186 - What If Recognition Worked Like A Viral Product - with Ali Linz

Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders. We've got a great guest for the show today, Allie Lenz. She has spent over 20 years in marketing strategy as a strategic planning director, advising companies like McDonald's, Johnson Johnson. And today she is the co-founder of Group Together, the platform that makes group gifting easier.

Allie, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So let's start by talking about the problem that you're solving. Before we get to any solutions, what is the thing that people are facing today?

Yeah, sure. So after COVID and during COVID, everyone still wanted to celebrate each other and show appreciation. And whereas you used to walk around the office with a big card and a jangling envelope to get people to sign a card for someone's farewell or someone's baby or someone's happy birthday. All of a sudden, with everyone remote or hybrid or working in different offices, it's just not possible.

So the need is still there, but how do you do that? It also feels a bit tragic sometimes. It feels super awkward to, you know, to ask people for money or to chase people for money if that's the case. And so we needed a solution to that.

Yeah, so that's so interesting, Ellie. It's it's because we also lose track of it too. We find ourselves in a new normal. And you might think, like, wait a second, I used to be at the water cooler talking to my co-workers and actually new people.

I used to go out to lunch with present coworkers and previous uh co-workers, and you you kind of just you just go out and you do things and and and so we just don't do that anymore. And actually there's a deficit. You actually feel the need to show that appreciation more because you don't have that. You don't have that melting pot happening, and you don't have that sense, like it's so fundamental to as a human being, the need to feel valued and appreciated.

Am I doing a good job, not just in terms of my salary, but do you like me? Um, do you think I'm good? Basic stuff. Um and it's harder to do that in the remote and hybrid world.

It's hard to do it anyway. Yeah, so it's hard to do anyway. Now, are you thinking and approaching this problem from like the workplace perspective, or are you thinking just the broad human phenomenon? Yeah, we started this business 10 years ago.

Really, it was birthdays and it was teachers' gifts, um, or your kids' coach, um, particularly where you might not know what gift you wanted to give, but you know you wanted to say thanks. And then in COVID, it just went to offices, big offices. So now we're in 5,000 companies throughout the US and and some small, but mostly really large companies, you know, Disney's Department of Defense, Harvard, Bank of America, um, you name it. People um people wanting to just uh share a link and have everyone add a message to a card.

In fact, uh we go. Show and tell. Yes. Just so you understand what I'm what I'm talking about.

For the listeners, she's holding up kind of a like sort of this very nicely designed sort of card. Yeah, it's a card. It's a giant card that you've customized the front, and then people, you've shared a link, and people have written a message inside and maybe chosen a GIF or GIF, whichever you call it, um, to celebrate someone with a card that's digital. Um, and if you want, let people chip in for a gift card as well.

And that's optional. Yeah, and as you're talking about this, my mind is going to a certain class of software tools that could basically help with sort of team building stuff. So, like there's there's one for Slack that I use, for example, that does like it's like a happy birthday bot. Um, and you know, it it kind of pings folks at different times and asks them, oh, what's your name?

What's your birthday and stuff like that? And then it on its own does an announcement in one of the channels. And it's it's like one of those little things. And and we can all think of places where we liked working.

And uh, you know, usually the leadership does a good job of saying, like, okay, well, we've had, you know, say a software release. Let's all go out and play laser tag, or let's go out and have like this big lunch. So there is this ex- I don't sure what to call it. Is it team building?

It's it's kind of the slice of it. Well, I think it's I think that they call it it's it's a recognition um for the most part. But I think in most cases, it's from the company to the individual. The one you're talking about in the very various versions, you know, is better than nothing.

Um, but there's a difference between just the kind of board thing, the like a digital board, and something which looks and feels in its interaction like a card. It's more sentimental, people take more time. We put some AI, and I know your show is about product-led growth. So, you know, in the context of that, um using some AI to make things more personal rather than less less.

So we have this thing which is really cool, um, which is AI that helps you write your message. But it doesn't write the message independent of you. You say, Hey, um Thomas, you know, who else will I go and have a Siggy around the back of the office at the end of the day, you know, when you're gone. And and then you can say, write that in the style of Beyoncé, or write it in the style of Dr.

Seuss. And all of a sudden you've got, or write it in rap, and all of a sudden you've got like a little poem that that creates the magic. And I think the more personal these things are, uh, and and the that it feels like someone's gone to effort. That's that's where the love is.

