of the data that YouTube or Netflix or a better example is
TikTok has on us
right TikTok is interesting in particular because they they've built an
interest graph where they
understand for any one of our subscribers anyone of their subscribers all of
the various topics
that that person is interested in and they put that data to work to create a
very very addictive type of
of product but ultimately contextually relevant content down to each individual
subscriber at scale
so with our intelligence product what we're effectively doing is getting you
that TikTok algorithm
in a window into that data so you too can make decisions around the type of
content we should be
producing what are the creator partnerships that you and your business should
leverage in order to
reach a certain audience or ultimately how to distribute content in a way that
is more strategic
to help you drive the outcomes that you're trying to drive and so that gets us
to signals which again
is a little bit of a preview into the future but to be able to actually act on
some proactive
signals using this data set so putting that TikTok algorithm to work and
leveraging kind of proactive
signals to help drive the content effort going forward not just from a
production perspective but
also from a distribution perspective and much more say about that very very
soon so stick around
for that so I'll end that here but our belief is that this story is just a
little bit closer aligned
to how people are thinking about the very real problems that exist today in
marketing it's just
harder to generate pipeline it's harder to get the attention of our audience
and the belief that we
have is again owning your audience relationships are incredibly important but
ultimately it's this idea
of building relationship that is at the heart of what marketing's job is we're
going back to what
our original purpose was as an as an organization right to build at scale
relationships between brands
and audiences and we believe audience marketing is how you do that so I'm
really excited about that
now what was cool is doing the work was one thing of course but being able to
present this publicly
was another our website has has long required a overhaul for our ability to
basically articulate
this story and I think both from a certainly there's some like you know design
things and I'm
going to chat about that as well but I think very much from a functional
perspective we had you know
a decent amount of our lead flow come through whether it's like a request of
demo flow or folks that
wanted to kind of see more about the product and the kind of some of the
recurring feedback we heard
is like I have no idea what audience plus does like we almost actually a fun
note maybe Todd can
add some context for those are interested but like we almost did a campaign
around this launch
or like almost poking fun at the idea that we have no idea what audience plus
actually does from a
product perspective and so I'm smiling but bad marketing right like we had work
to do to actually
solve this problem and thankfully with a product marketing project we now had
it in a Google doc we
now had it in sort of the the back of off back of house sort of documents but
we needed to evolve
our website to be able to tell that story so I'm super excited about what we
launched this week as
well which is a brand new audience plus calm and I thought it might be fun for
those that are still
here to walk through that a little bit and give you a sense of just some of the
design decisions we made
but we're fortunate to work with both BB agency which is an incredible agency
that helped us
kind of bring this to life as well as Michaela Fias who is an incredible
partner she actually
designed not the original original audience plus logo was literally horrible it
looked like an
urgent care but when we actually grew up Michaela actually designed the
original brand identity and
now helped us evolve it into what you see today and I'll have a quick word on
that towards the end
as well but the idea with this website was to be more product forward I think
if you're creating a
category that the tension in that is how do you balance being having problem
aware content on your
website versus more solution aware and I think we did quite a bit of the
problem work and the previous
version of the site and not enough of the solution so we've started we wanted
to attack that
you know here with the new version of the website the one thing I'll call out
to you on top that we
did that's kind of a an interesting decision for us is we put content as a
primary CTA in the
navigation obviously we believe deeply in the importance of content so as you
click into explore
content you now go into the audience plus experience you can go back into
audience plus through our
navigation or back to the website from our navigation but we also think that in
a world where we're
optimizing our website for the 95 right people with our at 5% like they're
smart enough to click the
get get a demo button we know they can get there but for folks that are here to
learn which is the
overwhelming majority of our web traffic we want to give them a primary CTA to
find our content
and so we did that up here I think a lot of companies and even some some of the
customers we talk
to struggle with where do we really position our content network and get people
to drive that
traffic you know could be in our resources tab kind of tucked in here somewhere
and even under
the resources you could have like videos on demand webinars blog and all these
separate links
and separate spaces we want to unify everything onto an audience plus property
and drive that CTA
as a primary traffic driver now in the hero area there was this kind of
question around okay how do
we do more of the problem aware stuff for folks who want to consume that
content but then a little
faster get into the solution so we actually created this letter that I wrote
that kind of talks about
the evolution of marketing over the last two or three years why owned media was
