This Part 2 of my interview with Alex Norman, co-founder of TechTO. Today’s episode dives into how he grew TechTO into the leading tech-events company in Canada. This episode has background music added in. Feedback so far on the background music is negative and I will discontinue it after this podcast if I don’t get overwhelming feedback in the other direction.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Edward Nevraumont: This is part two of my interview with Alex Norman. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Managing Director of TechTO. First, Alex, can you describe what TechTO is?
Alex Norman: TechTO is an organization that helps the Canadian tech ecosystems improve. And what I mean by that is we're a member-based organization that helps members meet other like-minded people, learn from each other, and advance their career in technology, either as a founder or as an employee.
Edward: Traditionally that meant events, right? You guys started with a monthly event and then added more and more and more of these in-person events.
Alex: That's correct. It started off with a monthly event and then March, 2020 I think the previous 12 months that we had a hundred events. Anything from a small dinners to 1,000 people showing up to the event.
Edward: And obviously COVID has made that a lot more difficult. Basically you're running an event company with hundreds and hundreds of events, and then all of a sudden events dropped to zero within like a three-day time period. How did you guys manage?
Alex: So I'd say there's two parts to this. One is going back to what I said yesterday about you should always be doubling down on what works and have experiments on the side. I think the year before we started experimenting with a digital membership, so not digital events, but a membership and community. And how do we make the community exist beyond events and online? So we had some learning about what we have to do from a community perspective online to make this still a vibrant community add value to our members. So we were prepared from that perspective and had some knowledge there. So we ramped that up quickly.
The other thing is, I remember March 10th, I think we had an event and then both Jason and I were supposed to go on vacation because March break on March 11th. March 12th we decided that there's going to be no events for the next year. Let's figure out how to do online events and what that meant, what technology can enable us and how our events could represent something similar to what we do. What will work that we used to do, what won't work?
And so I think the next five or six days we tested like 30 platforms. We started learning limitations of what could be done, what couldn't be done. And we did a test event, I think on March 18th or 17th, with just some of our members. And then March 24th we did our first event and then basically did an event, I feel like it's every weekday, since then. And it was constant iteration and improving how to improve experience and how we could deliver value.
And I'd say from March until now, being August 2020, probably done 150 events, a bunch of different formats. And we're actually now thinking we have enough impetus strategically about how do we take it to the next level. Assuming there's no events for another year in person, what do we have to do to actually deliver value for members? And how do we have to change, for lack of a better word, our product. But we have now enough data, enough insight, enough interactions with people to build a fact-based hypothesis versus we went live and started iterating and we had enough of community and brand to experiment online.
Edward: I read somewhere recently that in order to win in quality, the way to do it is to massively increase quantity. Does that match with what you guys are doing?
Alex: Yeah. I've never heard that before, but I fundamentally believe in that. Again, maybe there's vision, product-driven founders and people out there that can see the end product. And maybe that was what Steve Jobs was, but the way I've always more than likely got the best product is doing hundreds of experiments. And sometimes experiments are hypothetical and sometimes they're building a product and putting it out there and seeing how the world reacts. So it's been a lot of quantity, we had a quality level we had to keep, but now we have an idea how to take the quality level, make it three times better.
Edward: I want to dive into some of your more significant marketing channels. Let's start with meetup.com. How did you start using Meetup to grow TechTO at the beginning?
Alex: So originally we used Meetup. We came to Meetup. We said, "Okay, this might be interesting way to get distribution," but it was more of tool for functionality. It's an easy way for people to register interests, show up. We could use their ticketing. They had some ticketing built in. We could use it to administer our initial events. And initially we didn't think of Meetup as a distribution channel, but we quickly found out after doing the first few events, seeing a lot of people were just discovering and joining our Meetup group, not necessarily events on Meetup. We said, "Okay, this is actually a strong distribution channel." Because a. Meetup gets lots of organic traffic. You find out that they get ranked pretty high in some SEO terms. And if you could basically, for lack of a better word, figure out how their recommendation engine recommends groups, you could probably drive a lot more traffic.
So I don't know if it was three months in, nine months, but I spent a lot of time researching in and playing around to figure out how you set up a group and how you set up events. How you can basically take advantage of organic traffic from Meetup. So I'd say we optimized how we did everything on Meetup to basically optimize the flow of people to join our Meetup. And then we experiment a lot with how do we communicate with people to get to them to attend events. And I'd say at the peak, when doing offline events for some of our, and we have different committees, for some of our committees it could be 30 to 40% of our initial interaction. And coming to our event was from Meetup. It could be lower for some. It's just like search is optimized for Google or YouTube. You could do that for Meetup.
Edward: And how did you do that? So how do you search engine optimize for Meetup if you're not going to give away any secrets?
Alex: So I think it's changed over the years. So I think the first thing was what terms. You could say, I think 10 or 12 terms that you associate a group with. It could be how many events you have listed on there. So is it a regular event? Are you listing two or 10? The more regular frequency and the more events you have listed and the right hashtags, the right wording... And so we could find also how we did research. You could look at like New York Tech Meetup group. You could click on it. They have 50,000 members. I think they were the biggest Meetup group at one point. You could see what they were hashtagged for. Then you can then use those hashtags.