And someone said to me the other day, I got one of your cards. I was like, oh, that's great. And they said, I ugly cried when I got it. And that's when you know you've got it.

Yeah, absolutely. And so uh tell us how um folks interact with your with your product. Um so first of all, let's make sure that we have the um website correctly for everyone who's listening. Group together.

Group together, group together.com, yes. Yeah, group together.com.

Uh spelt exactly as you would imagine, group of people together. Grouptogether.com. And uh you can use it anywhere in the world for the group card.

If you want to chip in money, it works it all across the US and Australia. Is it typically an individual signs up or someone at a company? And then does it spread from one user to like the company starts using it? Yeah, so it's it's a similar story that you've heard from things like Loom or Atlassian, where someone discovers us, and that person literally just logs on.

Like they use their Google login. It's not an onboarding, it's not a whole B2B SaaS integration. You literally go to grouptogether.com, you press start, and it walks you through a setup where you choose the card template like you would if you went into a store and chose the perfect card.

And then you can customize it and share a link with anyone anywhere. So you can put it in your Slack channel, you can use our platform to enter emails, and then we'll do the reminding for you, which is great, and the tracking and who's opened and all that sort of stuff. Um, and then each person clicks to add a message to the card. They can upload a photo or or choose a GIF, and uh, and then that all gets magically compiled onto this group card.

If you'd if you'd ask them to chip in a bit, they can optionally chip in. No one else can see how much you've chipped in except for that organizer. Then that's all pulled and it can be sent digitally or printed out to give to the recipient. And when the recipient receives it, there's another flow.

There's like a magical digital opening. It's a bit like a uh, you know, a really special luxe box. The envelope has their name on it uh and it's embossed, so it feels special. There's a ribbon on the shiny box.

Uh, the card opens magically, and then you can start to look at all your messages and the cute gifts. And um, we have something called an any card, which is our gift card, which you can swap for hundreds of leading gift cards, you know, Amazon and Walmart and Sephora and wherever you want to, wherever you want to use it. So the the recipients got something which is something they really want, not what you wanted to give them. Um, and also the sentimental part, the the personal part, the feeling of being valued.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, it this seems much closer to sort of a PLG and ready-to-go uh sort of self-serve product than a lot of companies are really achieving nowadays. Um, it do you have any kinds of uh team plans or company plans, or is it mostly sort of on the individual level and people work out on their own the team dynamics? Yeah.

So it's a it's a classic product-led growth product. Um and it is quite as simple as Sally at Deloitte's discovers us. She uses us more, she then trades up, moves up into a more in into a more scaled product. So at the moment, we haven't gone as far as an integration into your HR system.

Uh we we may well, um, that wouldn't be difficult, we can do that. But at the moment, we're finding that uh, you know, over a million people a year are transacting um on the platform. We can it can scale up and down as you want. And and and the feedback that we're getting is uh another subscription.

No, just let me buy what I need, let me just pay as I go. Um so that that's the way it's working at the moment. Right. And so this is really cool going to the website, everyone, uh grouptogether.

com. It it really looks easy as you're sort of uh hovering over the options, and you know, you've got the types of birthdays split out and everything. It kind of reminds me of the websites that make it super easy to buy flowers. It kind of is reminiscent of that to me.

Um, you might hear that a family member has passed away or someone's graduated, and you're like, oh, well, let me I don't have time to fly out uh to that location in the next two days, but I can send something and let them know that I'm thinking about them and they can have physical flowers appear at their doors, like that kind of stuff. So with this, you know, all kinds of things happen to coworkers and in the workplace. And we talk to these people every day. We're on Zoom calls with them, we care about people, we hear each other's stories, and it is nice to be able to add just sort of that more real dimension to things.

And I think it's people find it hard to find the right words, especially with sympathy. Um, but in many cases, oh, you know, you're a legend, right? It's flippant, it just feels a bit contrived. Do you really mean it, as opposed to when someone takes a little bit longer and we give them a hand with AI, and all of a sudden somebody's received something which feels much more deeply thoughtful and uh can be kept as a keepseg.

And so whereas just getting a whole lot text messages saying, oh, you know, feel feel better quick, you know, get well soon, um, you have something that that you can hold on to and you can reread and it has that sentimentality. Yeah, there's so many possible journeys that I can imagine as a user of the product, of how I might get introduced to the product, how I might use it one time and then be prompted to level up for some reason. How important to you is UX, you know, the stewarding the user experience and thinking about things from that perspective?

