We’ll be bold if you’ll be. We’re talkin’ to you, HR Technology Conference attendees…
This week, we’re prepping for HR Tech. Bill Kutik, the uber-analyst, has selected Rypple as a “cool new technology” for the show. Sweet! We get to demonstrate Rypple in front of a large audience.
But, we feel a bit strange about it. You see…. the magic demo can be fraught with danger, the place where your moral compass as a vendor can get warped. Demos and other heavy forms of “push” marketing are optimized to convince buyers why their solution “could be” useful.
That’s not why we started Rypple. We wanted to be bold and build a service that real people want to use and actually find useful. So, we’ve created a consumer oriented product for people who happen to work in the “enterprise”. This reduces training costs for our clients and means that our primary marketing is user recommendations.
It’s all part of a bold business model, called “Freemium“: free for many, subscription for some. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net, described Freemium’s benefits best:
[Freemium means]…if the product doesn’t solve [the actual users'] problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. … This also means your product has to rock… If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay.
This approach has worked well. CEOs, trainers, project leaders, doctors, professors, and executives have found that Rypple delivers real results for them, their teams, and their companies. Amazing evangelists, like John Foster, the Chief Talent Officer at IDEO, are collaborating with other users to help us make Rypple rock even more. And, of course, free users are converting to pay users.
Next week, we’ll be spending time with lots of HR professionals at HR Tech. These are great, hard-working people typically responsible for tens of thousands of employees and many complex systems. They are used to the dog-and-pony-shows of buying and deploying [gulp] Enterprise Software for others. It can be painful and we sympathize… Heck, we’ve been there!
That’s why we’ve decided to demo to these pros at HR Tech as users, not buyers.
After all, HR pros want to find out what teammates, employees and mentors really think – just like everyone else! They also want regular, helpful feedback so they can learn and improve. By demo-ing to them as users they’ll see that the can try Rypple for themselves or with their teams – for free and with almost no set-up. We’ve made it simple to experience Rypple with minimal effort and red tape. The service we’ll demo is the exact service you can use, for free, today. No vaporware!
Being bold doesn’t mean being naive. We know what the purchasing and change cycle are like in large organizations. But, based on our experience, we believe it’s better for everyone if there are internal champions who have experienced real benefits from Rypple before the buying process starts. That’s what freemium does.
So, HR-tech-ers…. will you be bold and “turn the future into the past“? Will you be bold and discover useful insights you would not have otherwise learned, so you can advance your own career and make your organization more productive?
We hope so.
See you at Cool New Technologies at HR Tech!
*****
ps: We’re glad we’re not the only ones who think this way!
Tags: Bill Kutik, business development, Enterprise Software, Freemium, HR, HR Tech, ideo, John Foster, professional development, Workplace
Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.
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