The SaaS Operator Podcast

In this episode of The Venture-Scale SaaS Operator, Andrew Horn talks about Tribute, a media platform that makes it easy to create and share personalized video montages for any occasion. He shares the challenges and opportunities of transitioning from a B2C startup to a SaaS business, the importance of building a strong product-led growth strategy, and how he uses rituals to create a positive and productive company culture.


Tune in to learn more about:
~ How to measure the impact of employee recognition programs
~ How to build a culture of appreciation and gratitude in the workplace
~ How to use technology to create more meaningful employee experiences


Timestamps:
  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (00:30) - Problem Tribute solves for its customers
  • (03:03) - Transitioning from a B2C startup to a SaaS business
  • (05:03) - Fine-Tuning Messaging for Enterprise Clients
  • (08:05) - Importance of building a strong product-led growth strategy
  • (10:19) - Using rituals to create a positive and productive company culture
  • (11:19) - Specific rituals implemented at Tribute
  • (14:25) - Advice for new managers on building team rituals and showing appreciation
  • (24:41) - The Power of Permission
  • (25:49) - Andrew's vision for Tribute as the Hallmark of the digital age
  • (28:35) - Creating a Code for Listeners
  • (29:12) - Outro


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Follow Andrew Horn
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhorn
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsandrewhorn



Mentioned In The Episode
Tribute.co - A Video Montage Maker for Special Occassions
Coupon Code: “Operator”
ReactSquad.io - React.js Agency for Startups


EarlyNode
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/earlynode
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On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earlynode


Nikolas Chapoupis
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikolas_chap
On LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/nikolas-chapoupis

Creators & Guests

Host
Nikolas Chapoupis
Founder of EarlyNode & ReactSquad.io (React Agency for SaaS Startups)

What is The SaaS Operator Podcast?

Get real stories about the birth and growth of SaaS Startups with our Host Nikolas Chapoupis (CEO @EarlyNode). Each episode gets into the trenches alongside those who were *actually* there when it happened. To reveal the full story of what's working in SaaS right now, from hiring to fundraising, marketing, and product strategy.

Brought to you by EarlyNode.com

Nikolas: You are listening to the Venture-Scale SaaS Operator, the podcast where we interview founders who are actually in the trenches. We talk about the transparent journey of how they built their SaaS companies, how they grow them, and what they would do differently if they would do it all over.

Nikolas: Hey, folks. With us today, Andrew Horn, founder of tribute.co, happy to have you.

Andrew: Happy to be here. Thanks so much, Nikolas.

Nikolas: Amazing. Let's dive right in. What problem does tribute solve for its customers?

Andrew: You know, the problem is very clear and the easiest way to highlight that is to tell a quick story about how tribute started, which was my 27th birthday. My partner at the time decided that she was going to give me a very special gift, but she didn't tell me anything about it. So she reached out to 20 of my closest friends and family members, and she asked each of those people to submit a one-minute video telling me why they love me. When I got to my house on that night, she sat me in the back of the room. She caught a couple of my friends to come over. I had no idea what was happening.

She hit play on this projection screen. And one by one, I see my dad telling me how much he loves me. And I see my mom who is telling me how grateful she is to me for starting her business for her.

My friend, Matt, comes up on the screen and tells me that I'm his best friend for the first time. And it was at that moment that I just started to cry. I was so overwhelmed with joy and connection to my community. And that carried on for the next 20 minutes.

And so this experience concluded. I hugged all my friends. I kissed my girlfriend. And I looked at her and I said, how did you do this?

This is the best gift I've ever received in my entire life. And she said, well, it sucked. And I was like, what do you mean? Well, I had to email these people hundreds of times to get them to actually get their videos in. I was collecting files through Dropbox and Drive and Text Message. And last but not least, I had to edit everything together in iMovie. And so immediately I walked into the other room. And within a couple of minutes, I had said, well, this is a tribute video. And I realized, well, everyone on the planet deserves to receive this type of outpouring of love and appreciation while they're still here.

