THOMAS MADSEN-MYGDAL
Insights Applied: Mature Startup - TwentyThree
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Co-founder & CEO of TwentyThreeThomas Madsen-Mygdal is the Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyThree, and has previously co-founded Podio (acquired by Citrix). In his talk he will share the story about finding the right timing, believing in your narrative and creating an innovative video marketing platform, which is changing how companies market their products and communicate.
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Thomas, thank you. Thanks a lot, Rowan. Hello, everyone, and thanks to Rowan for inviting me to give a little talk here. So product, as an entrepreneur, product is very dear to my heart, and marketing likewise. So when they both come together, it′s all hallelujah, right? It′s all magic. But when you think about it, it is actually just when you start out. Product and marketing is one, right? If you are a free four or five people in a small startup, it′s all the same, right? Customer research is product development research. Marketing research is, you know, it all comes together, right? Obviously, when you need to scale it later on, it becomes a whole different animal. But it is also sort of the magic ingredient of great companies, right? Great companies are great at product marketing. Bad companies are really bad at product marketing, ultimately, of joining them together, right? We also live in interesting times where both fields are really developing tremendously fast, just the last five to seven years, right? Product used to be hardware or software. Nowadays, it′s all services that are dynamically deployed every day. Changes are made. Roadmaps are moving extremely fast. As a marketer, you used to have a 12 or 18-month roadmap. Nowadays, everything is moving every month, every three months, right? In the real world, obviously, we all have 12 and 18-month roadmap, but they move, right? Also, in marketing, obviously, it′s so data-driven. It′s so scientific. It′s so direct. It′s all direct marketing. It′s all content. It′s all coming together, right? So it is really an essential field product marketing at large, right? And as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, I mean, you′re longing for great product marketers, right? It′s the most desired hire you can find if they′re good and understand what the market you′re in, right? So let me just tell you a little story about what happens when you really go wrong on your product marketing and you really go into a very deserted desert where nothing goes on, and I′ll share a few tips in the end. So 23 actually is sort of a full cycle company. We started back in 2002 when a much younger version of me wrote this very energetic, non-native language blog post to the left about how the emergence of mobile and connected cameras, aka mobile phones, would change everything, right? And that we would live in a visual world where the ability to communicate and share directly would very quickly change things. Obviously, it′s a belief that, you know, sort of nowadays is extremely proven and happening on an everyday basis, right? It′s one of those things that is really sort of when you saw it, it′s like a hundred-year paradigm shift of empowerment. It′s bringing us back to the town hall, back to the physical conversation. It′s changing communication from being abstract to more sort of verbal language. It′s making things authentic and direct again, right? It′s really amazing. And nothing really beats believing in something, right? We would never have been able to go through the journey we′ve been on if we hadn′t believed in this. Nothing beats a team that really believes. It′s pretty basic. Nothing beats a tribe of customers and a company really coming together in a field sharing the same beliefs, right? So paradigm marketing and really sort of belief marketing is the foundation of product marketing, right? That we often forget, right, when we are on the latest feature releases, XYZ, and product differentiation and et cetera. But ultimately, the tribe and the core narrative and story of what you are doing is really the key. And if we didn′t believe that, we would never have gone all the way through the desert. Then we started experimenting a lot of things. Funny things happened. Back there, we started experimenting. We played around. We did some early customer development work, did a lot of one-on-one sort of customer development stuff. But nothing really moved. Then in 2010, we thought we really had it and launched a great product. To this day, it is a great product and it′s sort of 60% of what our product is today. So it is a great product. The only problem was that nothing happened, right? You got the TechCrunch article, everything is happening. You have been awake the last 48 hours before your launch. We did a global launch tour in London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, New York, S.C. in a week. It was very crazy and good. But nothing really happened, right? We pushed and pushed. And like trying to differentiate this thing, but we couldn′t get our story and product through, right? Because the market was just somewhere else. It was here. We thought that video and software for video was really sort of about to break through, right? But we were in this weird filter bubble where everyone was like, video is YouTube. Video equals YouTube, right? And even though it really didn′t make sense to send out a newsletter to 500,000 customers with one big image in it leading to YouTube, no sane marketer would ever do that instead of driving them to your own website, right? Why send them off on cat videos and other fun stuff, right? Just something that totally doesn′t make sense, but it was the reality of the market, right? So it was a really tough lesson for us that even though the market actually is wrong, sort of from a good marketing craft standpoint, it totally doesn′t make sense. We took some very hard years, really fought it out. But you can′t really fight on what people really deeply believe in, right? It′s very tough to get people to actually change what they believe in, right? They do it gradually, but you can′t sit in a meeting and tell them they are fundamentally wrong about what they believe in, right? So we spent a lot of years out here in the desert. We eventually actually built a great niche SaaS business powering video for those niche cases where it wasn′t really fundamental and where it was very important not to be on YouTube already at that point. But 99% of the market was on YouTube and to some extent still is today, which today represents a great opportunity. So we were out in the desert. We were having a lot of fun. We were also fooling around doing a little bit of stuff along the side just to keep our interest going and changing the world because this thing was definitely not happening and not changing the world. But then something amazing started happening. Suddenly video changed just in the last 12, 18 months. Suddenly there was video on Twitter. Suddenly there was video on Facebook. There was video on Instagram. There was video on Snapchat. And it really fundamentally changed what the video category was for marketers. And slowly and then slowly people started realizing, ah, video is not YouTube. Video is everywhere. Video is just a format. Just the core idea that a video platform is a very bizarre idea to begin with. So we really started seeing a lot of interest and we really got to work to try to make it happen. So the first thing we did was very