Yeah. I might even uh answer that in a different way because I know that you're particularly interested in product-led growth. So I think it's about what's what's interesting here is that uh is is that is the growth and the inherent virality of the product. So rather than acquiring every customer and paying for every customer um in a consumer product, you're you're saying, okay, look, I'm gonna buy this card, you know, sort of for five bucks, and I'm gonna share it with 20 people in my office.

And those 20 people now have had an ex actually had an experience, not just heard about your brand. They've had an experience of it. Um, it should be fun. Um, you want to like doing it, it shouldn't be another chore in your work day.

It should be, oh, that's so cute. I just used a really cute gift, and that AI was fun. And oh, there's that fluffy dog who, when you're instead of a page loader saying, you know, please wait, there's a there's a cute fluffy sheep dog that's bouncing between the pages to give you good vibe. Um we're we're about gifts and we're about appreciation and we're about giving joy.

And so that is really woven deeply through the product so that when one person shares with 20, they all have good vibes. And they also have us in their inbox to say, oh, what was that thing Ali used? What was that thing? Let me just search it in my inbox.

Oh, yeah, I found what she used for Thomas. That was great. I'll use that. And that's the that's the product-led growth piece, and the UX is absolutely fundamental to that.

Um one of the things that I'm doing that I do every time I come to the US from Australia is, and I've been doing this for 10 years now, and I always speak to customers one-on-one, uh, in groups of 90 sometimes in a webinar, and I still have a Q ⁇ A. But like literally just before our call this morning, I spoke to a woman who works in a in a bank, I won't say, which she said there are about 60,000 employees. Um, and she talked about the fact that she could sometimes see somebody in her office opening the card that she had just sent digitally, and she could see on their face the feeling, the reaction to it.

Um, and then subsequently she would receive a thank you note as part of our platform. So, in terms of product-led growth, um, all of those things, the feedback we're getting from customers there, the the fact that we're using a product like Hotjar where you can actually watch video recordings of how people go through the process and where they get stuck and where they're jagging across the product and going backwards and forwards and pressing the back button, and I'm like covering my eyes in despair.

Um, you know, removing that friction to reduce abandoned cart, adding more joy uh and fun is is uh to me is the pinnacle or or the or the ugly cry uh of the recipient. Those are the things that uh that make that viral loop go faster and smoother and better rather than the classic consumer model of acquiring one customer at a time or the B2B of going through a 12-month how do I get into the director of HR and uh and convert them and go through compliance? Right. It's terrific.

I mean, it does something there like the human experience really is core to all of this, the way you guys look at it. Um and then do you do you all curious, do you um actively really pay attention to the metrics and you know how people are using it? Is that like a nut. Yes.

Like a nut. Like pay attention to the metrics. Yes. And sometimes they're not as accurate as we would like.

So there's something uh in in this kind of uh viral loop marketing they use in the apps called co um uh not colour, I've just lost the word. It's called um virality coefficient. And so in an ideal state, every time you converted one customer, they would bring and convert another customer, and then you would double and double and double and double like a crazy virus. Um it's very hard to measure that if you're not an app.

Uh we try and measure it and we do. It's not perfect, but there are there are a thousand metrics like that which can help you uh see how much joy people are getting from your product, how much they're spreading it. I mean, there's also a referral code if you want to do that. Um but yes, I look at uh metrics and and I I actually don't do the metrics that I do not look at are vanity metrics.

I don't care how many likes I get on a post. Don't care. That's actually very advanced to when when companies realize, like, yeah, these metrics might kind of feel good to my ego, but that that's actually not what drives things. And what do you do?

Do you get an opportunity to, or to what extent does your company uh make that a culture, caring about these things? And the reason I ask is some companies I've seen they find ways to make the metrics or the stories that the metrics are telling um also a little bit more physical and real, you know, in and visual, and you know, sort of it's it affects the language. Do you do you how far do you go into that kind of perspective? Um well, you'll be the judge of of the relative how far.

Um we do a few things around that. First of all, we're a very lean team. So we don't have the 10,000-person employee structure that makes it remote. So we we we're we're super tight.