Most people don't hear something like this until they're in a box underground at their funeral. And I thought, how crazy is that? And so we took this disjointed process of inviting friends, accepting videos and editing them together into one seamless process. And what started as this little mission to help people to share appreciation and gratitude has turned into this global movement. We've given more than 6 million videos delivered over the past eight years and all sorts of exciting partnerships, as people like 1-800 flowers, Bed Bath and Beyond, companies and organizations that are taking a stand for really telling the people in our lives what they mean to us.

Nikolas: That's amazing. I mean, you started in 2014, so close to or a bit more than nine years, I think, just some stats for the audience. So you have roughly 50 employees raised more than 4.3 million in funding. And it's mainly a D2C or B2C product. But this is basically a B2B podcast. I would love to dig into how you transitioned that and even offering things for companies and for organizations.

Because I think you have an amazing story there to share as well. So I would love to hear from you how did you transition from a pure B2C model to basically helping companies as well.

Andrew: Yeah, so I think that for us, what happened is that I experienced it as a consumer, right? Like this, okay, I want a one-off gift for a birthday, for a wedding, for a graduation. That was our bread and butter and where we started. And then we started to see over those first couple of years is that a lot of organizations were coming to Tribute and using it for internal purposes like employee recognition, testimonial collection, because we had just built a really streamlined video ingestion and collection pipeline. And so it was really for us, rather than saying it was something that we intentionally went out to go and do, we just saw that we had enterprise clients who were already using our product. And then we started to look at, well, if these people are already looking at it, what are best practices that exist within these verticals of employee recognition?

You've got your anniversary milestone occasions. They're such an imperative these days to appreciate and engage employees, to retain them, to build healthy culture. And a lot of people don't know this, but we'll ultimately spend about a third of our life at work with our colleagues.

Realistically, you'll spend more time with your coworkers than you probably will with your parents once you become an adult. And so the importance of having really strong relationships there can really dictate how you feel at your company. And so what we started to do was just to take our consumer platform and really, first, just from a product marketing perspective, really fine tune our messaging for the very specific problems of HR departments, of people officers, because it's different than a girlfriend or a boyfriend who wants to get someone a birthday tribute.

They've got actual KPIs and metrics they need to measure against to invest any sort of dollars here. And so we really started to tweak it just from a product marketing perspective so that we didn't even alter the core product. We just altered our positioning so that it was more suited for those people within the enterprise. And as we started to do that, we started to see even more of an uptick of enterprise clients. And now one of the things that we're most excited about is that we're actually going to be launching an enterprise product, which is fine tuned for that use case, just because we have so many Fortune 500s, large organizations that are doing this, ultimately our mission is all about helping people to share their appreciation and gratitude. And one of the most important places that we can do that is in the workplace, because like I said, it's where we spend so much of our life there.

And those people deserve to feel appreciated. And there's a financial imperative to do so. So we just want to make it easy. And I think what's what's nice for us is that there's a lot of best practices. There are people that are doing employee recognition really well. But there are very few people who are nailing these kind of group experience, like large gifts on these milestone anniversaries and occasions. And so we're really excited to go deeper into the enterprise.

Nikolas: Got it. And then what year was that that you basically felt the pull from the business or the enterprise market?

Andrew: Within the first two years, we were really just getting the product out, so it was fine tuned. And then in years three and four, by year four, we had a full-scale partnership with Bed Bath and Beyond who had integrated us into their platforms so that people that were using their registry products could also add a tribute as a virtual guest book for their registrants. So, you look at something like that, even 1-800-Flowers right now, they're all about thoughtfulness. They think that gifting is just a real way to be thoughtful and mindful of our relationships. And so what they do is they, for all their passport members, these are like their VIPs, their Amazon Prime for 1-800-Flowers, the largest flower company in the United States. Now they can add a tribute for free. And so it's just a way for them to differentiate their offering from the plethora of other flower companies that are there. But it's, hey, you're going to get someone a gift. Why not also share some meaningful messages with them?

