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@mscccc thanks Mike! We actually do a bunch of stuff to make this work so it's sort of secret-sauce-ish. Perhaps in a couple months I'll do a write up of some of our more clever (but by then possibly outdated) techniques :)
Hey all!
Maker here. I'm going to be hanging out for an hour or so, grabbing a little sleep, then I'll be back on around 7am PT to continue to answer any questions.
In the meantime, let's get the obligatory "What is this and why did you build it?" out of the way.
Pluck is our solution to needing to do cold outreach but thoroughly hating traditional means of doing it.
I get a lot of these emails:
> Hey Ryan, congrats on the current round of funding! As CEO, are you looking to grow your sales organization? [etc etc]
Two problems with that email: First, we didn't just raise money. We raised money almost 2 years ago. Second, we only raised $278k through an AngelList syndicate back then -- hardly enough cash to go building out a sales force.
I get these emails almost every day because somewhere inside BuiltWith, Data.com, Mattermark, Salesloft, etc... I'm listed as having the following attributes:
- Industry: SaaS
- Title: C-level
- Raised money: Yes
While these emails aren't exactly "spam" -- like the emails asking if I want to buy mining equipment or Viagra -- they're also not very well targeted. They're sort of in the ballpark, but the external optics of the attributes used for targeting rarely map to actual current needs inside an organization.
So that's problem #1 with the traditional methods of doing cold emails: Lack of targeting.
I also get a lot of these emails:
> Hey Ryan, following up on my last email [etc etc]
Either they sent no previous email and are trying to play some psychological game (tsk tsk people who do this) or they are actually following up for the 3rd, 4th, sometimes 5th time. Sometimes, these emails don't even have unsubscribe links.
So that's the 2nd problem with traditional methods of doing cold emails: Giving people email lists encourages them to be bad citizens.
So after struggling with ways to grow our other products, we had the idea for Pluck. We put together a hack, tweaked it over the last 3 months, and starting delivering emails like this:
> Hey there, saw your your tweet about [topic] and wanted to reach out...
This technique yielded some staggering results:
- 3,000 emails sent
- Over 70% open rates
- Over 15% click through rates
- Under 0.5% unsubscribe rates
So after a few months of testing this out and seeing how powerful it is, we decided to pull the trigger and build Pluck.
There's some "philosophy via product" that we've imparted on Pluck:
1. To ensure high quality, we manually review every account when it's created. This might hamper our ability to scale in the beginning, but we want to make sure only people with legitimate campaigns are using Pluck.
2. You cannot buy email lists from Pluck. We send emails on your behalf, and the only way you ever get to see the email address is if the person replies to the email or if they go to your site and sign up.
3. An individual will only ever receive ONE email from you through Pluck. You don't get to subscribe them to drips. You get one shot to make a good impression.
So that's Pluck. I think this intro comment may be approaching the longest intro comment ever made on PH, so I'll stop here and leave my other ramblings to answer your questions.
I hope you have lots. Talk soon!
@allisonshea30 thanks, Alli! That means a lot. I wasn't sure if anyone would actually read this novel of a comment :)
@angilly:
1. Cool concept. There is a good level of intent if someone discusses a topic on twitter. I see the benefit. Love the simplicity of ur solution too. See below though.
2. I am surprised that you compared funding event emails to Viagara emails. If you target companies and decision makers that just got a significant amount of funding that is going to be a way better option than someone who passively mentions something on Twitter. Companies that get over $10M in funding are spending money all over the place. They are dumping money everywhere to make sure they meet their benchmarks. Sales is not just about needs/interest. It is also about timing and budget. There is a reason why it is called BANT.
3. Besides funding events there are tons of other triggers that can find demand. If you target using specific events you should increase your close rate 4x. See below...
New Job Openings: If a 150 person company just adds 40 new sales jobs you know that their big corp initiatives are focus on sales growth. As opposed to product, R&D, finance, etc.
New Decision Makers: New leaders at a company always make changes when they get hired. They have to prove their worth.
New Locations/Hiring Plans: When there is a new facility there is always money spent.
