Andrew Michael  
Hey, Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Barnett  
Andrew, awesome to be here.

Andrew Michael  
It's great to have Matt on the show. For the listeners. Matt is the Papa Bear of Bonjoro. Bonjoro helps Customer Success teams convert and retain more customers through personal video. Prior to Bonjoro, Matt runsand the research agency through video from which they spun up on Jura has founded multiple companies and as a passion for product. We still need product as well as his role as Papa Bear at Bonjoro. So my first question for you, Matt is what is the puppet bear responsible for?

Matt Barnett  
Papa is responsible for doing a good job. That no one else in the company wants to do all the work as jobs volunteer when the culture keeps ever going up everyone fads and then juggling running products alongside that.

Andrew Michael  
And let's talk about the product in a little bit. So what is it that Bonjoro does exactly? I gave a very brief overview, but maybe you want to talk us through a little bit more. How do you use Bandura to retain customers and rejection?

Matt Barnett  
Yep, sure. It's a layer that sits on top of, of your customer data source, so serums like intercom, Active Campaign, MailChimp mailing lists, like MailChimp, always its Shopify is Patreon. And what we found is that certain points on the customer journey, so Gemini around conversion, activation or retention, it pays to send personalized video messages to customers to help get them to take the next action. So for instance, triggers up to you Hey, see how they work. But if If Joanne performs x in the platform that will notify and say, Look, this is a great time to send around a personalized message and ask her to go and do something. And so you'll be recording a video specifically for john saying, hey, Joanne saw us on ontraport. Notice you've done x y, Zed, but you've got stuck here. My name is Matt, would you like help. And so that video is bundled up and sent off to her instead of a generic email. And we find that these messages tend to get about three times response rates of emails, they receive very well and they help drive customers to the next action.

Andrew Michael  
That's excellent. Three times response rates. I think it's incredible considering as well like the early stage, it's really, really critical to capture attention of users or you've typically lost them after a few days. The thing how is personalization done as well so and at scale, like what sort of customers are using your product? Like, how many like video messages with a typical customer success manager be sending to customers?

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, so We just thought types of users, it tends to be more of a more job jobs per dollar trade show that we have. We have medical users through the becomes through the SAS, through universities, but they're all trying to tackle the same problem, which is generally, we have a lot of people using it for lead conversion. So leads coming into funnels, and dropping these messages in as a methodology to get more leads to come on board, engage with a company and obviously become a customer success is very much around activation. So kind of post signup, post pay, getting customers to actually engage on the platform with the product. And make sure that activate in those first kind of week to three months time. If you're using activation, customer success teams tend to use it with all paid users. This is generally done by spreading the load across a number of different team members paying on the size of the company. If you have 10 paid users a month, super easy. I mean, each video takes 30 seconds, so really, it's not a huge If you have 1000 paid customers, then you've got a large CS team as well to support that. And that's generally how it's used. There is some, there can be some kind of filtering, depending on the size of the customer as well. So some teams might only choose to focus on customers with a certain ROI. So it makes sense for the time input. Yeah,

Andrew Michael  
that makes sense as well, I think depends obviously, on the number of customers that you have and what sort of the average account value might be for each one of those customers, you will be able to dictate how much time you can actually spend. But I guess a just 30 seconds, I think it sounds like you've locked it down to a really good formula, an easy way to produce these videos as well. Like, is there something and there's the magic in there to easily and quickly create these videos?

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, so so the way the way it works is actually pulls information from your data source. So let's say CRM lands Comm. It pulls it in. So when you open up so you get a notification when the custom performs a trigger. So let's say they They pay and you're waiting in two days to see how they go on the product pings you It says like the Nazca Thompson message. Here's all the information that you've that you've selected from the CRM that you want to show. And it shows that Julie has, you know, completed onboarding, but she hasn't, you know, created her first project. And she hasn't done x y Zed. And so we sent a message to Julie say, hey, Julia, so sign up from x company source have a paid two days ago, awesome to have you on board. I know you've done this, which is great, but you haven't done x and y, here's a link in the video to go and do those next steps are really important. So it's all about kind of a customized that that messaging but we show the information prior to recording so you can do it. And then when you press finish, you get back to work. We handle all delivery and tracking

Andrew Michael  
mass. So it's almost like you're building up a script for the success manager for the individual who's trying to reach out to customer with like exactly what the user has been doing working on so you can really make it personal. But then also make it easy for that individual not have to go now and start to different metrics and CRMs and trying to understand which users they need to be speaking to, and then what they need to present to each one. Excellent. So how are you using Pandora then at Pandora?