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Nikolas: And then for, I think most people listening are purely from the B2B space. And you just said that you basically built a version of the product for the B2B segment. What learnings were you able to take from having this deep consumer experience, basically, into building the B2B product? Were there specific things, like specific nuances in the way you built it, which you wouldn't have been able to do without having the previous consumer experience?

Andrew: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that when you look at SaaS products, again, whether it's project management, whether it's employee recognition, whether it's task management, you can have brilliant software, but it's only as good as people's ability and capacity to actually use it consistently. It's like, how often do we implement new systems that people just don't take to? They don't understand.

They don't end up using them. And so for us, so much of our growth as a consumer company has come through the virality and the product itself. It's that, so about 80% of our new customers come because they have been invited to participate in a tribute.

Right? And so that's pretty rare for a consumer company like ours. So what we looked at there is the vast majority of our energy as a team is not spent on email marketing or search where we do bring in some new traffic, but the vast majority of our effort is in product-led growth, is looking at who are the people that are using our product, how can we make it easier for the invites that they are sending out to convert at a higher ratio?

How can we take those people who are being invited to participate to record a video to then turn them into customers themselves? So I think all those usability focus about how to make it as simple and easy as possible has really parlayed to success in the enterprise as well, because if something's not easy and you're introducing a new system, a lot of times it's out of sight, it's out of mind. And especially in this vertical that we're getting into now of employee recognition, if people don't do it consistently, it doesn't work. There's a great saying that, “You are not what you do. You are what you do consistently.”

And so when it comes to building culture, the way that we think about that at Tribute is all about rituals. Rituals are the things we do consistently with intention. And so the way that we really look at this with our partners is not just giving them a product, but actually helping them to be thoughtful about what are these milestone occasions that come up in your company. So let's say your employee's one, three, five-year anniversaries. Let's say that you have an employee who's retiring. Let's say that you have an employee who's joining the team and you want to quickly get them to know everyone else who's on the team. It's that if we can just set up rituals around these times, every time this happens, that person gets a Tribute from the team sharing their appreciation.

Like now you're building real consistently. People understand how to communicate at the office and you're really starting to help our companies not only to have a technology, but to really improve their culture. And I think that they say culture eats strategy for lunch any day of the week.

Nikolas: Yeah. What are specific rituals that you use in your own company?

Andrew: Yeah. Well, so today is Wednesday. And so every Wednesday, we have a connection prompt for our team. And I'm really the torch bearer of our culture here on the team. And so I set up and I'm thoughtful about a lot of this.

I consult a lot of companies on this as well. And so Wednesday, 9am this morning, I sent out a prompt to our entire team. And what I'll do is I just have a whole list of great questions. And this is about, you know, what are you reading right now? What's the last great show you watch?

What's the last great movie? What are your plans for the summer? What's the next place that you're going on your travel list?

Who's your most important mentor? And we'll put that in there. And it's just an opportunity for us as a team to take a pause and to talk about something meaningful and get to know each other because we're a completely distributed team. And so it's really cool to see people who are doing there. And so that's something that every Wednesday, we know that we're going to talk about some things that are there and nothing is forced. It's just optional, but people take advantage of it.

They do it. On Friday, we'll have our weekly wins at 1pm. And that means that we'll come in and we'll talk about one win from our work week and one win from our personal life. So everyone just comes in and we finish the week talking about basically something that went right that week. And that's how we go off into the weekend.

Nikolas: Is that asynchronously or do you do that in... Is it asynchronously in written form and slack? Or do you do that in a call setting?