an important starting
point for companies that are starting to take this this this evolutionary step
but then talking a
bit more about audience marketing as well and so we decided to do that in sort
of a letter format
make it personal then as we scroll you know we did want to kind of kind of I
talked about this a
little bit earlier but kind of position a why audience marketing is different I
think I saw a
question in the comments to you here about this is a little different perhaps
than the traditional
maybe community plays certainly inbound marketing and so we want to build that
out here and then
immediately we want to get into our product messaging in our product marketing
product pillars
which for us is engage understand and act as I talked about earlier now this is
the V1 of our site
the next step for us is to have a dedicated page for engage or understand and
for act but for
today we're giving kind of just a higher order introduction of those features
and just a pretty
cool you know animations that are kind of clicking through and showing a little
bit of what those
feature use cases look like then we started talking a little bit more about our
platform and this
is what we believe over the medium term again I don't want to get too deep into
it beyond what's
on the website today but we believe that the strength of audience plus over the
long arc of time
would not just be the front end kind of you know digital experience like in
many cases the digital
experience is somewhat commoditized or you can hire a agency to build something
in web flow or
something in WordPress to create kind of a front end we think that the core
value proposition is in
the data model ultimately that that your understanding of your audience will
help inform the
personalization of the digital experience and so this is sort of what we think
is the actual
moat to this to our product and so we started building out just a little bit of
that high up here
on the site to start talking about those those use cases there's sort of this
like idea of who is
audience plus four who are your buyers or who are the people that are using the
product and so we've
tried to create a value proposition for each of our buyers or persona as I
should say excuse me
and again these will link out eventually to solutions pages where we can talk
at speak at length
directly to content professionals speak directly to demand marketers speak
directly to the CMO
and so this sets us up to be able to do that here soon there was also this kind
of
unders or misconception that were this like video platform basically because a
lot of early
customers heavily leaned into video but the truth is we support written
articles some folks are
using us as a blog replacement again documents of audio podcasts and so on so
we wanted to at least
try to lean into that misconst our help kind of shift the narrative a little
bit here and market
the fact that we are a multi format multi media platform we treat videos as a
first class citizen
but we also treat audio podcasts and the written word and so we're going to
continue to add more
formats here but we want to make sure to address that we then think there is
something super
first of all powerful in what our customers are doing with audience plus these
are folks that are
the pioneers behind audience marketing and so we wanted to create almost this
like in my mind it was
like a if you remember if you're old enough to remember the original iTunes or
one of the first
iterations of iTunes that had the ability to like scroll album art we kind of
were inspired by that
and given just how visually stunning the work that our customers are doing with
our platforms we
wanted to kind of show off some of the the work that they were doing and so you
can click on
here to see more of our customers and then this is something I think is
actually quite important
being able like the conviction that I have the heart that I have for starting
this company and
what I think is the future of company building candidly is one where you are
not just building a
software product we think about this at Gainsite you know this was kind of a
lot of my experience as
marketer Gainsite was more than just a soft is more than just a software vendor
but they are also
building expertise and best practices a lot of that coming from us a lot of it
coming from the voices
in our audience who are doing the thing who are the early and I should say
earlier but who are
the thinkers and customer success who are actually out there as practitioners
or executives who are
learning so much more than just we are as a small company and so we believe in
addition to being
software focused as a product company we're also cultivating the best practices
on how to do
audience marketing right at scale and so this is a way for us to kind of
position that value and
the other bit is community you know we think we're not the only ones out here
kind of evangelizing
this new world for B2B marketing and so we want to gather the voices we want to
take the position
in the role of being a convener of this movement and so with things we built
effectively this sub brand
called golden hour where we're able to gather those voices in live events and
community starting with
a conference that we do and we're going to bring it back next year called
golden hour we have an
executive forum that we do just for CMOs and we have local chapters starting
pretty soon here
that are going to be sort of like community led organizations and cities across
the world
who are we're going to support on sort of a one-to-many basis so if you you
know the idea is if you
become a audience plus customer not only do you get access to the software but
you get access to
exclusive best practices workshops a lot of hands-on work before us to our team
as well as sort of
privileged access of membership in our community and that's kind of I think a
big piece of how
how we think about that it's not wanting to spend too much time on on this the