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, so we we use it to onboard every single lead. So we we got to kind of go go whole hog. So every single site that we get, we welcome with a message. We generally give it at least an hour after they've signed up so that obviously talking towards churn here, I am a product person. So I'm a massive believer of kind of activation as one of the primary drivers for churn. So make sure people come in and get set up as soon as possible. So we're leaving for an hour, we'll see those early metrics and what they've done as a few clear indicators to us as to what makes a successful customer. So if you like we have what we call pilot qualified leads. So we can see that if a safe is for one job, you know if if they If they haven't sent a video in the first hour, then we need to get them back in. And we need to get them to test out and send themselves just to test video. Because we set as a layer on top of CRMs, we need to make sure that people connect into the software. Whereas we do have the ability for people to use us without that, and they can just send videos off the cuff. Generally, we find those customers don't last as long. Because the ability of how you see them as it was that we're telling people, you know, every morning, oh, here's five people who've done x. So we actually drag them back and support each day. It's much more sticky put it that way. So if we see they haven't done that, we have some information in Germany about what serums they are using. And we say here's a link to connect up Shopify, I see that you're in e commerce. So again, every lead that comes in, we try and get them to a successful activation. We have a two week trial, but it's within the first 24 hours that really matters to us.

Andrew Michael  
Absolutely. And you mentioned then as well in terms of like really a sticking point thing connecting a car. More with a data source for years a company you mentioned a few early on as well sort of like MailChimp and or for Salesforce so intercom contrary the exact one companies now but how did you go about sort of deciding and prioritizing on the different CRMs and different channels that you would integrate with first for your customers?

Matt Barnett  
So honestly, there wasn't that much shines through at the beginning, I think we made some good ones, we made some mistakes. So I think one of the challenges we found so it's we never, we never really started to build OneDrive in the first place. Just we actually built this as a as a lead conversion tool for our company and one thing led to another and it kind of got taken up and grown over to over to the wrong company. So one of the challenges of that is that we've always been on the back foot trying to work out really who our ideal customer profile is. To that point, we we started being building serums that we thought ideal customers would use. And then as we went ahead, we will start to collect information. So so during onboarding, we put a field in saying What customer data source do, do you want to use? And so we started to use that information to help us make better decisions on what to use when to use it. So for instance, the first thing we built was intercom because we use that for their heads. most active integrations is a tool called Active Campaign, who we hadn't really heard of at the time. I think they just raised about 90 mil like they're doing great. Really, really good for us. But we had to discover that from customers. We made a really good early call, I thought it was a fluke. We had a couple of musicians sign up, which sounds funny, but they were they were kind of bigger musicians. And they were on this platform called Patreon, which, I guess three years ago. Yeah. People knew, but I don't think it was it was huge. I think we were probably maybe patrons second integration. I want to say they just released an API. We these guys are pretty nice. We're like, okay, whatever. We'll build an integration for them. Now, fast forward to Patreon raising $60 million. And jack Conte who runs Patreon uses one user who talks about it on stage and events, etc, has become a huge deal for us. And honestly, I think that was a happy accident. So. So I can't say that you can always follow the data. Sometimes, there are strategic partnerships, where you may have not a single user that uses that but you go, if we build this, we can then talk with that, with that integration with that company, and then we can potentially build a partnership and we can drive traffic into those pieces. Maybe the last thing to mention here is that don't always go after big players. What we found especially is that when select if you integrate with smaller software's, there is a much higher chance that you can talk to, you know, the CMO, the founding team, do some co marketing, look at how you can work together whereas if you integrate Salesforce until you get to unison Yeah, no. Yeah, yeah, you're dropping the ocean. Yeah. And so we just we did this we integrate with AP really early on with like, saving seventh grade AP. And Xavier helped us a lot with that, like hugely. So pick pick companies that that I think are strategic as well as beneficial to users. Yeah, that maybe have cultural alignment with you, as well.

