1 million signups!
by Thomas KetchellSo 1m educators, students, business users and friends have signed up to Sutori since our inception five years ago. Considering how we used to have nothing more than a Twitter account that recreated historical events, it feels like quite the achievement. Yet, it merely feels like the beginning as our conversion rates are still super low!
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Congrats!
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Thanks!
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Wow!! Congrats! Have you tried posting in the community for feedback to improve conversion rates? Cheers!
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Good idea. I think I'll line-up a post and ask some questions to see how we can increase those conversion rates to paid subscriptions.
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Oh wow, that sounds amazing! I'd love to know more details, nosey me! Have you considered signing up to do an IH Interview?
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That could be fun. I'd love to sign-up for it. Thanks for the comment :)
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Congrats on your signups, I would love to know how did you acquire so many and how long it to you to reach that?
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Thanks for the kind words.
It took a really long time for us to get that many users and lots of experimentation. Our product has always been "freemium" and our free version was very extensive for the first three years in order for us to get a mass of users.
In the space of five years we did the following:
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Cold outreach by email and Twitter
When we first started out, we just had a beta for teachers and struggled to get those first users. We used a combination of email and Tweets to get the first users to try us out. Once they started using it with their students, our numbers grew exponentially as one teacher brought in around 20 to 25 students so the numbers kept rising. -
Finding edtech influencers
We then figured out who were the most influential bloggers in the edtech space. We then reached out to them and asked for a review or to take a look at what we were building. We were fortunate to get some early coverage and that had a snowball effect as more users were reviewing and talking about our product. If you scroll down this timeline on Sutori you can see all the blog articles about us in the early days: https://www.sutori.com/press - this definitely helped us a lot and that helped us grow to a few thousand teachers. -
Getting listed as a "top tool for timelines"
Once we had some initial traction, we spent some time trying to get in the most Googled articles for timeline tools. This still drives around 100 signups every day to Sutori: https://elearningindustry.com/top-10-free-timeline-creation-tools-for-teachers (we're number 2). This has been the best factor for growth. -
SEO and user generated content
When you create a timeline on Sutori, everything is private by default but some teachers and users can make work "public" and share it out with the community. If they do so, the content is indexed by Google and we have thousands of original pieces of content so we get a lot of traffic from random searches. We also allow users to "embed" their Sutori presentations onto their websites which provides some backlinks back to Sutori. Here's an example of a Russian news website: https://www.enisey.tv/news/post-13982/ (you'll notice that we put links to Sutori in the toolbar!)
Happy to answer any other questions on growing a teacher base of users.
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Congratulations! Sutori website looks amazing, solid product with a very clear target audience. Keep shining!
Could you share a link to the Twitter account you mentioned in the post?
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Thanks for the comment!
As for the Twitter accounts, we used to create separate accounts for each historical re-enactment. Here are a couple that we did:
The ascent of Everest by Tenzig & Hillary in 1953: https://twitter.com/Everest1953
Rolling Stones free gig in 1969 at Hyde Park: https://twitter.com/Stonesin69We rolled a lot of that content into history curriculum for schools. You can view some of our history work here: https://www.sutori.com/stories/sutori (scroll through the units!)
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Congrats! What's your plan for improving conversion?
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We're not sure yet :/
We're selling to a really tough market (education) and here are the pricing options that we currently have: https://www.sutori.com/pricing
We currently sell to individual teachers on an annual basis ($99/year) and we have a high churn as many teachers do not receive discretionary funds to purchase a digital product for their students (they usually pay out of pocket). When we try to up sell to schools ($500 or $2,000), the sales cycle is super long and school admins will get teachers to use a free Google alternative to Sutori. We feel like we've added so many features that we can't keep building more and more as the product will become so bloated.
Any tips for improving our sales to schools and not just individual teachers? We're adding a referral system to try and get more teachers from the same school which will hopefully help our school sales process as we'll have more of a crowd.
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Understood.
Do you know who the decision maker in school is? Do you know how they allocate their budget and spend it? What's important to them?
How long is the sales cycle?
That's the hard part around bottom-up distribution, teachers are not salespeople, and they don't have required arsenal to make the sale happen. That said, they can be valuable as a warm introduction to school higher management, especially if they love your product. But you need to make that sale happen yourself.
It's essential to understand what problem are you solving for the decision maker, as it's probably not the same as for the teacher. I'd try to do customer development around that and understand that part better. And then try to sell it to the school as a direct b2b sale but at a higher price point, 10k-15k, that price would justify hiring the sale person in the future. But again, a lot depends on an understanding of how they allocate and spend their budget.
I'm happy to chat about it more here on in PM. Hope that helps.
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Appreciate the response and you make some valid points. It definitely helps us figure out how we can better serve potential customers.
With a product like ours which is super versatile, we've struggled to identify a particular budget to fit into. As we do not provide content, we're often within a "digital tool" budget allocation. As it stands we have sold to: library, social studies, ELA, science and math departments. All these departments have different budget sizes and sales cycles. An average school sale cycle is between 3 to 6 months and we have seen a lot more success with charter schools than public schools. I agree with the comment about teachers not being salespeople and we ask them for their admin contact info so we can reach out to them and up-sell Sutori but this has proven quite fruitless.
We have changed our value-add numerous times for schools and went from a project-based learning tool to now focusing more on the 4Cs for 21st century learning but it has yet yielded many results. I think we need to do a better job in figuring out our true value for the admin. We serve the teachers' needs well and it's a clear value but the buyer is a different beast as it's an admin that doesn't have much time. Here's the page we setup for them: https://www.sutori.com/schools but it's clearly not compelling enough and not solving a pain point at the admin level. We're clearly a vitamin and not a direct painkiller for the majority of admins.
I agree with you that we need to do some customer development work. I think the main issue is that we have such a variety of buying personas and it's difficult to target on one specifically as we've found budgets vary depending on the school, the district and subject specific budget allocation.
I'll definitely post updates as we run some new experiments to kick-off the school year in August.
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Thomas, thank you for your thought out reply.
You probably know that better than I do, but it's hard to pull off a versatile product without focusing on something first. As you mention different sales cycles, that's precisely why you want to focus on one particular vertical, to have that process as automated as possible, that will enable you to expand further. If you see more success with charter schools, maybe try to target them and do customer development inside their departments?
Just one more piece of feedback, when I visit /schools link I get five different pricing options and feel lost. Maybe show one pricing that is specific for schools?
Anyway, I hope you will find what works best for you soon. Keep us updated on your progress. It's exciting where it will go from here.
Also, feel free to reach out to me if you need the second pair of eyes to look at things. I'll be glad to help.
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Appreciate the response and making me rethink a lot of our current sales strategy. I agree we should be more laser focused on one segment and we know we convert charter schools at a higher rate so we should be able to continue growing that engine.
You make some good points for the schools page and a potentially confusing pricing. We're actually in the midst of removing the "slider" for districts and colleges as we're unable to upsell those sales yet and it confuses some of our schools with those pricing options.
I'll definitely be in touch after the summer and share some of our learnings from switching the pricing and focusing more on one segment for conversions.
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Well done Thomas.
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Thanks!
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