last thing I'll say is
we started building out our golden hour value proposition digitally
historically historically
two months ago golden hour dot net went directly to our event micro site which
is important we're
driving a lot of people to it again very small small team but we wanted to do a
couple of things here
pull golden hour into our master brand and onto our website onto our candidly
our domain where
now it's audience plus dot com slash golden hour and start building equity into
that but also tell
the sort of portfolio story this isn't just a single event but this is a kind
of multi kind of
format event and so I loved what the team did here I've been click on the
golden hour page we're
maintaining the same parent navigation here but the color treatment changed and
it's a bit you know
you sort of pulled into the warmth of golden hour and so just love kind of you
have shown this off
more than anything else here but giving folks the opportunity to request an
invite to the
golden hour executive forum which here at CMO watching this got six days but
would love to
to have you attend just let us know a golden hour 2025 page or folks can like
save their spot
and coming soon golden hour local and these the idea behind this page is this
will link out to the
individual event microsites and so if you are running a sub brand for your
thought leadership
or for your community and you're like okay well I've got the master brand here
and I've got the like
other brand here how do how are you sort of building the bridge between those
two brands for
like a better term this is our attempt to do that and so the events themselves
will eventually have
their own kind of microsites so if it's audience plus dot com slash golden hour
be slash conference
or slash 2025 slash conference or whatever we're building that equity into this
site and getting
folks excited about the event that we just hosted why folks should attend who
are some of the members
of our golden hour community that have contributed their voices to this
movement again who were for
giving folks the opportunity to partner with golden hour we've had in our first
I guess six
months of existence as a as a sub brand here a lot of great partnerships and we
want to continue
to find ways to engage this community a little bit of social validation only at
the bottom do you
see the audience plus kind of presenting sponsor type messaging here and then a
bit of a link out to
our content from the event and so again really cool for for our business is as
you're engaging with
some of this content you're then pulled back into our product and so it's a
nice tie into how do you
think about your marketing pages on your website and how do you think about
your content pages and
finding ways to bridge bridge those two so excited about kind of how the team
kind of pull this off
so the last thing I'll just share is yeah I mean we have a brand new sort of
logo and was really
excited about this with audience plus we had typographer we had a typeface type
mark logo mark I was
get this wrong I think it's typeface so we had the words audience plus but we
didn't have was an
icon or a kind of logo mark I guess and it was it wasn't something I think we
set out to do necessarily
but as we started to kind of put this project together for the website we just
found opportunistically
that hey there's some refinements we can make to the brand identity itself and
again huge shout out to
Michaela for helping us with this but the couple things you'll see the logo
mark is or the text
is absolutely the same the color palette is a little bit different so we had
this purple and pink
and black and we sort of moved to more of a purple and blue and black and I
wish I can say there's a lot
of science behind this the word that came to mind was it's a bit more
theatrical a bit more
aligned I think to where we're headed with the brand whereas the pink was very
playful which
honestly with things like emo marketing and others that that will continue to
be a big part of
our culture but we thought this was a little bit more future forward for where
we were headed
from like a color palette perspective and the logo mark of course it looks like
an A plus if you
squint your eyes or maybe you know zoom out just a little bit for audience plus
but also it has
this sort of data orientation around like the slash plus it's almost like a
command line prompt to
me as I think about I'm not an engineer so I could have totally butchered that
forgive me but there's
something very data kind of centric when I think about it a little bit more
technical when I look at
this icon so it's excited about kind of what the team put together for this I
think that's it I think
we covered everything but we're pretty excited about all of these changes and
again it's three days
old out in the world two days old three days old whatever it is two days old
and a little bit up
the morning here on the on the west coast so I'm very excited about where we're
headed with all of
this and if anyone has any feedback please you know we're always all ears to
hear it but we think
we're in a better position now from a product marketing perspective to and we
're activating the
story I think in a better way a lot more work to do for sure but also now with
the fund fundraising
and you know having Colin on board and others I think we're in a good position
now to scale and really
kind of go after this market so stay tuned for some really exciting updates
that we can't talk about
today but we're sort of believing in the promise of audience marketing
believing in this idea that
if you're watching this like you know our goal is to build relationship with
you is to compare notes
is to share and it's all authentic right share kind of what we're learning and
then for folks that
are ready to buy or are procuring technology we're here for you as well so
thank you for the time
and we'll look forward to seeing you guys out here on the internet soon thanks
[The door opened and closed]