The Folklore #2: Our first customer
Updates from last week and a little bit about our North Star
đđ˝ Welcome to The Folklore, our weekly newsletter where we talk about our journey of building Folklory. Every week weâll share updates, wins, and learnings, so sign up if youâd like to be a part of this journey đ
In todayâs edition of The Folklore, letâs start off with some updates over the last week, and then we want to share a little bit about our Vision and Mission for Folklory. Letâs dive in!
Updates from 10th - 16th March 2022
đ Wins
Our biggest win was that we got our first 2 customers! đ In fact, one of them bought 3 episodes
Weâre only counting unique customers towards our #Mission100to100, so 98 more to go đŞđ˝
đ¤ Learnings
People find the price tag of US$ 199 too expensive for a gift. We spoke to a bunch of people and heard this many times. Our mission (you can read more about it below) is to make Folklory accessible to everyone. A more affordable price is part of that mission. Weâre not going to change to price for now as there are a lot of other things to improve, but weâre keeping a close eye on that.
Most people took some time to understand what the product was. They understood that it was a service where someone would interview their loved one, but they couldnât easily picture why they would need that. Our learning from this is that we need to make it even more clear, the different ways of using the service.
People wanted to know the hosts better. They were going to be introducing their loved ones to this person who they had never spoken to or met. They also didnât want to go listen to a long podcast by the host. Our learning was that we need to find a way where our customers could get to know the host better, in a short amount of time. So as a next step, weâre going to be adding a short introduction for each of our hosts on the website.
Folkloryâs Vision and Mission
âVision and Missionâ are heavy words and in most cases, they donât really mean much. But having said that, we felt that itâs important to paint a picture of the world we would like to see. In that spirit, here are ours:
Our vision is that every community has a shared capsule of memories and experiences. Families, University batchmates, Startups, Organizations, Sports Teams - each of these communities should have its own capsule of stories that can be preserved and easily accessed by members over time.
Our mission is to build a platform to allow every community to create these memory capsules. There are millions of communities in the world and in order to serve them all, we need to build a system that can scale. We also want to build this in a way that is sustainable for us and accessible to others:
Sustainable: We want to make sure we can generate enough revenue so that we can keep doing creating Folklories for many years to come
Accessible: This includes things like the product being affordable, our hostâs ability to interview in a given language, simple technology to capture stories of our guests in high fidelity, etc.
Our vision and mission will take many years to achieve but this is the north star we follow.
Hope youâve enjoyed this weekâs episode of The Folklore. If you like what weâre doing and want to help, weâd really appreciate it if you could share this with one other person, who you think might like the idea. Our biggest challenge right now is getting the word out and to hear from people about what they feel is missing so that we can iterate and improve.
If you have feedback, ideas or just want to get in touch, you can always write to us at theteam@folklory.com. We would love to hear from you â¤ď¸
Until next time
Haresh