SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Very Natural Path from Consumer to B2B Helps Tribute Founder Break $1m Run Rate for Meaningful Montage VIdeos
14 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the Tribute platform and how does it work?
What was revenue? I think Inc. publishes that, right? What was the revenue? They do not publish revenue. Oh, what was the range? Can you share a range?
We prefer to keep that a little tighter to the belt. We're in some conversations right now.
When did... Can you maybe share the year that you passed a million dollars in revenue?
It was 2020.
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Chapter 2: How did Tribute achieve a million-dollar run rate?
Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Andrew Horne. He's the founder and CEO of Tribute.co. As a speaker and executive coach, he's been called the Dale Carnegie for the digital age by Forbes.
In addition to building companies, Andrew trains organizations and leaders around the globe on social flow, a simple framework to cultivate real confidence and connection in every situation. He's now building Tribute.co, a group video montage platform. All right, Andrew, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So what does Montage Platform mean? I've never heard of this before.
All right. So Nathan, when's your birthday? October 3rd. October 3rd.
Chapter 3: What unique features contribute to Tribute's viral growth?
So on October 3rd, imagine what it would feel like to wake up on your birthday and one of your best friends sends you an email. You open that email. There's a big play button. You click on it and that opens a video montage of 20 of your closest friends and family members who've all recorded a one minute video telling you why they love you.
So you watch that thing and just like 82% of our customers, you cry tears of joy because that's the most meaningful gift you've ever received in your entire life. So that's a tribute montage. And eight years ago, we built the first ever collaborative video montage platform that turned what used to be a 15-hour laborious process into a 15-minute enjoyable one.
Yeah, I totally understand the use case here. Graduation just happened. My aunts, like my younger cousins were graduating high school. They sent emails going, please record a video, attach it to the email. It's an MP4 file. Then they have to edit it all together. You're basically automating this whole process. Exactly. You get it. That's awesome. Okay. This makes tons of sense.
So just to be clear though, your turn is going to be higher than most B2B SaaS companies who are selling direct to consumers, I imagine, right?
We are selling direct to consumer, but one of the things and like why, you know, especially when we're talking to investors and partners, it's like why we are somewhat of a SaaS product is because like, not only do we have subscriptions for enterprise partners, you know, everyone from Bed Bath & Beyond to 1-800-Flowers, you name it.
But also there's a baked in virality to our product where just the way that you had talked about that graduation tribute, this is not a traditional consumer product. It's really, if you're creating a tribute, you're inviting on average 31 of your friends, family, and coworkers to join you in the process.
And so because of the baked in viral coefficient of the product, every customer that we acquire is actually getting us a new customer in the process, which is a cool part of our growth, which most of it is truly kind of baked into the product that way.
It's rare I get the opportunity to go down this question stream. I can with you because you actually have viral coefficients. So obviously key to making viral coefficients work is you need to have at least one user invite at least 1.1 new users, right? So you've got 30 invites going out. The next part of that math equation is how many of those invites then sign up to tribute and activate.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Tribute integrate gift cards into their service?
So, you know, I mean, I would have to look to my product lead and my marketing. I just know that like our main KPI around the virality, it's like, you know, 85% of our new user growth is coming through the virality of the product itself. And so as long as we're keeping that above one, like I'm happy.
And so in terms of like what actual percentage of those is converting, I'm not sure the actual number.
Okay. Okay. Understood. And I guess give me a general sense of sort of growth rate. How many new users signed up last month?
So we are, last month, I don't have that information in front of me.
Or whatever you remember, whatever the month, the most recent month that you remember.
Yeah, would be 300,000 last time I looked in March.
Oh, wow. Okay. That's huge.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Tribute face during the COVID-19 pandemic?
So you're saying 85% of those came from effectively virality. Right. Interesting. Okay. Now, I guess help me understand pay, right? So my aunt, when she sent out this request to all the family to record videos for the kid who's graduating high school, right? Is she going to pay five bucks for one video? How do you keep her sticky?
Yeah, so there's really two tiers to it. So it's a pay-per-use product so that basically she's either going to pay $29 to do it herself, $99 for someone on our team to edit that together. And then we have add-on products, which would enable her to put that onto a bamboo sustainable USB or an LCD video card so she can deliver that video on a physical gift.
But then what's cool about tribute as well is that we have this social commerce element so that all of those people who are going to record videos not only have the opportunity to record a video, but they can also add a gift themselves.
So we have this gift card marketplace so that of all those people that you just experienced for that graduation tribute, imagine them all having the possibility to add a gift card to their video so that not only is the recipient going to open that video montage full of love and appreciation, but then after that, they're going to get another one and say like, hey, we're not done.
