Good Stuff Happens in 1:1 Meetings: Why you need them and how to do them well
Postling Demo Day
1. social media just got a whole lot easier.
david lifson follow me online at:
ceo @dlifson
dave@postling.com @postling
718.715.6161 dave.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.
2. 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...
3. Last year, I left Amazon and joined Etsy to run their Product team, where I met Chris Maguire
and Haim Schoppik.
4. 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.
5. 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:
6. “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.
7. Iʼm going to give you a really quick demo of what Postling does, and Iʼm going to do so using
an example.
8. Social Startups Postling blog
Caterpillar Cowboy @postling
@dlifson
David Lifson
dlifson
waffl blog
@waffl
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.
9. 0. Log into Wordpress
1. Click Add New Post
2. Write your post
3. Publish post
4. Log into Blogger
5. Click New Post
6. Go back to your Wordpress post
7. Copy and paste the text
8. Go back to your blogger window
9. Paste the text
10. Click Publish
11. Copy the post’s URL
12. Go to bit.ly or your twitter client 25 steps
13. Paste in the post URL
14. Generate the bit.ly short URL
15. Paste that into your twitter client
16. Type in your tweet.
17. Publish it.
10 minutes
18. Sign into Facebook
19. Go back to your twitter and copy your tweet
20. Paste that into Facebook
21. Publish it.
22. Log into Flickr
23. Upload the photo you included in your blog
post
24. Add title, tags, and description.
25. Publish it.
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.
10. Create your blog post, check off on the right which blogs you want to publish to, and click
Publish.
11. 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.
13. And itʼs done! Even better, when anyone replies to your posts, you can read those comments
in one place, regardless of source.
14. 0. Log into Wordpress
1. Click Add New Post
2. Write your post
3. Publish post
4. Log into Blogger
5. Click New Post
6. Go back to your Wordpress post
7. Copy and paste the text
8. Go back to your blogger window
9. Paste the text
10. Click Publish
11. Copy the post’s URL
12. Go to bit.ly or your twitter client
13. Paste in the post URL
14. Generate the bit.ly short URL
15. Paste that into your twitter client
10 minutes
16. Type in your tweet.
17. Publish it.
18. Sign into Facebook
19. Go back to your twitter and copy your tweet
20. Paste that into Facebook
21. Publish it.
22. Log into Flickr
23. Upload the photo you included in your blog post
24. Add title, tags, and description.
25. Publish it.
0. Log into Postling
1. Click Create New Post
2. Write your post
3. Check off which blogs you want
4. Publish it
5. Click to generate a bit.ly link
6. Select your microblog accounts
2 minutes
7. Publish to Twitter / Facebook
8. Enter in any titles, tags, descriptions
9. Publish to Flickr
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.
15. With Postling Without Postling
$10 / hour $16 $35
$20 / hour $23 $75
$50 / hour $44 $175
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.
16. 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.
17. “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.
18. Subscription Model
Coming Soon...
PREMIUM
Weʼll be talking with them not only about Postling, but also the upcoming Premium service,
which may better serve their needs.
19. “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, “ “.
20. social media just got a whole lot easier.
david lifson follow me online at:
ceo @dlifson
dave@postling.com @postling
718.715.6161 dave.postling.com
Thanks, and thank you to [Ellen, Steve, David, Mike, Steve, Katrina, Ahmed, lawyers Steve /
Fred / Jeff / Mike ].