Sutori
Collaborative timeline presentation tool
We're happy to have now reached 1.5m users as we continue to grow and get more usage. We're now getting roughly 1m visitors per month. We're still having issues with converting teachers and schools to a paid plan but we're making progress. The switch to online learning has definitely helped us grow and get Sutori in the hands of more teachers and students. Excited for the next few months!
So 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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We edge closer to meeting our targets as 500k users signed up to the product. We are still running a freemium product but primarily focused on providing the tool for free and we're not optimizing for conversions yet.
With 200 users, we decide to launch "officially" and remove that beta tag.
28 Comments
That's amazing, congratulations!
I'm giving a talk tomorrow for teachers (in Finland) about digital learning environments. I gave the same talk last year, and one of the pain points that was brought up frequently was that it's a lot of work to move data around between different learning softwares. Have you guys run into this? I noticed that you've built integrations to multiple Learning Management Systems. What was that experience like?
Hi @Pandabob - that's great that you're giving a talk to teachers in Finland. I'm currently based out of Helsinki and we're trying to get more teachers onboard here to use the tool!
As for the pain points, indeed! Moving data from one tool to another is a big frustration for teachers and they waste a lot of time. One thing that has worked well for us is the integration with Google Classroom. It's used by millions of teachers (primarily in the US) but it means they can import their students directly to Sutori and also share Sutori presentations directly in Classroom. This has saved teachers a lot of time. We did the same integration with Clever which is used a bit too.
We also integrate with all Learning Management Systems (LMS) through LTI. We've not been too impressed though with usage. Many teachers complain often about their outdated LMSs and will switch over their lessons to something like Sutori and try to bypass it altogether. LTI is very basic but it does save a bit of time with the creation of student accounts when trying to access Sutori. We do not have any grading functionality on Sutori (we have Sutori Analytics which gives teachers data on collaboration time, quiz answers, media uploaded) so we don't pass any grading data from the LMS to Sutori and vice-versa. To be honest, it's not requested by our teachers which is why we haven't developed it.
The biggest win for teachers is the ability to embed stuff in Sutori directly. Teachers (and students) just need to copy/paste a link from any of these services: https://help.sutori.com/en/article/what-can-i-embed-into-sutori-1ub6v9o/ and they will be displayed within their Sutori presentation. This allows teachers to put all their resources in one spot and students can easily follow. For example, you can add a video from Google Drive directly to your Sutori and all the students have to do is press play. No need to follow a link or leave the presentation. This alone has helped teachers keep everything together especially with the switch to online and remote learning.
Good luck with the talk!
Wow, nice detailed reply. I hadn't even heard about LTI, having a standard like that makes a lot of sense though.
I found your email in your profile. Do you mind if I mail you the next time I know I'm visiting Helsinki (I'm in Turku) and we could grab a lunch/coffee? (And if the covid situation allows for it). I'd love to chat about the education space in general.
Of course. Would be cool to hang out.
I work out of Maria 01 (https://maria.io/) in Helsinki which is a great spot so would be cool to grab lunch there. They have a restaurant in the space too.
Let me know next time you're in town.
Excellent! Added you on LinkedIn as well.
Hey @tomketch and @Pandabob usually I don't post much on here but I saw this exchange and if you two ever want to ping would be happy to talk. I make an app Easycsv.io that allows people to connect CSV files to any API or Zapier. If you find teachers can often export CSVs and there are common formats we can help maybe solve some of those data moving issues for some of the smaller players that don't have good ways to integrate with them other than getting a CSV export. Feel free to email the support email or start a chat on EasyCSV.io and we can talk there if you want. Have a good day!
Thanks for sharing!
Nice, this looks relevant as well. I was thinking of adding a slide about no code tools that teachers might find useful for data transfer work, and this fits the bill exactly.
Congratulations! I am curious about the following : how much pricing experimentation have you done ? Your pricing seems very cheap to me, could you please explain why you weren't able to charge more ?
Hi @Leo - thanks for your comment. Edtech is definitely a tough market to break through!
We've run so many different pricing experiments since we started and have gradually increased the price over the years but it's very difficult selling to teachers who have to often pay out of pocket for tools. Even asking for $99 off them during a pandemic is a difficult ask. Most teachers get between $250-$500 for all their classroom supplies. That includes pencils to whiteboard markers to some books. It's a ridiculously low amount and I can't believe in 2020 that teachers aren't able to have the proper resources to help educate kids!