@tomblue yeah 100% in agreement re: the unfair comparison of funding event emails to Viagra emails. I got a bunch of emails right after raising money that said "hey congrats on the seed round! do you need [thing I reasonably needed at the time]" and they were actually helpful.
I was referencing the extreme case where I'm still getting those emails 2 years after the most recent funding event :)
@angilly That's good - we need better data for campaigns. Emails should seem hand typed.
@datarade I'm not sure that's correct. Can you explain the exact flow you're envisioning?
@angilly
Zapier - monitors twitter for keywords
Google Sheets - zapier throws tweets and twitter handles into google sheets.
FullContact is a company with access to twitter firehose, it handles finding their email addresses.
You can make a microapp to do this very quickly.
@datarade Got it. FullContact actually cannot turn a Twitter handle into an email address. I think that's a very common misconception about FC. They have APIs that go the other way (email -> Twitter handle) but that's not very useful here.
You can also look up a person by Twitter handle on FC, but the API response does not include an email address: https://www.fullcontact.com/deve...
@n_clemmons I'm not familiar with ProLeads, but upon a cursory glance it appears that despite being a fairly full-featured lead management platform, ProLeads doesn't actually do what Pluck does.
Pluck actually monitors Twitter and identifies new people to send one-time emails to.
ProLeads appears to manage existing leads, leverage personal networks to get intros, and ping existing leads on Twitter to warm them up for an email outreach.
Sounds a bit like @colinmathews Lukewarm Emailer (now defunct) which I've had really good success with (reply rates above 20%). Keen to try it out!
@travisleestreet cool thanks! would love to know from @colinmathews what caused it go defunct! 😳
@angilly @colinmathews I'm pretty sure it was super successful and he built it into another product called Contentmarketer.io (good news for you guys eh?). Read more here http://blog.lukewarmemailer.com/...
@travisleestreet @angilly Thanks for the shout-out! Yeah, Lukewarm Emailer went really well. One of my customers reached out to me about building upon it and we joined up to create ContentMarketer.io. Through that process we built an MVP product called Connector which is doing amazingly well, and in response to its success we're now nearly done building Mailshake.com. lol
It's been a crazy this-led-to-that path for me, but every step has been more promising than the last and I'm really excited to launch in a few months.
Pluck looks awesome - nicely done!
Is there a minimum subscription length? Could I try it for a month and then cancel if it's not working out?
@davidhoos the minimum length is just 1 month. You could absolutely try it for a month and cancel. After canceling, any links in your emails will continue to work.
@angilly Thanks Ryan. Is the email that we sign up under going to be the email that all emails are sent from? In other words, would it be better if we signed up with a personal vs a marketing@ email?
@davidhoos no, it doesn't matter. you can signup with one email address, and then your account will have a "verified reply-to email address". You'll be able to set that address (and also set your physical address, which we need for CAN-SPAM compliance) after your submit your account and we review it.
@roamlocally right now it's just Twitter, but as things progress expect to see other networks added!
I never know how I feel about products like this... Just because I'm tweeting about something, doesn't mean I want to receive an unsolicited email.
People receive enough unwanted email as it is.
Also, 'automated and personalised' - those two don't really go together IMO. Like saying 'automated and personalised' DM - I just don't see how they can work together.
@bentossell yeah I hear you, man. To be honest I was sort of the same way when we started to play around with this concept. This has been an interesting ride for me personally.
Our first test was only 50 emails, then 100, then 200, then we started to get bigger (and smaller -- running campaigns that only get 1 or 2 hits per week). As we dug in, the response was just overwhelmingly positive.
Yes, we definitely got a couple people who were SUPER mad that we emailed them, but on the flip side we had hundreds of responses and people like Rand Fishkin tweeting out stuff like this: https://twitter.com/randfish/sta...
At the end of the day, unsolicited email is never going to stop. This is something that we think can lower the percentage of unsolicited mail that is also unwanted.
@angilly hmm I suppose if you hit the bigger numbers then there are always going to be positives vs negatives but I just cannot see the +ve in emailing people who didnt give you their email or ask to be emailed.
