Startup Lesson: Pitching Ain't Easy

Welcome to Bits & Bytes episode 5! Today is February 8 2015 and I am your host Jeff Weisbein! Buckle up because I’m going full on founder today. In this episode, I’ll be discussing the past week at KYA and sharing some experiences I had. I hope it’ll be helpful to someone else.

Take a listen! Of course, you can leave feedback here in the comments or tweet at me on Twitter. And don’t forget to subscribe to Bits & Bytes on iTunes!

[podcast]http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.besttechie.com/podcast/audio/bits-and-bytes-2-8-15.mp3[/podcast]

Episode 5 Show Notes

What I learned from installing KYA on BestTechie

1. KYA’s personalized content recommendations have resulted in approx. 10 percent increase in site traffic. That’s additional traffic from visitors who were on BT viewing a piece of content and then were recommended something else by KYA which they thought was interesting enough to click on.

2. According to KYA 8 of the top 25 most engaged articles on BestTechie are how to’s or reviews. Looks like I know where we should focus more effort now. Also, in that same grouping of articles, it looks like rumor related posts are also performing well.

3. Visits and page views are both up over 15 percent in the past week.

I know it’s my product, but I’m telling you, it will help your publication. Give it some time to run and you’ll get killer insights and information out of it. Early this upcoming week we’re rolling out the last part of the update, it will make KYA even more amazing. It will literally humanize analytics.

Even a good pitch can be shot down

So I had a pitch this past week. I was super excited about it, so I call and start talking to the publisher, and it’s going great in terms of my pitch, I hit the points I wanted to, etc. But they didn’t bite. The reason was one I just hadn’t considered a possibility before: they are currently focusing their efforts on other things, like building their social platforms.

I’m not going to lie, it bugged me for a little. Like why not at least try KYA (for free)? There’s absolutely no risk to you. The more I thought about it the more I realized it’s likely due to resources (or lack there of). People just don’t always have time to try new stuff, especially when their current priorities are elsewhere.

This revelation is something I need to think about going forward. How can we lower the barrier to get people to TRY KYA.

I mean, in the end, KYA is designed to make your life much simpler from an analytics perspective at least. We do all the hard work, from analyzing what content is performing well to giving you in-depth demographics with user profiles and email addresses.

Sometimes people can be mean

Shocker alert: there are mean people in this world. I’m not going to provide specific details, because those aren’t that important when it comes to the lesson I want to share here.

Here’s a brief backstory: my colleague, Chris, has been sending out emails to potential customers, as you would expect, we have worked and reworked our sales email more times than I care to count. We try to make it as personal as possible based on the information we have. Anyway, so Chris gets a reply from someone, reads it, and gets upset. The reply wasn’t the nicest.

By the time I heard about it from Chris he had already sent a reply to the email and it was an excellent reply, in my opinion. He said all the right things.

So what do you do when this happens? Well, here’s what I did.

The first thing I did was hear what Chris had to say about it and let him vent a little. No one likes to be on the receiving end of stuff like that.

After he told me what had happened, I took a look at the email for myself and while reading it, Chris says to me (I’m paraphrasing here): it’s mean, but they have some good points. If it’s ok with you I’d like to completely revamp our initial sales email.

This made me smile for a few reasons.

The first was because despite it upsetting him, he didn’t let it cloud his judgment on the actual email contents.

The second was because he was right. It wasn’t the nicest email, but it did have some good points on things we could improve on going forward.

The third was because of the initiative on his part to fix it.

Within the next hour or so, we had a completely rethought approach to our initial outreach email and you know what? It’s much better (I think). Now we’ll see if it leads to more positive responses.