You can search those hashtags. They tell you how many people are members. You get metrics, you can basically navigate around Meetup to find metrics and tags. You could figure out which groups or you could just reach our communities. We had different meetup groups, we'd start measuring the growth of them and try to figure out what was working or not. We tried to research articles and there wasn't much out there, but it was just exploring Meetup and basically trying to backwards engineer how they were recommending stuff.
And we'd test results and we'd see. Because we tried different things with different communities and you could see the growth rates and we'd see our biggest group was growing twice as fast as our smallest group. So what are we doing different? So it was just a lot of analytics, a lot of backwards engineering, also experimenting. It's also doing great products. So I think what we also believed is if you have a lot of people attending and a lot of repeat attendance to events and people come looking for you, Meetup would recognize that as a quality event. So it was just basically observing what would make a difference and we could see by the rate of people joining our group.
Edward: You even put a bid in to buy Meetup when WeWork was divesting it, is that right?
Alex: Yes, we did. Our belief with Meetup is it's a great brand. It has tons of organic traffic, but it doesn't know who it wants to serve. And then there's a few different types of groups that leverage Meetup and that can either build different products for different groups or could just focus on one. So we believed there was a lot of value in Meetup but it hasn't ever really figured a way to unlock it for itself or for its organizations. And there was an opportunity to potentially buy that asset and just make it much more powerful.
Edward: Your other big channel is organic social, which is primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. Now I've always thought that companies overvalue organic social, but you seem to have found something that drives more than a quarter of your business. What are you doing that's working so well on organic social?
Alex: Let's be clear, I think it's changed over time and we've sort of zigged when everyone zagged. So I think Facebook was doing a way that you got the people attending events to interact with content for them. So a lot of pictures, a lot of videos, a lot of content that... We have a Facebook group, but that gets no distribution anymore. So we probably took 200, 300 pictures of an event. And even though there's 700, 800 people, we would try to tag all the people in those pictures. We would have postings after, which were interactive. And so when people interacted with it, their friends see it and hopefully a lot of them have like-minded friends that'd be interested in the same thing. And then that would translate into people signing up for us and coming to events.
I think Facebook was good by leveraging our community, to get distribution and get like-minded. So you didn't need a huge amount of distribution because you had the right members and they would attract like-minded people. We started off with using Twitter a lot. I think Twitter is a great for awareness, but Twitter is like pissing in the wind. You put a tweet out... Every time we did an event, we'd be number one trending in Canada because we just had huge engagement. We have 800 people, huge engagement. We do our events on Monday night, it'd be us or NFL Monday Night or the Bachelor. So you're talking about good awareness, but the distribution of any one tweet's not huge. It disappears after a few seconds. And once you start trending you also get lots of spam that paws on to take advantage of that.
So it gives you [inaudible 00:09:48] metrics, which give you credibility and gives you a bit of awareness because people that aren't at events seen an event's going on and they want to interact with that. But we're interacting a lot with Twitter but we de-emphasize it as a marketing channel because we saw it's great for the community. It's a great communication app, but doesn't really do anything. My hypothesis at one point was LinkedIn has become more of a social network. And I can't remember when this was about two or maybe three years ago we said, people aren't leveraging it like they would leverage other social networks, so let's experiment with LinkedIn and see if that can make a difference because you're not going to get necessarily the person that wants [CentreTech 00:10:21] but you might get tech leaders that are trying to recruit.
You might get potential partners that look at LinkedIn and no one's really filling their feed. So we started doing a bunch of experimentation on how to get distribution, and LinkedIn's horrible from an analytics and distribution perspective, but we started de-emphasizing Twitter from a social stream to LinkedIn. And it actually paid off because we got to activate a different customer set that we were targeting. It builds a brand and gets people out. And they introduced LinkedIn events, I think 10, 12 months ago. So we were being quick to try new tools. So we got a lot of initial bump there because no one else was using it or experimenting with it. So you adapt for the channel, but you also take learnings from other channels. And I think our approach to LinkedIn was early and different than other people's. So it helped us grow our communities.
Edward: Tell me more about what you were doing on LinkedIn. You weren't just posting, "Hey event having happening tonight" or, "Here's some pictures of the event."
Alex: No, I'd call them two buckets of content. One is just interacting with the overall tech ecosystem. Just being a source of information, but I think more importantly we'd have Jim McKelvey speaking. He's not good example. He was co-founder of Square. So once we have Jim McKelvey speaking we do content around that beforehand. "Hey, here's Jim, you may not know him. He started a company with Jack Dorsey. It's called Square" and do stories. And then maybe we'd say, "What would you like to ask him?" So a bit of information about upcoming events, but not advertorial. It was more information about why this is relevant to you. And then maybe try to engage with the audience.
