Online Subscriptions Entrepreneur of the Year 2008
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MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit Transcript 2008 Online Subscriptions Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 Session Description In 2002, Allen founded 10x Marketing, an internet Every year we celebrate an entrepreneur whose marketing agency that was sold to Innuity in 2005. In inspirational story shows you can start a subscription 2004, he started FundingUniverse.com, a fast-growing offering that succeeds online without major corporate company that helps entrepreneurs through venture backing. Past winners include AskTheBuilder.com and consulting. Since 2007, he has been 100% focused on TheLadders.com. Find out who will win this year! his new company, FamilyLink.com. Allen and his wife, Christy, have 8 children. He ABOUT THE PRESENTERS graduated from BYU with a degree in Russian in 1990. He is suffering from a serious addiction to his BlackBerry, iPhone and Amazon Kindle. Paul Allen CEO, FamilyLink.com ABOUT FAMILYLINK.COM FamilyLink.com is a venture-backed startup in the genealogy and family space. The company’s genealogy site, WorldVitalRecords.com, provides access to nearly Paul Allen has founded several companies in the 2 billion family records, has 30,000 paying subscribers consumer content and social space. He founded and is growing by thousands a month. The company’s Ancestry.com in 1997 and launched MyFamily.com, the Facebook application “We’re related” has had more fastest-growing community site of its time, in 1998. than 3 million installs and nearly 100,000 daily active After an initial stint as CEO, Allen focused on internet users. marketing and strategy for several years, helping Ancestry.com become one of the leading content subscription sites in the world. A/B Testing Case Study PRESENTATION some of you might know. His name is Paul Allen. As he MODERATOR: Our last presenter of the day is not just likes to point out, he’s not the Paul Allen that you’re going to give us sort of their presentation, their case thinking of, the co-founder of Microsoft. Instead, Paul study, but they’re also somebody we’re recognizing. is a veteran of the online subscription industry. He We’ve done this every year at the Summit. We like to founded Ancestry.com back in the ‘90s and grew that call out somebody that we call our Entrepreneur of the into the largest genealogy site on the web. Year. This is somebody from the subscription industry He eventually sold that company, but didn’t really get that is proving you can be a small company, but you out of the subscription business. He felt compelled to can be smart and nimble, and you can have some really jump back into it, for reasons I’m sure he’ll explain. What great success. he’s done is he’s jumped back in and he’s started another It’s not just the metrics. Obviously, those are important, online genealogy site called World Vital Records. the growth rates that they’re achieving, but it’s also just World Vital Records, when they came on my radar screen the lessons that they have to teach the rest of us about a while ago, several months ago, had just announced some of the tactics, and techniques, and strategies that that they’d doubled their subscriber base in a matter of are working for them, some tried and true methods, and a few months. That was right around the beginning of also some new ideas that they’re really using to help the year. They have actually now tripled their subscriber achieve their success that we want them to share with base since I first talked to Paul, and that was back in you. January. So, in less than a year, they’ve tripled their This year, our 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year is a name subscriber base, and they’ve done this through a 156 | © Copyright 2008 MarketingSherpa LLC. It is forbidden to copy this transcript in any manner MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit Transcript 2008 Online Subscriptions Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 combination of tactics that, when Paul explains them, changed dramatically in the last 11 years. It’s actually are more of the tried and true methods. But some of fun to use some of those tried and true methods, and them are really creative and really making use of some at the same time to try to be on the leading edge, and of the latest phenomena on the Internet. the cutting edge, and figure out what can we do that’s different. They are actually big believers in social networking and, as part of World Vital Records, they created their We’re now competing with the company that we helped own social networking site called Familylink.com. found that’s doing about $150 million a year in revenue. They’re also big players in Facebook. They developed a When I was there, we bought the number one or the Facebook application called We’re Related, which lets number two competitor in the space, and a year after I people put a family tree on their Facebook profile and left the company, they bought, again, the number two link to their family members. This project, which we competitor in the space. So it was really a consolidation profiled in a case study a while ago, was one of the in the online genealogy space, and there really hasn’t most successful Facebook apps in. I think – I forget been any competition, so to speak, in the last five the number of people who have downloaded it in the years. first six months – they’ve got more than 100,000 people So big, dominant player. You kind of wonder, when using this application every day. you’re looking at a large company like that, is there They’re learning a lot about what kind of role social an eBay kind of network lock-in model where there’s so networks like Facebook can play in the marketing efforts many users, and so much content, and so many users for your own subscription site. I think Paul is going to generating new content, that it’s invincible, and that talk to us a little bit about some of these things and there’s no way that you can take on a company that is some other factors that are driving his success. that size? Can you be nimble, can you be creative, can you take some totally new approaches, and as Clayton Let’s bring him up. But first, let’s recognize Paul Allen Christiansen from Innovator’s Dilemma might say, “Can as our Entrepreneur of the Year. I have a small but you go after an audience that the leader is not going impressive ceremony here. after at this point?” PAUL ALLEN: Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate Most of you probably don’t do genealogy, I’m guessing. it. Wow. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Most genealogy societies and conferences that you I’ve been a huge fan of MarketingSherpa for years attend, I would say the majority of people are over 60 because, as one of the early pioneers in the Internet years old. They have time on their hands. They’re at that subscription business model, we launched Ancestry.com point in life where family, and their heritage, and their back in April of ’97, and this was just after USA Today legacy matters more than anything else. It’s not like had discontinued its attempt to sell subscriptions. There a lot of young professionals have any time or interest were very few people doing subscription marketing back in doing genealogy. But there’s a life stage where you then, so it was a pretty lonely gig to just try to figure get to the point – my Mom, for example. I’m thinking it out on your own. about her a little bit because of Mother’s Day yesterday, Later, a few years later, as MarketingSherpa started not but she’s got eight children and over 30 grandchildren only holding this Summit, but also publishing great – 34 I believe. Every morning, she wakes up and checks case studies, I have said a hundred times that, pound the MyFamily.com website to see if any of her children for pound, MarketingSherpa case studies are the most or grandchildren have posted anything or added any valuable thing that Internet marketers can ever read. photos to the site. That night before she goes to bed, I’ve been to several Summits. I’ve sent a lot of people to she does the same thing. She just lives for her family. Summits. I love the transcripts. I love the case studies. I think at that age, when you’re over 55 or 60, and life So, for me to be honored by MarketingSherpa is truly a has kind of – the hard, intense part of life, maybe – has great honor for me and for my team. passed a bit, and you kind of are thinking about what’s The fun part for me about what we’re doing now, 12 really important, that’s the audience that Ancestry.com years after launching Ancestry.com, and 11 years after has been serving for about 12 years. Of course, that’s launching Ancestry.com’s subscription business model, our audience, too, at World Vital Records. is that we’ve got quite a few of the original people I’ll jump into the slides now, and kind of tell you our back together again. Of course, the Internet world has story.