Andrew Michael  
Nice. So like not really much science to begin with. But over time, you sort of figured out like the biggest opportunities weren't in the beginner tricks, but in the more up and coming ones where you could actually have this sort of CO marketing opportunities and actually have a bit more visibility than like you said, getting lost in middle of the ocean of Salesforce or one of the bigger players. You mentioned something else method really intrigued me as well. I'm interested to hear sort of how this learning has progressed over time, as you said, You started out as sort of building bundoora for your own internal uses to capture more leads for your agency that you had That you're still trying to figure out who your ideal customer profile was. And I think like, how has this progressed over time? How is your understanding changed? Like, how do you go about really trying to refine and nail down who your ideal customer profile is? Knowing that in the beginning, you really started out as you and your company was our ideal customer profile in your own minds. But how is that change? How's it shifted? Like, what's led you to here today?

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, so I'll be honest, this has probably been the hardest thing that we've tried to do. And it's ongoing, and we're not there yet. Probably the thing that we found hardest is that we've been picked up by like a completely diverse set of industries, and quite a diverse set of customer sizes. So I say like, our our big our biggest customers are universities, but we're not we're not corporate, or enterprise. So we're kind of universities, our biggest customers, and we have a lot of micro users. And then we have I said health professionals charities SAS, like, like, like, you name it. We've had them Like on as a customer. And so you look at that and say like, it's a bit simplistic to go, what industry are we in? And we're not in an industry, site size of company is important, but because we tend to come in bottom up, it's what I mean by bottom up is we'll get adopted by employees, and by certain team members, and then we'll get adopted by more team members. And then we'll be taken up the organization rather than going in and pitching into head of a large company and say, Hey, you should use us.

Andrew Michael  
Yep. So land and expand

Matt Barnett  
Yeah. And this is how we got used by companies like ConvertKit ontraport, like biggest serums was that method. Now that in mind, quite so, so we do a lot of analysis. We started off a lot with Excel. So we export massive dumps of customers we would we would go through customers websites, buy like in the in the thousands trying to work out That's what the industry was leading. Now, since then we have moved to stage by when people come through our onboarding, we asked them to let us know. So we this is this is the end result of, of a say this is what we do. So we ask them to let us know what what industry they're in. And this obviously helps us better position things for them, we now have within the product a, a feature called campaigns, because what we've worked out is that is that people are using us for certain stage of the funnel, so using us for, you know, onboarding, or lead conversion or thanking donors, etc. And so we actually get them to set up a name, their first campaign during the onboarding. So we look at that Miguel, this person is using the products for driving more, you know, reviews from the e commerce store, so we can know that they're in this industry, they're using the product, more importantly, in this way, and that then helps us track who they are, what they're using, and then what you can do from that. Start to filter down and go, Well, well, a which of these converts the best? And by convert the best that's synonymous with who gets the most value from the product. And those are generally your best users regardless. And then from that, following that down, who stays with us the longest who has the highest lifetime value? Which is that? I mean, that this is where it gets hard because you're leading metrics versus lagging metrics. Yep. So for the audience, really easy for us to see if someone's done a video and day one really hard for us to see, you know, the average churn time of a customer in e commerce who is using us for reviews because that takes time to come through. But you try and match those up and try and follow these different channels and different routes of different types of customers. And then you work back up to the top and say, Well, this is these are our most successful customers, they stay with us longest. Maybe let's prioritize the kind of features that these customers want over others because we know those are

Andrew Michael  
Best users are the most specific use cases that stand out like so maybe it might not be a specific industry or a specific type of customer size or customer, there may be a very specific use case that is like dominant overall, when it comes to Bandura.

