postling demo day
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
social media just got a whole lot easier.
david lifsonceo
follow me online at:@dlifson
@postlingdave.postling.com
Hi, Iʼm Dave, and together with Chris and Haim, we created Postling. Postling is a tool that helps small businesses face the daunting task of social media marketing. Before I dive into Postling, I think it will help if I tell you a short story about how we got here.
I donʼt know if youʼve ever stumbled upon a product at Amazon that doesnʼt have customer reviews and see this photo, but yeah, thatʼs me. At last count, I get about 14 million page views every day. I was a software developer turned product manager, working in the Community and Personalized Recommendations groups, you know, Because you bought this book, Amazon thinks you might like...
Last year, I left Amazon and joined Etsy to run their Product team, where I met Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik.
Chris and Haim were two of the three co-founders of Etsy.com. In case you werenʼt aware, Etsy is the largest marketplace for handmade goods, selling $13 million of goods in June 2009 with approx. 200,000 active sellers on the site. Chris specializes in the web layer on up, and Haim in the DB layer and down.
We left Etsy late last year and I convinced them to help me build waffl, which is a marketplace and community for bed & breakfasts. I got the idea for waffl after I grew frustrated with how terrible the experience of finding and booking a B&B is. We launched waffl the last day of March and came into DreamIt intending to grow the community and figure out a business model. We started talking to our customers and this is what they told us:
“We don't want to log into 5 different sites every day and figure out how to use 'em. We'd pay for a tool that made all of this easy for us.”
"Everyone keeps telling us about this blogging, Facebook, Twitter thing, but it's really time consuming and frustrating. We don't want to log into 5 different sites every day and figure out how to use 'em. We'd pay for a tool that made all of this easy for us."
As an entrepreneur, when you hear a customer say that, you stop and listen. As we started to think deeper, we realized that this was a problem that also affected crafters, bakeries, muscians... so we decided to build a general purpose tool called Postling.
Iʼm going to give you a really quick demo of what Postling does, and Iʼm going to do so using an example.
@dlifson
David Lifson
dlifson
Social Startups
Caterpillar Cowboy
waffl blog
@waffl
@postling
Postling blog
I have a tech blog, a personal blog, twitter, facebook, and flickr. Postling has a blog and twitter, and waffl has a blog and twitter. Letʼs say I wanted to write a blog post that publishes out to both my professional and personal blog, tell my twitter and facebook readers about the post, and then upload any embedded photos to flickr.
0. Log into Wordpress1. Click Add New Post2. Write your post3. Publish post4. Log into Blogger5. Click New Post6. Go back to your Wordpress post7. Copy and paste the text8. Go back to your blogger window9. Paste the text10. Click Publish11. Copy the post’s URL12. Go to bit.ly or your twitter client13. Paste in the post URL14. Generate the bit.ly short URL15. Paste that into your twitter client16. Type in your tweet.17. Publish it. 18. Sign into Facebook19. Go back to your twitter and copy your tweet20. Paste that into Facebook21. Publish it.22. Log into Flickr23. Upload the photo you included in your blog post24. Add title, tags, and description.25. Publish it.
25 steps
10 minutes
To do what I just described without Postling took me about 10 minutes, and Iʼm a really fast computer user. Hereʼs how it works with Postling.
Create your blog post, check off on the right which blogs you want to publish to, and click Publish.
And your post will be published simultaneously out to your blogs. Then, you can write a custom message, drop in a bit.ly link, check off which microblogs to update, and click publish.
Finally, you can publish your photo to flickr.
And itʼs done! Even better, when anyone replies to your posts, you can read those comments in one place, regardless of source.
0. Log into Wordpress1. Click Add New Post2. Write your post3. Publish post4. Log into Blogger5. Click New Post6. Go back to your Wordpress post7. Copy and paste the text8. Go back to your blogger window9. Paste the text10. Click Publish11. Copy the post’s URL12. Go to bit.ly or your twitter client13. Paste in the post URL14. Generate the bit.ly short URL15. Paste that into your twitter client16. Type in your tweet.17. Publish it. 18. Sign into Facebook19. Go back to your twitter and copy your tweet20. Paste that into Facebook21. Publish it.22. Log into Flickr23. Upload the photo you included in your blog post24. Add title, tags, and description.25. Publish it.
0. Log into Postling1. Click Create New Post2. Write your post3. Check off which blogs you want4. Publish it5. Click to generate a bit.ly link6. Select your microblog accounts7. Publish to Twitter / Facebook8. Enter in any titles, tags, descriptions9. Publish to Flickr
10 minutes
2 minutes
Without Postling, I was able to do 25 steps in 10 minutes. With Postling, that was cut down to 9 steps in 2 minutes. And Iʼm an expert user, so you can inflate these numbers as you see fit.
$10 / hour $16 $35
$20 / hour $23 $75
$50 / hour $44 $175
With Postling Without Postling
So the ROI is clear. If youʼre paying an entry level employee $20 an hour to do your social media marketing, every dollar you spend with Postling saves you $2. If youʼre doing it yourself, weʼre talking saving $3 or more.
Weʼve been asked a number of times how we are different than Ping.fm, Posterous, and CoTweet. None of these services lets you complete the workflow I demoed for you earlier, and they certainly do not pull into one place all of the comments left by your readers.
“We’ve been looking at Posterous, Ping.fm ... have limitations that don’t fit our needs or ways of working ... The usability and “philosophy”of [Postling] feels very right...”
In fact, we were contacted by a music label yesterday who was interested in using Postling to manage the various social media properties for their 54 artists. They looked a Posterous, Ping.fm, FriendFeed, and a few others and none of them fit their needs like Postling.
Subscription Model
PREMIUMComing Soon...
Weʼll be talking with them not only about Postling, but also the upcoming Premium service, which may better serve their needs.
“I love Postling.com! It has been frustrating to have to manage all my social internet whoo-haa ... [Postling] makes my virtual life much easier to manage.”
Finally, I want to close with some love we got from a customer 2 days ago. She said, “ “.
social media just got a whole lot easier.
david lifsonceo
follow me online at:@dlifson
@postlingdave.postling.com
Thanks, and thank you to [Ellen, Steve, David, Mike, Steve, Katrina, Ahmed, lawyers Steve / Fred / Jeff / Mike ].