And then post event we'd have postings that would be like, "You may have missed an event, but here's the three key takeaways from Allan at Wattpad." Or we do member stories. "Here's a member that joined TechTO and she found her first job." Or a perfect one was, "Here's a member, she attended TechTO three years ago. She loved the founder that was talking, she reached out to him. Now she's the CEO of that company." Highlighting stories and highlighting takeaways and what was going to community. So building awareness by providing two, three paragraph insights and then engaging with the community and-
Edward: And you're doing that daily?
Alex: No, we found daily's too often, but it'd be once every couple days. We experiment a lot. I think anything more than once a day in LinkedIn's too much just because it's the exact opposite of Twitter. Stuff stays up there long. We never really spent too much time figuring out how everything works, but we just knew that if you do more than once a day, I think LinkedIn seems to hide your postings. So one thing we did learn is if you have quick reactions on LinkedIn, it gets spread faster. So in the first 10 minutes 10 people give it a like, or whatever they call it, it would be more likely seen by your wider community. So you have Facebook equivalent, your company can have followers? We never even focused building that on LinkedIn because it's just enough other ways to get distribution on there.
Edward: I want to loop back a little bit to your Facebook comment. You were trying to tag 700 people. How did you manage something like that?
Alex: Dedicated team. The thing is everyone has name tags on them and usually your name tag's in the picture. So maybe you get a Tammy or a Jessica but even in the group of 800 there's five Jessicas? Either the team would know her or we had a group of volunteers and team members that we'd try to do it with. We weren't 100% successful. But if you have just five people in the picture and you get one person, usually the other people come tag themselves. So you need like a 60% success rate to make that strategy valid.
Edward: That's incredible. So now that COVID's happened and you switched from in-person events to online events, has that changed the marketing channels that are working for you?
Alex: Yes. And I don't think we were well aware of it at the beginning. So I've always been overly worried about the margin channels we work on because it's not our platforms. One of our biggest marketing channels we didn't discuss. We have an email list of members, which is 50,000-plus strong. So that's something we own. And other channels we rely on are all the channels we don't control. So the email channel still works, but I'd say we are over-relying on three channels before and two which don't work the same way. Who goes to Meetup today? You go to Meetup because you want to see an in-person event. They're doing digital events, but just my guess without knowing anything is their traffic's probably down 80 to 90%. Because people aren't inherently going out to go look for, "Hey, I want to go to a tech conference" or "I want to go meet a bunch of bicyclists."
And so the activity on Meetup has significantly dropped. I think the other channel, which we're aware of never really quantified, but I think it's actually significantly hurt us is I think we had a unique word of mouth. And what I mean by that is, someone goes Monday morning and goes, "Hey, I'm going to TechTO tonight" to their colleagues. Maybe they go themselves the first time. Next day they go for coffee. He says, "Man, I had a great time at TechTO. You should come to it." And then three weeks later, when the next TechTO or let's say your FinTechTO in two weeks comes along, someone goes to buy a ticket. And they say, "Hey, I'm buying a ticket. I'm going to TechTO next week."
And then they say, "Why don't you come out with us?" And they pull their friends. The word of mouth was actually dragging friends that enjoy social experience together in person. And I think we still have strong word of mouth, but it's not nearly as impactful because when there's a point you have to schedule to go see something in person together, you make plans around it. It becomes part of your social activity. And when you think it's good enough for your friends to enjoy, you'll suggest it and you'll go to it together. And then they become advocates and come together.
What I noticed online is no one does, "Hey, I'm going at 7:00 online to this event tonight. Why don't you come join me?" And then there's a couple of things that happen. I think when you want to go to TechTO an event in person, you actually have to plan your day around it. At 7:00 you have to be at RBC WaterPark for a TechTO event on Monday or 6:00, you're going to plan that Monday not to work. Maybe you have an issue with the babysitter. Maybe you got work and you don't come, but you're usually buying your tickets ahead of time. What I've noticed online is, "Hey, we have an event at 7:00 on Tuesday." People are like, "Oh, let me see what's happening and I'll register at 6:55."
So first of all, people don't plan. And I think second of all, this shared social experience online right now is not like a shared social experience in person. You're not going there. You're not laughing together. You're both in your own rooms or your houses. So I think we still get strong word of mouth, but [amplifier 00:16:48] where people drag their friends along, it doesn't happen. And I think that's a significant impact on us. So Meetup as a channel is not working and word of mouth is not working. So we've relied a lot more social. We rely a lot more email and we're still trying to experiment because I think lots of people have had the marketing channels changed, not just events, but retail and stuff like that. So I think it's a lot more crowded and there's a lot more volatility and noise in lots of channels right now. So it's not clear to me which ones will scale up in the near future.
Edward: This has been awesome, Alex, thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show. Before you go, tell me what comic book we should all read next.
Alex: I haven't read it but I've enjoyed the Netflix series Umbrella Academy so I want to actually pick up the comic books and read them. But I haven't read any good comics in a while. If you want a classic, it's the Sandman series. It's written by Neil Gaiman and it's about the mythology of the character Sandman: Master of Dreams. It's not what you expect from a comic book. Go read it.
Edward: I think ending on the Master of Dreams is a fantastic way to end. Thanks, Alex. Really appreciate having you here today.
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