👋🏽 Welcome to The Folklore, our weekly newsletter about our journey of building Folklory, a startup that helps you turn family memories into podcasts. We’ll share weekly updates, wins, and learnings, so sign up if you want to hear from us.
A few months ago, we connected with the team at COMO Shambala, the wellness arm of the COMO Group. They were launching a program called “The Strength Within Us“, a curated set of classes over two weeks. Through this journey, our job was to capture the personalized Strength Stories of participants by recording anecdotes and experiences into an audio capsule.
First Pop-Up
We put together a recording setup in a cozy corner of the COMO Shambhala Urban Escape studio. Students and practitioners could drop by and we’d talk to them about how they discovered their own strengths, which was the underlying theme of the program. The setup was simple and even had a few sample Folklories for people to listen to.
While pitching to COMO Shambala, we recorded 2 samples with the practitioners, to help convince them. This also gave us a lot of confidence in being able to extract anybody’s story about anything, even within 10 mins. You can listen to the conversation with 2 of the practitioners - Jay and Roxanne.
A deeper understanding
While our main task was to capture the stories of the participants, we also ended up speaking with many of the practitioners. It was fascinating to hear each one’s story, especially about how they got into yoga. We later learned that many of their colleagues had not heard these stories themselves, which proved to us again that Folklory had a role to play in bringing teams together (read more here). Beyond their colleagues, we believe that these short recordings could be valuable for potential clients to listen to, and would do a much better job as compared to a few lines in the “About Us” section. This could an area where Folklory can help individual practitioners and client-servicing businesses build trust with customers.
Reluctant to try
Despite the cozy setup and samples, it was difficult to get people to try Folklory out. In many cases, the teachers had to nudge their students to come record with us. Our guess was that people didn’t fully understand what was going to happen and thus were reluctant to try. Since this was our first pop-up, I’m sure there were many things we could do differently. One clear actionable for the next is to make the space more inviting by adding a brochure or an explainer video.
All in all, it was a great experience and we learned a lot about doing a Folklory pop-up. It felt similar to the in-person Folklories (read more here) we tried a few weeks ago, but yet it was different since the location was different.
A big thank you to COMO Shambala’s team for giving us the opportunity to be a part of their campaign.
Until next time
The Folklory Team