Andrew: We will do it as a 30-minute call. And for people who don't make it, they'll usually drop in their notes. Like if someone can't make it for something like that, they'll just drop in their notes. So we're still getting that check in. But usually you'll have a healthy dose of people who come in for those calls. And we're really strict about... We don't have work conversations on those calls.

It's like if someone says, oh, this thing is going, and they start getting into strategy, we're like, not the place for it. Have another call somewhere else. And so we'll do that. And then on Monday, when we have all of our all hands, our stand-ups, we start each of our meetings with gratitude. So we start the meetings just by saying, what's something in your life you're grateful for. And so that's how we start our meeting.

We take five, 10 minutes to do that. And this is just an example of things that we do consistently that people can count on. At the end of every month, we have an employee recognition tool that we're here. Everyone on the team gets 200 points to allocate out. And so it's again, it's everyone is asked to allocate those 200 points, which can be retrieved for employee gifts, for money. And it's just our way of supporting people, actually sharing appreciation at the end of every single month. And so that's just an example of simple rituals.

And those are four that I think any team could implement pretty easily to cultivate more connection amongst their employees, better communication. And it's just really simple. That's an hour of our week. But the value of that hour for our team feeling connected on a human level does wonders for how we actually collaborate, how we want to show up for each other, and how much we enjoy working at the company.

Nikolas: How would you actually get that going? Because I like basically being transparent here. I had a couple of things that I tried with my company, and sometimes it just didn't catch on meaning like we did it.

We won amazing. Week two, and then especially for like asynchronous things like then from like 15 people, seven replied and so on. And it feels like I always have the thought, okay, if it doesn't catch on, it doesn't make sense of me as like the CEO like brute, brute force it into being the ritual. So is it just like a thing of like trial and error or like what fits a team? Or how do you actually get a rule like such a routine started because like for me personally as a CEO, like the hardest thing to do.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think that with these types of rituals, there are some things that as a CEO, there's an element of the benevolent dictator aspect to things, which is that in some aspects, I think it's good to get people out of their comfort zone and to make a judgment call of, I believe this will be better for the team in the long run and to take a stand for this behavior and to consistently show up for it. But I also will say that before we get to that place of making a stand and articulating what we think is best for the team and will ultimately end up serving them, the best thing to do is just to get buy in from the team, which is, hey, it's like one of the things that I'd love to do to start building culture, helping us to connect with one another is to build these types of rituals.

Here are a couple that I have thought about and I'm going to let people vote on these anonymously to see which ones you're interested in or which ones you don't like. So now what happens is you can get honest feedback from your team, they feel no pressure where they can't speak honestly and you can see. So Nikolas, for example, how many people are on your team currently?

Nikolas: Including some part timers, I think 15 or 16.

Andrew: Yeah, so 15 or 16, it's a great number. And so with 15 or 16 people, so you can send this out to them, but what you also get to say to them is what have you done at other companies that you've really enjoyed from a culture perspective? And so having that conversation ahead of time, where I think that again, there's like a, when you're below 20, everyone tends to know one another. Like you can have these types of conversations when you're there. There's collection moments that happen after 20, after 40, especially at 40 and 50, they say.

Like that's when you no longer know people's names and the company and it becomes a different game for sure. But at 20, just to have those kind of conversations where this Friday, I would say, do you slack or teams or something like that for internal communication?

Nikolas: We do all slack basically.

Andrew: Great, so if it's all in slack, then you have your channel with the team and you say it's like, hey, thinking about culture activities, what are some of the things that you've done at other companies that you really enjoy? And now you're having a conversation and you're pulling things from the team, seeing what they feel engaged, they're creating it, it's not just top down. One thing that you can do there and certainly voting on them when you get it going.

But I also think that again, it's important that it's modeled at the top first. And especially when it comes to appreciation, there's a lot of research that shows that people at the top are oftentimes the least likely to share their appreciation because for some reason they think that it makes them seem weak, or it means that people will ask for more money if they know that they're really appreciated when neither of those things have been true. People see appreciative leaders as much more likely to be successful. The number one reason that people leave their jobs, this is an ARP study is that they don't feel appreciated. But when we commit to these types of things of sharing appreciation, whatever these are, it's really important that the team sees the leadership doing it consistently. And that's one of the most important things I always talk about.