We started with a $49/year plan and also offered a monthly subscription. We stopped the monthly pretty quickly as teachers would upgrade for one or two months for a project then churn and we wouldn't see them again until next year. In the end, we wanted more use of the tool and for it to be spread out throughout the year so switched to an annual plan only. We gradually increased the price to reach the $99 plan for an individual teacher.
Our main focus is to use our freemium plans to get schools to pay for subscriptions for teachers which is why we have two plans for them:
For many schools, they are buying a variety of tools and we've really struggled in closing the larger district type sales. Our focus is to get better at closing schools at $2k and then grow from there into districts. As you can tell, all our sales process is inbound.
We also have a business plan which is currently $399/year. We increase that plan by $100 every year and it brings in a small amount of revenue but our main focus and usage is still from teachers.
We will continue to experiment over the next year and we're fortunate enough to have a large user base to trial things out. We're also planning on switching up our paywall by the end of the school year and removing the 30 day trial.
Great and detailed answer ^^ Thank you for taking the time to share your learnings with the community!
Here is a little insight that may help. Schools have a very small window of purchasing new products and that is the summer break. Also, right now schools and teachers are bombarded by productivity products. It is very hard to have them pull out their wallets. Teachers personally are underpaid and can barely pay their own bills. What you need to do is find your champions in each school district and have them convince their boards so that next summer you can close a deal. Another option might be to find state education level personnel who can push your product through some alliance. Feel free to IM me if you would like. Twitter: @jotibasi
Thanks for your thoughtful answer and I completely agree with the points you make. It's why we have a bottom up approach and rely primarily on teachers making the most of Sutori with their students. We're still struggling in getting them to convince their admins and that's something we need to work on. They generally don't have much time to handle this type of admin!
I hadn't thought of reaching out to some state education level personnel. Seems like a good idea. I'll do some research and see what comes up.
I've followed you on Twitter. Thanks!
Congratulations! That's a great accomplishment.
Thank you!
Amazing stats! Would you mind sharing how you grew the traffic to 1 million per month? Which acquisition channel worked the best for you? While my startup is in a very different space, I will benefit from your thought process :)
Hi @karthik_2206 - thanks for your message.
I recommend you read my interview with IH from last year: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-sustainable-business-despite-a-tough-user-market-a982af2a06 - I mention four ways on how we grew our traffic and online presence.
Wow such a simple idea and great execution as well ! Kudos
Thanks @faqlo!
Yay!! So happy for you guys! The teachers I've shared Sutori with were very impressed and excited about it.
Thanks @allison - it was awesome to collaborate with you and congrats on the write-up in Roll Call!
That's amazing - congratulations! Reading through your story is quite impressive, seeing how long you have been working together as a team around the same core idea and growing the business this far.
Interesting times ahead for sure!
Thanks @oskarif - let's see how Sutori will evolve in the next year!
Wow! That's a lot of traffic. How did you managed to get that? What customer acquisition channel has been working out for? and how are you doubling down on it?
Thanks @aminmemon for your comment. The traffic we get is primarily through user generated educational content and it's taken quite a few years to get going!
There are over 275k public presentations on Sutori. Each presentation which is public is indexed by Google and means we get a lot of random keywords and people that find Sutori that way. 50% of our traffic is from organic search but our conversion from that number is very low as it's a lot of random users and not necessarily our core audience of teachers. We're going to work on our CTAs when a visitor lands on a public presentation to make them more actionable for teachers.
In terms of conversion, we've been focused on having teachers invite their colleagues through a referral system. It's been mildly successful but we're now thinking of ways of improving this.
what distribution channels do u use?
Hi, as I mentioned in a previous answer, best to read through my interview from over a year ago: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-sustainable-business-despite-a-tough-user-market-a982af2a06 - I mention four ways on how we grew our traffic and online presence. It's taken a lot of patience to get the traffic we get and it's still quite unqualified for conversions but we're getting there.
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Our front end is built in Ember.js and backend is Ruby on Rails.
We constantly have to work on optimizations especially when we get a bump in teachers and students all uploading materials at the same time: https://twitter.com/YoranBrondsema/status/1309157298670129163