Also I dont think that something that will help unsolicited emails is to send unsolicited emails that I may or may not find interesting.
I guess there is no place for someone to put their name on a 'Never send' list either?
@bentossell not before they will send you email. There is unsubscribe CTA button at the end of the email in Rand tweet.
@angilly I suppose you will not tell us the percentage of FBL in gmail ? :]
@bentossell yeah I get where you're coming from. Like I said, I was very surprised by how overwhelmingly positive the responses were. Otherwise, we wouldn't have built this. I actually had people emailing me saying things like "I wish more cold emails were this good" etc etc....
This is one of things where the customer development and market research generated data that went against not only my intuition, but my inclinations as well.
I think the never send list is probably coming. It's still early days so there are a lot of features that are yet to be built.
@bentossell If the content of the DM or email is engaging, then I think it's okay. I came up with engaging questions for my DMs because I don't like the bad rap DMs have gotten because spammers abuse them. With that said, I do see your point about it being a bit invasive, and understand your concern for spamming. "One bad apple ruins the bunch." That sparks a question then: Can people opt out of being a part of this or make emails private, something?
It sucks the fact you spam me to bring me to this page. Pity there is no "vote down" button.
Ryan late to the game here. Can we geofence or tag Twitter responses by location or just key words? I did not see the answer on your site. We are getting 60/15 numbers but very hand crafted process. I would gladly pay $250 for 1,000 if I could control the geography. Many thanks.
@chadbharris yup you can currently apply a lat/long & radius to narrow the result set
Ahoy PH community, other maker here.
I just wanted to let you know it's been awesome reading all the feedback and learning so much from you today. We want to make this product awesome resource for you, and this kind of feedback about product features, pricing, and others really helps us think about what’s next.
The possibilities of what this tool can do for all kinds of people gets me excited! I can't wait to see what ideas you come up with. Remember it is free to sign up and check out Pluck’s platform up to where we must approve your account.
Thanks again! 🙌
@alex_flom Thanks Alex! We won't be doing that. Automating the sending of a reply tweet is against Twitter's Terms of Service.
@angilly Congrats on great comments and PH visibility. Hoped on and noticed the 1-Tier $250/Mo pricing. It seems like an unconventional pricing model for this kind of service. Can you please explain why you selected 1-Tier pricing and at such a high price point? Is your target market big corporations? Do you have any plans to target smaller business users who generally spend $15-25 mo for SaaS?
@tjwise_ thanks for asking!
The reason we have 1 tier is to keep things simple. We scale our pricing up for anyone who goes over the 1k emails/month.
As far as the price point, there are many factors. To put a few of them very bluntly:
- While conceptually simple, there is a lot of nuance to this product. We can't afford to spend time on customer support for users who are only $15/month.
- A price tag of $250 isn't only the purview of "big corporations". Companies doing as little as $10k MRR spend $295/month on BuiltWith, $500/month on Mattermark, etc....
- We've had a handful of very small companies sign up, and we've seen a trend where they can't devote the resources needed to run a successful campaign using Pluck, so we use pricing to try to discourage those companies from signing up.
We may offer lower pricing at some point, but we need to hone the product a lot more first, and we can only do that by working closely with more mature companies.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
Edit: typos
@ninjinka @samuelfaith not right now. we need to stick to paid only for a while. you can signup anyway for free and you'll be notified if that changes!
I wish this was a desktop app that could just extract the emails for me..I feel like that's all people need anyways, and that's the unique selling prop that you guys offer. Everyone can figure out how to send emails, and keeping it capped at $250 a mo for 1000 emails is extremely expensive.
@kingliv_ There are a few apps & Chrome extensions that let you find email addresses. They're escaping me at the moment; I think Clearbit has one. I just saw another one a few days ago too. When I come across it, I'll come back and comment again.
One of the biggest values of Pluck is that we do everything for you in an automated fashion across multiple concurrent campaigns. While it may be too expensive for individual users (think prosumers), it's probably priced too cheaply for more mature businesses.
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