basic. We came from an industry where this was sort of coined as a video platform, which was the origin of the video category, enabling people to work with video and to share video, even pre-YouTube. You might know companies like Brightcove or Yala, etc. sort of the 15-year-old companies in this category. So we very quickly, the first thing we did was basically sort of, okay, we changed the market category, introduced a new industry category. Obviously as a challenger brand we did it. All our competitors copied it within three months. We didn't give any credit, but that's the name of a challenger, right? But you know you're onto something when both your main competitors change their core positioning within two months of you changing it. Then you know you're onto something, right? Then we also very quickly got ahead on sort of building a product that was really built for the area we were in, right? That reflected the core idea that video is everywhere and the challenge is now to run video across all these platforms at the same time as a marketer to format the videos for the different platforms, to have the full analytics to understand the dynamics of the different platforms. Facebook is great for reach. Your own platforms are great for engagement and how you really start working with everything in this. Also a lot of marketers suddenly realized once again that these social platforms are paid platforms. So we actually in the funnel want to drive our customers and users back to our own website. We can start doing a lot of interesting stuff, get a lot of organic traffic and really drive all our customers in our email newsletters to something on our website instead of driving them to YouTube. Pretty basic, but it happened, right? And when you start doing that, when you're on your own platforms, then suddenly you can actually understand who's actually watching your videos and you can integrate it with your core marketing automation systems, et cetera. Video is about half of the engagement on a website and it's currently not tracked. That's half of the engagement on your platform that is not tracked. That person watching a 40-minute video on some feature in your product, your sales guys should know that the next day, right? Currently you don't. So we really got to work. We launched it in June and the time is now as we can see with Madeline here from our team. We're currently just in that sort of eye of the storm where everything is happening. We get a new key reference customer every week or two. We're all struggling to really drive our product marketing level and all our marketing up to a professional level. And it's amazing, right? When you've been out in the desert for a very long ride and you really believed in something, it's amazing when things actually start happening. It's amazing when suddenly a category moves from being truly, truly niche things to something where every marketer needs this product in their core marketing stack and they currently don't really have it. That's a crazy opportunity. So that's amazing. So that was a very simple story of what happens when you go through a very long cycle and still come out in the end as a product marketer. I wouldn't really be surprised if you didn't advise anyone else to go on this journey. But it made for a lot of fun and it actually, as everything in life, if you really experience and take the pain, then it's even greater when you get to the other side and actually came through. So I would end on just sharing a few couple of tips on what we're doing with product marketing and the way I'm seeing the sort of market develop. So first up is the anti-digital of doing physical manifestations of your core story and your core product narrative. Everything nowadays, digital, the stacks, everything is amazing. So what is it that's ultimately going to stand out is all the stuff that is not just what everyone else is doing, right? So back with my previous company Podio, a collaboration software startup we sold to Citrix back in 2012. This corner is called the product marketing. So the idea behind this was to make sure that you're not just a product marketing person, but you're also a product marketing person. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. 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So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. So we were able to do that. And throw them around the world on a needed as needed basis, right? So you got a self contained unit that can go out in the world can also contribute to the communities. We're a part of by going out and doing live streams like today and really engage with with the local community. We're part of right. So so really standing out in a digital world is is just really important nowadays, I believe. So really think about what are the physical manifestations you can do. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. And the surprising thing is that the physical manifestation is really important nowadays. So obviously video for doing a core product narrative, your core stories here like as in this core product narrative video here. Live keynote and live streams, right? This is from when we launched the product. Doing that, you know, Apple keynote, 90 minutes, core narrative, actually getting a global reach, even though you're only 100 people sitting in a small room or even just your team. Even though you're only 100 people sitting in a small room or even just your team, but really delivering that story we're seeing a lot of activation send us doing related events, et cetera, that we're also doing live streaming for. And really event driven approach events suddenly makes sense if you can have five 10,000 people globally engage with the events as compared to all the high cost of actually doing a small local event. globally engage with the events as compared to all the high cost of actually doing a small local event, right? And lastly, obviously great when you need to do that great customer validation case when we eventually got one of the most globally well-known content marketing cases to start using the product. And, you know, all this stuff is so easy today if you build up the organizational capabilities to actually do video on your teams, right? Just as well as you have a lot of people that are really good at writing in terms of communication, you know, you need to have the organizational capabilities to communicate with video as well, right? It's just a sort of generational challenge also in terms of a lot of people that have been taught including me that writing was the way we communicated now and now you have the 25 year old guys and girls coming in that do great DSLR video, you know, should they spend two hours writing of a press release or should they do a video in two hours? For them it's all the same, right? So videos is really moving nowadays which is very exciting. So to sum it all up, for me there's really ultimately no real difference between product and marketing. For me it always ultimately comes down to really connecting with your core market and really understanding being aligned with what's going on there, right? This is a belief I've come to realize from being five, six years in the desert where we were totally out of track with what was going on, right? And we took us a few years to actually align with what the reality was and then live with it and start getting mentally ready for when it would start moving and changing because not everyone survives being five years in the desert so you shouldn't make that mistake either. Thank you.