Matt Barnett  
So I'd say we have kind of three primary use cases that used the most common, I would say is lead conversion. And this, some people call it onboarding. So we'll call it lead conversion. So so so in SAS, they would they would call on like onboarding. And this is, this is pre payment. When you have users coming into a funnel, whether that's through a white paper, whether that's through a email list, or whether that's through signing up to your SaaS company, getting those customers to tick through success before they pay you $1 so they roll over and pay you that first dollar. That is that the reason that's most common is because as it's actually the easiest place, it is easiest place to start. You can see results like within a week. Everyone has a lead funnel, it's binary, they are the people that don't think it's a really easy place to save your success. Second after that, and this tends to be a more this tends to be a more SAS companies It's also used a lot in online education companies is activation. So someone's paid you, but what you'll find and if you looked at churn heavily, like you'll know this, people can pay and they cannot really get to success on the product, you know, in the first couple of weeks, and then they will go silent and then they will turn and this is a really I mean, this is my favorite part of the funnel is is how do you feel successful and say paid because because the pay? I don't think we've got the body that that's done. Like it's just it's just not at all SAS everyone in SAS guesses. I think online education is really interesting because people will pay to do courses and then the amount of people who do not actually start the course is insane of guilty of that

Matt Barnett  
only customers like you like it's not Yeah, like that. And this and this is a this is a is that the same process of SAS, where activation? The final area we get used is. So I say it's we classes growth really it's it's driving customers who are with you to then leave reviews on specific sites, I want to trust pilots or Google reviews, etc. And this is obviously using your customers to then create a channel for more customers coming in.

Andrew Michael  
Yeah. Okay, so you sort of have three specific use cases. And it really, it sounds like it follows the progression of the user journey with the most value being sort of that lead conversion, onboarding, second, and being activation. And then third, really being sort of trying to drive referrals or references from customers and different channels.

Matt Barnett  
I always say I always think that's the order. It's easiest to do. And I think I think for any company, like focus on the whole referral and advocacy and word of mouth At the end of the funnel is actually a lot harder to measure. And it's something that we all do a disservice to. I think everyone's like, new sales is the easiest, like, it's new money. activation as you learn your business, you're like, who is the problem that will solve that. But I'll grow through the funnel thing, honestly, is is so powerful if you can get to work. It's so so good. The best companies are like 80% where the mouth but it's not very visible. And so not every company even even focused on that.

Andrew Michael  
Yeah, I think it's Jason I mentioned this in the previous episode like Jason Lim Canada blog person that said, it's it's inevitable that at some case from the SAS business hits a scale, that 80% of customers is going to be coming from word of mouth or referral. And like, obviously, the sooner you can get there, the better I guess, because relying on page strategies and trying to unlock new growth channels to sustain growth is not very sustainable. Like you want to get your customers talking about you and that word of mouth going and referrals being a big deal. We chat a little bit about how you use the product yourself into Finally, we've chatted a little bit about sort of now one of the challenges being trying to understand who your ideal customer profile is. What has been sort of the next challenge when it comes to looking at churn and retention itself? Has there been any sort of like big thorn in your side that you've said, okay, like this is something we need to figure out first.

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, so. So we tend to try and get as much data as we can on churned users and why they've churned. And again, I'm sure we all do this. It's hard because you'll have a silent majority that will churn and either won't give you data back I mean, we do exit interviews, we do exit I guess, drop downs on our term page, like you're gonna try and pick apart data and work out what's happening. So you know, like so. So pricing may be giving us determinism. Everyone will see this. Sometimes it is pricing most of the time, it's actually price to value. So what I mean here is it's not that you're too expensive because it paid in the first place, but The fact that the value you're offering is not enough for the ongoing cost. And so really you're looking at how do you match it together? Sometimes it will be like pricing really as a component. So for instance, we actually ended up shifting about pricing recently, where we released both a lower tier plan and a high tier plan because we we understood that we have a very small type of user where our base plan was too expensive. And it wasn't really giving them a route in support. It's kind of grow with us as they grow. And so after all, that love kind of research Besides this, it's been pretty effective so far, but trying to unpack how much of that was price and how much that was value and then and then really building a product around the low price tier that that gave them the value they wanted. Without cannibalizing higher pricing tiers was extremely hard.

Andrew Michael  
What is the hardest part?

