Episode 15 – Oct 30 – Nov 3 – It’s all about Women (Shoppers, Entrepreneurs, PR)

(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
14 , 13 , 12 , 11 , 10 , 9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Episode 15 – Oct 30 – Nov 3 – It’s all about Women (Shoppers, Entrepreneurs, PR)

Beth and I had decided to hire a PR agency and do a press tour for this launch. While Riya 1.0 had been done almost entirely through the blogs, we knew Riya 2.0 couldn’t just be. Our logic went something like this…

Marketing to Women
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Riya 2.0 would help most in hard to describe items for which searching inside photos was most important. Objects that had this property tended to be soft goods like clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes, home and garden, etc. Looking at Hitwise we realized that while there were $15-$30B worth of these items sold on the Web, almost 65% of the buyers for these items were women.

We knew we need to reach more women. We would talk to the fashion bloggers who were had the largest audience online, but in addition, I wanted to talk to the traditional fashion magazines like Instyle, People, Lucky, Jane, etc. Millions of women each day read their articles. The reporters at these magazines were not reading Techcrunch or my blog and had never heard of Riya.

Porter Novelli
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Laura’s team at Porter Novelli were perfect for this. They knew the technology reporters and they had folks who had pitched these consumer women’s magazines before. Her team was in Austin, but as a result was far cheaper than most S.F. or NY agencies.

They started setting up meetings almost 1 month in advance. After about 3 weeks things looked bleak, we had very few meetings. I called Lisa Peterson and Laura Beck and said, “What the frack is going on.” Laura said, “Don’t worry we will get there.” Lisa seemed a little scared of me. Nonetheless she took the feedback and took action.

In the end, Lisa Peterson, Cindy Young, and Lesley Pitts (who all work for Laura) just knocked the ball out of the park. I have worked with many PR agencies in my career (actually almost 7 different ones) and PN Austin is the best … and cost effective to boot. They don’t try and tell you that they know your business better than you. They just make the meetings happen.

Lisa Peterson impressed me the most. She quarterbacked the whole tour, got us even more meetings while driving in the car to our existing meetings, and made sure we were answering follow up questions. Lisa is a smart and determined person who cold called her way into her first internship in NYC after college. Like many she followed her dream of working in NYC and doing PR even if it meant she had to live in Spanish Harlem. She worked her way up through great execution and attention to detail. After spending a 12 hours a day for a whole week with her, I was blown away.

The Tour
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Lisa and I met in Washington D.C. on the 29th evening and for the next five days we did 6-8 meetings a day between D.C. and Manhattan. It was exhausting. Rushing around in Manhattan is no fun, but the response we kept getting was just extraordinary. Person after person we met just sat there with their mouth gaping wide open. Some of the comments I heard were:

- This is just amazing.
- I didn’t know this could be done with technology.
- I’ve been waiting for this for years
- This will increase online sales of clothing.
- How did you guys do this?
- This is so impressive.

A most of all (since most of the fashion reporters were themselves women) they said, “I will use this site daily and will tell my friends to.” Compliments are great – usage, visits, and purchases are better.

The Experts on Women
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For me these weren’t just pitch meetings. I was learning about a new industry. From Jane (where we met a really smart fashion editor named Kelly Culp – who eventually led us to the Editor in Chief – Brandon Holley) we learned about how truly technology savvy women aged 25-30 were and from People Magazine we learned just how popular dressing like celebrities was for the mass consumer market. However I learned the most from the bloggers.

I got the opportunity to meet three very impressive entrepreneurs.

Lesley Scott from fashiontribes , Julie Fredrickson (and her very smart partner Philip Leif Bjerknes) from Coutorture , and Michelle Madhok from She Finds . All three had been building their online magazines and had seen their blogs take off. All three where experts in fashion and style. Frankly all three reminded me of the position Michael Arrington was in the early days of Techcrunch. Like him a year ago, their audience was just starting to find the Blogosphere. Their audience was just starting to transition from email lists like Daily Candy . All three had experimented with various revenue models, had done great SEO work, and were building traffic month on month. They seemed aggressive and driven. I could relate to them as a fellow entrepreneur. In the 45 minutes we spent together, I learned so much from them and I realized just how little I knew about the world of fashion.

They also had seen the male biases of many bloggers. One said, “… our traffic is sky rocketing but the traditional blogosphere can sometimes be hostile to us. For example when my article on the best moisturizers got put in Digg by a reader, the tech crowd that frequents Digg marked it as spam even through it was an genuine article.” It seems the Blogosphere is still a little male-centric.

From them all I learned new vocabulary – What is a Mary-Jane shoe (every girl seems to know this – no guy does). I learned that the average Vogue reader is in her fifties while the after Jane reader is much younger.

The key to being successful is to learn as much about how you customer thinks as possible … even if you are the wrong gender… ;-). Of course my wife just laughed at me.

Killer Apps and Purple Cows
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On the 2nd to last day of our press tour when meeting with a really smart BD guy from a large search engine in NYC it dawned on me… he said, “You have the killer app for shopping for soft goods…”

Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t, but it was nice to get such a positive response.

Ironically the interest we are getting in Riya 2.0 is not due just to good execution such as that of Tara in Riya 1.0 or Beth and the PR agency in 2.0 but mostly because of the Godin’s purple cow-esque approach of Riya. Once again, people were talking about Riya because we had build something truly different and used technology to get us there.

Ann Chao presented to a bunch of merchants during the week and she probably said it best when she wrote to the whole company, “

First of all, I want to congratulate everyone on a great looking site and thank you for all your hard work. Over the last 2 days, I met with 3 different affiliate networks in Chicago.. Everyone … was blown away with the new site and was incredibly excited to get their merchants involved. I had no problems demo-ing. Everything performed smoothly and quickly. Thank you for making this possible.

Myself, Ann, Mark, Beth, and even Lisa are just the broadcasters of the incredible work of our engineers. Our engineers made a product that got us so many meetings and such a strong response.

Thanks team…

I don’t know if they any of these reporters will deem this newsworthy enough.... we'll see.

Comments

[Puneeth B C]

U guys are really stealing away my life. I don't know to what extent u guys will be successful, but if u reach the thresholds that I have set for myself, I have nothing else to do in my life on the technical front. Excellent work, great team! I am Riya's fan.