Here's all these gift cards you got from your friends.
Really interesting.
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Chapter 6: How has Tribute evolved since its inception in 2014?
Okay, so let's talk about again, your average sort of use case, which is one person sends out 30 invites. Of those 30 invites, how many of them are likely to add a gift card to that transaction or to that recording?
Yeah. So right now, about 60% of those people are converting to actually submit a video. And of that 60%, right now you have about 10% of participants. And this is a newer feature that's three months old. So about 10% of those people are adding a gift card to their video, which is another huge opportunity for us to actually kind of improve the social commerce growth of the company.
Yeah. So 30 invites, 18 submitted video, 10% of 18. So call it two years on average, attach a gift card. I mean, that's actually higher than I would have expected. And what is it usually like an iTunes thing or a Bed Bath & Beyond thing to pay for college dorm stuff?
Bestsellers, Amazon, Apple, Nike, 1-800-Flowers.
Interesting. Really interesting. And what's the average? I mean, are people doing like a $5 gift card or are you seeing like $500 gift cards?
Oh, you know, because I think that what's cool about tribute is most people are doing this on bigger occasions. So, you know, we, we don't want to give them kind of a choice overwhelm here. So we just have basically the 10, 25 and 50 are your presets and then you have a custom, but our average gift card right now is actually $50 from those customers.
Really interesting. Okay. So you have really interesting data then on what's like the most high spending event. Is it a college graduation? Is it a wedding? Wait, let me see. Yes. Is it a honey, like a wedding? I would put wedding at the top. I bet the biggest amount gift cards are attached to weddings.
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Chapter 7: What role does employee recognition play in Tribute's business model?
And then second would be like, maybe like a high school graduation going to college. But what are the big, what are the big spending events?
You know, so about 80% of our traffic comes through birthdays. And so I would actually say that the biggest ones are milestone birthdays. And so milestone birthday, I consider anyone that has a five or a zero at the end of it. And then I think that those really do trigger as a very special instance for individuals where they're used to giving gifts there.
I think that a lot of people's kind of gifting for something like a wedding is oftentimes going through the actual, you know, the knot or Zola or the actual, you I'm blanking on the term right now, but the registry. There you go.
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. This is really interesting. So how do you, I guess, let me get more of the backstory here. You said you got this going back in 2014. So when you launch, I guess, how did you, was it always the same product or did you evolve here? Did you pivot away from something else?
Yeah, so I mean, what was so great about Tribute is the reason that we started this was because I was fortunate enough to receive one of these that was hacked together by my girlfriend, now wife, Mickey, in 2014. I was in the back of the room bawling my eyes out because it was so amazing. When I went to tell her that this was the best gift I've ever received, I said, how'd you do this?
And she said, well, it sucked. I had to email people hundreds of times, like hack those videos and iMovie. And so immediately I realized that there was this incredible experience that I just had and that there was not a really great way to create this. And I'd also seen other people doing this, much like you are for graduation. And so immediately we had a very clear problem that we were solving.
Right. There's this amazing experience, not easy to do. Let's solve that problem. And so in the process, I mean, you know, we've certainly fine-tuned the product itself, but the core mission of making it easy for people to create a meaningful group video montage has been there. And then we've just looked into like, how can we actually improve the virality, the conversion?
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Chapter 8: What insights can we gain from Tribute's customer experience?
How can we give other people who are contributing more opportunities to add a gift along with their video? And then we've started to iterate it more and more. of really tweaking the product so that it's more usable within the B2B workspace. You think about the value of something like this for employee engagement and recognition.
We have companies that are using Tribute for every single one, five, and 10-year anniversary in our company. We have companies that are using this for every single employee who's onboarded their new team will record a video telling a little bit about themselves. So they have a video montage to get to know everyone on a deeper level more quickly.
So we've tweaked it to make those types of subscription opportunities more available in the B2B space, which is a newer and really exciting kind of growth channel for us right now.
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I had no idea because I was a nonprofit guy. I'd started two children's nonprofits before that. I had teams of five and 10 people. And at that size, and especially it was really young. I was 24 at the time. I just had never really thought about employee recognition as a thing because we were so close to each other.
We hung out with each other that I didn't really think about the need to ritualize it. And there was actually a pivotal moment when there was a really large company. This woman had spent 35 years there and she was receiving a retirement tribute. So she received this tribute and she sent a message to our team, which in 2014, there was four of us.
So we saw pretty much every email coming through the doors. And just for context, how many today? So right now we're around 50. And that's 50, including our core team, as well as our experience team, which are the video editors and the customer service agents. That's one of the different ways for tribute is that we've got 24 seven customer support.
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