Matt Barnett  
So, so we have so we start with, we had just just just to place implants, and basically everyone has come into the first one, we have a lot larger customers on a higher price, and we're not so worried about those. And large customers tend to tend to be better attention anyway, the low pricing ones, we basically had this kind of midpoint pricing where it was a stretch for some small customers, it was fine for other customers. And so if you release a low pricing tier, obviously challenges that everyone just downgrades to a low pricing tier, which so how do you release something that is specifically targeted at small users that doesn't pull value away from the pricing tier you already have? So you have to look it has told people and go look, well, how are you using it? But actually the people who do find the middle plan valuable and are able to pay not using it. And that takes a lot of it takes a lot of research, you have to look at data to look into the numbers quite a lot to try and understand his behavior. So for us We used to do unlimited videos on all plans. What we found is that we had this small user, who basically was crazy about 30 videos a month maximum, because they had much more funnels because they were early starting businesses. So he said, Look, Well, one way we can do a low pricing tier is to add the limits here that we've always said we will can never do. But it was the only way to offer a real cut back real simple piece that actually would still provide absolute value for these smaller customers, but wouldn't be something that the slightly large customers would want to use to try and get that I mentioned Google. What like, can we do this? Can we not do this? It can't it can't challenge it. Challenge one. The cool thing is when we said we would never do, which was a false assumption.

That that's in the chat. Yeah. So make sense. Yeah.

Andrew Michael  
No, no, it's always good. I think when sort of those initial assumptions that are made or lots of the things you say you'll never do, and then you end up coming back on them. I think the more you progress in the business You realize some of maybe the early assumptions that you made dumped out. And they were just assumptions in your own mind as well, maybe your own cognitive biases that you had. But it makes total sense what you're saying now, maybe for smaller customers, they don't need unlimited videos and for you, so no offer that lower price, you need to maybe be able to limit the number of videos being sent to a bring down costs for the tune. So back that new price and lower level for the new businesses. So it's interesting that you say that you had to go back on sort of your initial assumption.

Andrew Michael  
Yeah. If you don't think it's worrying, like I think it needs to be able to be constantly moving and embracing uncertainty. I think when you're building a startup, or else you're you've lost before you've started. So the next thing as well like this is something actually asked every guest that joins the show, and I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this as well matters. Let's come up with a hypothetical scenario now and let's say that you've joined a new company and turn around retention is really not good at this company. And you've been given 90 days by the CEO, he's asked you to take things over, or she's asked you to take things over and really turn things around. What would be some of the things that you're doing those first 90 days to try and prove some results for the company?

Matt Barnett  
Yeah, say, I think two things kind of springs to mind straightaway. The product, the data side of me would want to get straight into the day, we'll have a look and try and say, map their customers and work out. Are they giving everyone the same energy? Or have they actually, do they have an ideal customer profile? Do they know what that is? Because one thing you know with churn is that if you have a wrong type of user signing up, for all the ones in the world, they may not be a value. And so it is less important to spend time on those and to focus on those customers and to listen to them. Versus, you know, the customers who are your perfect customers and you really should listen to it. Yeah, I'm some funnels. You know, the best customers might be 10% of the funnel. And in fact, those ones you should listen to in those ones you should build and change the company and the processes around. And if you do that, you'll be more successful, you might have to turn away more leads. But as a company, you're more successful, it's actually easier to support a focused customer base as well. It's easier to build product for as well as easier to build messaging and CS tactics around that. So I want to look at that first and say, do you really understand who your customers are? If your churn is high? Maybe we'll make one that one the biggest challenges straight away is you don't know who your customers who are the gems hidden the rough sailing I look at is, so I believe churn can really be impacted from the very top of the funnel. So I think rather than being reactive and say, I, you know, let's get back and get filled with because this person hasn't signed in for six weeks. I think if you start the top of the funnel, well then that becomes less of an issue. And so, like, I am biased here, but I really think engaging with your customers. from the get go, so going overboard to make sure that when they have issues, rather than just being silent churner they actually come in and say, Hey, guys, I've got a problem here. Can you help me? That's immensely valuable. And, like, I'm biased that like having your team, say, videos is one way to do this, because people are like, Okay, look, you know that there are real people behind this company, or Joe seems like a nice guy, if you have an issue, I'm going to go and ask Joe, if he can help me out. But that's, that's one way of doing it. There are other ways. But if you can get that, and then if you can handhold them to help them through, you know, this activation period, which you know, for me is more important than conversion. If you can make sure they get success as quickly as possible. And they know you and they have relationship and micro relationship with you. So there will certainly have challenges. They don't just, you know, get frustrated. They actually come and ask for help, which is what I can see as teams will provide. I think if you really, really start out that the rest of it can start to fall into play. You And then doing, you know, the generic messages, you know, two weeks not non login is less important because people are coming back into you. There's other things that come after that which are more complicated, like, making sure you have, you know, a great paid customer community. So that that's a much more effective way I find to communicate with your existing users and pick up on cues early on before they go into a cycle where they start to become less active and churn. But I think start at the top of the funnel, look at ways that you can, you know, get your CS team in front of your customers a lot more, you might think it's gonna take a lot more investment in time, etc. Honestly, it's worth it and your workout, the processes that make that easy,