And to give you a sense of that, there's apart from our our uh software engineering team, which is which is actually the biggest component, our management team is a handful. And then we have university students who are doing customer service rather than bots. Um, and we have a Slack channel where if there's a fantastic um G2 review or some sort of you know uh review, I share that. If it's not so good or our metrics are going down, uh I have a panic attack in the night and in the morning uh share a new way to look at that more constructively.

Um we have a good vibes channel, group together good vibes channel where we s where we share really nice things, literally like you know, somebody's thank you card where where they've shown uh that they've been brought to tears, that they've been really charmed, that they say things like, um, I I didn't know that I would be so emotional. You know, we hear that that sort of thing all the time. So those sorts of things we're sharing with our team, even uh the way that we want people to our customer service to respond to people, because language when it's in verbal form sometimes doesn't come across the same way as when you're seeing somebody's face.

And so, you know, just of this morning, I said, look, I can see that somebody was was not happy with the response that one of us gave, and they used this language. And I personally, I would have thought that was really nice what you said, but didn't it didn't come across quite right. So, what can we do to have some sort of sign-off so that it gives a nuance of this is coming from a good place? So there's lots of those sorts of things that make it uh human and tangible that we can change.

You guys have been around for 11 years. You've gone through COVID, and that kind of created an impact on the world as you opened up with that that intersects with what you offer. And then we've had the AI revolution of the past three years. That last part has that changed anything from what you can see about, you know, what you the value you guys offer and the way people see it.

And yeah. So we thought in in COVID we were dead. We thought no parties, no presence. Um, and it was the reverse as I described.

And then with the AI revolution, you know, I'm constantly hearing, I'm sure you are, oh, I could spin that up in two days, right? I roll, right? Yeah, we also spin things up quicker, but then it has problems. And luckily we have a big, you know, dev team and they can look after it and they're speculing things properly.

Um, but yes, you can probably do some of the card part that we do at a at a functional level. You could do that quickly, but people want uh people really care. You know, like I spoke to somebody this morning who said, I said, Oh, would you want this to be automated and we'll just generate a card for you and you can send the link? And she said, No, I want to choose every single one because that's I want to choose the one that really might be one of my friends likes Beyoncé, so I wanted to choose a blah, blah, blah, right?

It it comes that the customer wants that control and that feeling of choice and of and of personalization. Um, and then there's another piece which is more uh which is more functional, which is the the compliance piece. You know, we we collect, we're collecting money. Um, tens of millions of dollars are you know uh are going through our platform all the time of people collecting money.

You you want to make sure that this is you're dealing with a reputable company who's who's got all of the measures in place that makes your money as safe as possible. Yeah, I mean, I would like to double down on that for the listeners. You know, going to the website, it feels like an intentional website. It's clearly not something that was spun up in a day.

Um and you you can tell, and as you know, me coming from the product design side, I can. tell when I look at these things when I interact with them. And it's awesome that a lot of those products can get spun up. It gets democratized to some degree, but it's hard to trust it.

It's like, okay, am I going to enter my enter my credit card information? Where is it exactly going? Are they storing it properly? And there's just a certain amount of intentionality that I desire with a product that I'm using.

And um so yeah, I I plan to check this out to be totally frank with you. So um uh everyone we've been speaking with Ali Lynn's of Group Together check out group together. Can I just offer one more thing? Sorry.

Sorry I shouldn't have interrupted you then because that would have been great for you to say um I'd love anyone who wants to what I've been doing quite a lot while I've been in the US is um is sort of demos um with groups of executive assistants or what you know whoever is relevant in your business whether it's HR and you know somebody gets 30 people together or 100 people together or however big the the team is to have a whip through um and see how the products work. Learn for example how to schedule schedule um gift cards to be a lot of things.

You're allowed to say schedule yeah so um you know to to have a demo and then have the reassurance oh this fits us. This this will work for us. And I'm I'm really happy to to do that. They can either get in touch with me through the little chat icon on grouptogether.

com or email me on hello at grouptogether.com. It's really advantageous if you're a founder and you've got um you've got folks working with you and working for you it's advantageous to have a place that feels like a pleasant and real place with real people and having just certain certain cultural elements that you just help glue things together. You're you're just there's our bottom line factors to this people are less likely to churn and you know people put in effort to places that they care about.

So it's worth thinking about it's not terribly obvious that cards would be important but that kind of stuff matters. People keep them in a box under their bed forever. That's right. That's right.

Everyone check it out grouptogether.com Allie thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you very much.