It has been almost a year since we entered the new normal. Have you noticed any virtual event fatigue? I get tired easily. In virtual events, you need extra attention, your eyes, ears, brain, etc.
Don't get me wrong. I still participate in virtual events and talk about my favorite topics. But I am less excited than before. Many events look like clones, and the speakers are being reused in one event after another.
Don’t be surprised if your sign up has not increased. Because you don’t take the participant’s experience seriously, here's my take:
Zoom is common, but not the only solution. There are many alternatives to help create gamification, teamwork, stage experience, etc.
Can people easily find similar content? Organize a unique event based on the voice of the customer and identify diversified speakers.
Trend? It works when you are fast enough and have the courage to become a pioneer or expert in a specific industry.
Be an expert facilitator instead of another virtual event host! Virtual Mojito is designed to help you achieve this goal with the resources you need.
See who's available and talk live. Remotion is a video workspace that helps your team text less and talk more.
Meet-a-Mojito
Hey! Tell us about yourself and a fun fact.
Hello! My name is Julian, I'm a Co-Founder of Spaces, a virtual workspace for remote collaboration. Probably, like most readers, I'm very big on side-projects as a form of learning and a form of income. I've been at it for nearly a decade, from projects to do synthetic dataset generation, to real-time ray tracing, atomic "pre-fork" bitcoin swaps, to automated call handling that eliminates having to "wait on hold" for customer support, to spatial video chat.
I've always gained a lot of personal energy working on them, so much so that early this year I decided to quit my job and work on "side projects" full-time. Though I had gained some experience over the years, my big focus now has been on acquiring skills to do sales, customer development, marketing, etc. My view is if I'm skilled at both, I can be doing this sustainably for years to come.
What motivated you to start Spaces?
It's been a personal problem. Many projects I've worked on has been alongside someone else, almost always remotely. Video conferencing is fine for talking, but actually working together to get a "job done" is not effective. What we wanted was to bring our favourite tools into our remote working sessions and be able to simultaneously work on them. So that's where we started.
How do you acquire users and grow Spaces?
The initial motivation for Spaces was broad and fairly conceptual. We wanted a clearly identifiable niche to prototype our solution for. We started with founders of small companies. We ended building a co-browsing solution (check it out, it's pretty cool) and integrated Google Docs.
Meanwhile we broadened our discussions to people in Sales, Tutoring, Developers, Customer Support, etc. Among them, Tutoring started shaping into another clear use case. I would put up Classified Ads offering people $ to speak with me or lifetime access of the tool. This was a way to start to tease out commitment without having to write too much code.
Our approach is to experiment with many different customer outreach strategies, but be very clear-up front on the goals. For example, early on with a project, driving traffic to your site likely has little value. You want to be talking to users 1:1 to understand the problems they're going through and if they would even care about your solution ("Mom Test", "Jobs Theory").
Coming up with thoughtful/ creative approaches to get commitment early on goes a long way (e.g. the Classified Ads approach worked incredibly well for us and we learned a lot from it, whereas Reddit posts were not useful).
What is your future goal?
We ended up doubling down on the remote private teaching use case and have a growing alpha group of users to help us shape the product. If we continue to see success in this direction, we could empower the users of the tool to be the supply side of a 1:1 private education marketplace and go after building the demand side.
What we care about most is building innovative solutions to break through the "boundaries" of working remotely. That could be integrations with our favourite tools to bring them into our remote working sessions. Or even bringing "collaboration" much deeper into the application stack, potentially at an operating system level.
Anything our readers should know?
Please check-out what we're working on at joinwork.space. If you know ones who do private 1:1 / small group education, it would be great to get their perspective (can reach us at hello@joinwork.space).
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“In the past, we included ~12% on top of all calls to account for platform fees (this was Superpeer’s revenue) and we charged 3% for credit card fees, which went to Stripe. As of today, we’re dropping Superpeer fees to 0% and we will only charge Stripe credit card fees for 1:1 calls. We hope that this change will make Superpeers more engaged and even more accessible to their communities…” - Devrim Yasar, CEO & Co-founder, Superpeer