Nikolas: How would you advise a new manager to do that? Because I had yesterday with the leader of the company who's fairly new from IC to manager, basically. How would you advise someone, even let that be someone raised their pre-seed now, or some they're not two people in a garage, but they're like 10 people working remotely or someone being freshly appointed to a leadership position. What do you think is important for them to maybe even in their team get routines going? And also to, I would want to say to have the guts, but I'm not sure if that's all, but basically to feel comfortable in showing appreciation, showing the empathy part, because for me, but that's maybe a German thing, it felt kind of weird and acted in the beginning to do those routines. Because if you read it in like a management book and you try it, it just had a weird feeling. I had to get comfortable in doing that. So what would your advice for like a new leader to get going in this direction?

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, what I would say there again is that just because we are experiencing discomfort in the action does not negate the value of the action itself. And so what I would encourage anyone who's having challenge or discomfort or uncertainty around sharing appreciation is just to ask yourself, has a colleague, manager or leader at your company ever shared appreciation for your work, complimented you on something you're doing and your reaction has been, no thank you. I haven't had that experience, right? It's that the experience of someone being specific about something that we've done, telling us that they appreciate it.

And I can give you a couple of tidbits about how to share appreciation effectively. It's almost universally going to be welcomed in, right? It's like foundational to meaningful human connection and work and our personal lives. And so what I would say is that for the people who are feeling uncomfortable around it is, I would just ritualize the action of it. If you are trying to set up a new behavior for yourself as a manager, as a leader, what you want to do is ritualize it and think about a habit.

A habit's like a behavior that we do consistently. And so similarly, what are the touch points where I can share appreciation? It's if I have a weekly standup with someone on my team, it's, can I make a mental note? When I start this call, can I acknowledge something they did well from the week before, right? If I can just, before I get onto a call, I have a note to myself, what's one thing they did well last week, right?

And if you took one minute at the beginning of those calls with your direct reports to acknowledge something they did well from the week before, great. Now you're getting into the habit of doing it. And the more that you actually start to do it, you open that channel, you're going to be able to do that more frequently and easily in the moment. When someone says something smart in a meeting and you're just like, hey, that was a really great idea. Like, thanks for contributing that. But the same thing here is that to build the habit of it. So what is the touch point where you consistently do that?

I would say the same thing. So now you've got your weekly standups where you're starting that meeting with some appreciation or ending the meeting with appreciation. Then you've got the end of the month. At the end of the month, can we build a habit or a ritual where I'm actively reaching out? What's the best thing that you contributed this past month? What do I appreciate?

How did I see you grow? And again, it's, Stephen Covey has another great one. He says, “Great leaders don't prioritize their schedule. They schedule their priorities.” They don't prioritize their schedule. They don't wake up in the morning and go there. They wake up in the morning and they say, what is the most important thing I want to get done today?

And they put it into the schedule. And so for those leaders who are trying to really practice relational leadership, they're going to have those touch points built in so they know that they're doing that. So that's something I would put in there. And another thing that you can think about for really training people to give appreciation more effectively is there's a great book. It is one of the seminal books on influential communication, compelling communications called Influence by Robert Cialdini. And one of the things, have you read it?

Nikolas: I have, but I just know that I need to reread it. It's a couple of years ago that I read it.

Andrew: Yeah. So he actually commented. I wrote, I referenced him. It was really nice. I referenced him in a post that we wrote about on LinkedIn about effective appreciation. And he reposted it and he said, I really like this frame. And so because Cialdini has this line and it says, “It is not our statement of appreciation that impacts the recipient. It is our explanation of it.”