Andrew Michael  
for sure, and it all starts like you started out with really like understanding who that customer is that ideal customer, because that enables you to serve them better enables you to target and market to them better, and make sure that you're getting the right people actually through the door to begin with. So it all starts There's one thing I should ask you as well as like, what's one thing you've learned now since building bones or that you'd wish you'd known at the start when it came to generate attention?

Matt Barnett  
I think so it comes out so it comes down to this ideal customer profile we we didn't do this for a long time. We didn't really dig into the data until we hit issues and we should have dug into earlier before we hit issues. So again, I don't think we had a deep enough understanding of our customer probably for like 18 months like it's pretty easy months before we really started going hey, we need to like work this out. And to be honest, we like we had like we want one of our advisors was across one the forest last year. So he was like, hey guys like this is this is the thing and he was he was absolutely spot on. And we can't dug into that. So I think really by working out your customer, not just being like are there. There this guy being like, what is their usage? What they don't they what will they do on day two? How do we how do we know that this customers Good. Now all the consultants, all the consultants in Ohio who own a, you know, a Corgi, like, like, how specific can you get the more, the more the better. And honestly, honestly, we haven't figured it all out, we still have this, this is still a real challenge, but we're a lot better than we were 18 months ago, you know, you'll find, you'll find, you'll hit this that every stone you uncover was like five more stones underneath that. I could barely get around,

Andrew Michael  
for sure. And I think it's also one of these like the ideal customer profiles. It's always one of these very nerve wracking things because you don't want to make the wrong choices. Well, you want to make sure that when you left handed, it's the data is backing it. You've done your qualitative and quantitative research and that everyone in the team buys into who this ideal customer profile is because if you don't have the full buy in and you don't have the full confidence, you're always gonna be like having one foot in the water or like one two in the water and like not ready to really dive into it. And I think once you do then that's when things start to turn around and product decisions become easier marketing becomes easier customer success. Just becomes easier. So differently. I think this is a huge, huge point and very, very important to get right from the early days. For sure. Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure having you today. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with? Like, how can they keep up to speed with what you're working on? manjaro or anywhere else like any last recommendations for them?

Matt Barnett  
I think I think back to like, I'll say one thing that I think we have, we have a bit of an ethos in our company. And again, caveat is we are biased but but we can't live live by the the attitudes of automated processes, but not relationships, I think, especially in online, do not undervalue having relationships with your customers, even if you have a massive funnel. Again, it's very attractive to go the numbers routes, but you can scale issues. There's ways to do it. Video is one way there are many other ways to do it. How do you how do you hold in everything Thousand 10,000 microchips in your team's hands because when you when you have that, look, at least if you don't know the answers right now, there's a lot higher chance the answers will come out, come out from those customers, and they'll come and tell you and they'll work with you. So, do everything you can to foster those. I think it's incredibly important and automate the stuff that that doesn't need a human. Okay? Yeah, if you if you're trying to enjoy, check it out, sign up, it's free. We will send you you will get a video from one of us. And if you apply that, that that's one of my teams. So say hello. If you ever want any advice, or some help hunt me down LinkedIn, you'll find me on the Papa Bear. I think I'm the only guy in the bear suit on there. So feel free feel free to reach out we we had an immense amount to help get getting ourselves going. So I'm really willing to pass it on, if I can.

Andrew Michael  
Awesome. Well, you heard it as well like differently. I think what you're doing and Bonjour as well really brings sort of that personal and human element back into software and really puts a face behind sort of the business which I love as well and check out Bonjour. If you to making a random a bit more personal and getting bit closer to your customers. So thanks very much maths has been a pleasure having you today. I wish you best of luck now going forward and hope you get a bit of grace and understanding and more clarity each and every day on who your ideal customer profile is as you go forward.

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