So it is not a thank you that impacts somebody. It's, thank you for doing this. It's, thank you for helping me with this. Because if we just say thank you, or I love you in our personal lives, it's a nice thing.

Great. It's a good thing to say I love you to say thank you. What helps the recipient to feel it is when we explain why we're saying it. When I say, hey, Nikolas, thank you so much for helping me out with our, you know, monthly standup reports. It's like I was really, really busy and meant a lot that you stepped up and helped me out with that. Because now what you see is that I mean what I'm saying. If I just say, hey, thanks for doing that.

Sure. But when we explain our appreciation, it's going to help the recipient to feel it more deeply. And this is truly just as relevant for a direct report as a manager at work or for our husband or wife, whoever that might be at home.

Right. It's like when we explain our appreciation, we really do make it a lot easier. And on top of that, you know, one of the things that we can do as managers is I call it the power of permission. And it's, we need leaders to take a stand for this type of appreciation at work. Or people won't do it because we need to show and model and create a context where people feel safe to share their appreciation.

And that just means if it's someone's birthday, it's can a leader go in and say, it's like, hey, it's Nikolas's birthday. Like, tell him one of your favorite things about him or like something that you're grateful for him on the team. You know, it's like we create the context and great leaders are also focused not just on the content of what we're saying, but the context of how people are talking to each other. And when we can set that context for appreciation, it's much easier for the whole team to come in and great leaders do that. They give people permission to share appreciation. They model that and they show people that as a company, this is something that we really want to do.

Nikolas: I mean, that's amazing advice. And then just as a last point, because we’re coming close to the time we have, what's the big vision for Tribute for you?

Andrew: Yeah, the big vision for us has actually been the same since day one. When you look at Hallmark, which in America, you know, it's an international brand. So Hallmark is the seminal greeting card brand. And now they're a very large TV network as well. But they got their start in greeting cards.

And that's what they were really known for. And, you know, when you think about Hallmark and when it was created as a brand, it was 1910. And at the time you had pens, you had pencils, you had pieces of paper. So someone could have just written a birthday note or a Valentine's card on a piece of paper and given it to somebody. But for some reason, something about Hallmark and what they did is they created the context that made it easier for people to share meaningful messages with the people they cared about. And that's what the greeting card was. It was the context for meaningful messages.

And they were the leader for 100 years in doing that. And now that our main messages and our main medium of communication has shifted from pen and paper to the digital realm, to typing, to video, to audio, we believe there's an opportunity for a new player to create the context for meaningful communication in the digital age. And right now we believe that we are that company, you know, with millions of users around the globe who is helping people to share meaningful messages in digital context. And so, you know, we just launched our one to one greeting, virtual greeting card service Tribute Greetings. We have our Group Tribute service. You know, we're going to be launching our employee appreciation product later this year. And we launched our marketplace so people can now add full suite of gifts to their Tribute videos. But the ultimate dream is really to be Hallmark of the digital age, just to be that brand that when they see that logo pop up, you know, they know that this is the place where they're going to share some meaningful messages with the people that they care about. And to do that for, you know, more than a billion people to receive appreciation, gratitude, love from the people that they care about, whether that's in a personal life, at work. And that's the journey that we're on.

Nikolas: I think that's an amazing vision and a great point to wrap up. Andrew, thanks a ton for coming on.

Andrew: Absolutely, Nikolas. And what I'm going to do is create a code for your listeners. So anyone who would like to create a Tribute, whether it's at work, whether it's for, you know, a friend of yours, whether it's for a parent who's getting older, you're going to be able to use the code.

What would be a good code for the podcast guests? You tell me.

Nikolas: Let's say Operators.

Andrew: Operators. Okay. The code will be Operators. It's good for $29 off. So go ahead and use that before the end of the year and you'll be good to go. So the code will be Operators and you'll get a free DIY.

Nikolas: Thanks a ton, man.

Andrew: Thanks so much, Nikolas.

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