CEO of Bonjoro Shares his Creative Beginnings
Matt Barnett is a British designer and artist who decided to move to Australia and co-founded Bonjoro, a video email tool that allows you to connect with your customers on a more personalized level.
Bonjoro was born from a sale hack he had for his first business. Three years after Matt and his team decided to go all-in on the idea, Bonjoro has snowballed into a startup success story with a fully remote team across six countries and five continents.
Matt loves building great products. His goal? To be the next Zappos that’s the most loved brand in the world.
What We Discuss with Matt Barnett:
- Moving from London to Australia
- The good thing about starting a business with a creative mindset
- How Bonjoro came about as a happy accident
- Promoting your book and growing your following through Bonjoro
- Benefits of using Bonjoro
- The power of creating your brand earlier on
[01:11] Matt’s Transition from London to Australia
Matt went to a design school in Windsor Castle where they lived in a big castle in the middle of the woods for 600,000 designers for four years. When he left, he went into doing design consultancy. He had 23 exhibitions in his first year.
One thing he learned from his experience in London is that you had to be the brand. At that time, he didn’t have the ego for it. He felt it didn’t fit him and it kind of tainted the work he was doing.
To be successful, people are basically buying you, and not so much of your work.
Matt ended up moving to Australia at 26 wanting to start something on his own. He and his co-founder started a couple of businesses that didn’t work. Bonjoro came many years later.
[04:05] Starting a Business with a Creative Mindset
Starting off on your own thing is incredibly creative. Every day you don’t know what you’re going to do, and how you’re going to do it. You have to think about unusual ways to do things to succeed, and the learning curve is incredibly steep.
If you approach it with a creative mindset, and you get it right, you probably have a much greater chance of success than somebody who doesn’t approach it with a creative mindset.
If you have a creative mindset, you can think outside the box. You can build brands, inspire people, take different turns, and come up with ideas other people wouldn’t come up with.
[05:48] How Bonjoro Came About
Bonjoro came about as a happy accident. One day, Matt created a 40-second video of his client and sent it out to a colleague from another country. The guy ended up asking for a copy of the video. So he decided to build a system around it and created a video email tool that people could use and send out. Within three years, 35,000 people were using it.
So they ended up taking a leap of faith by scrapping the original business they had and went all-in on this one. It wasn’t an overnight success either.
When you see people who are overnight successes, you can guarantee they actually probably have quite a long history behind them. So when they get to the point where they do the thing that works, it’s built on their previous experiences.
[13:00] How Authors Can Use Bonjoro to Promote Their Book
When somebody comes on board to download your book for the first time, they’d put in their email. Bonjoro can be plugged into whatever platform you’re using (MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, Patreon, Shopify, etc.). They have an app that pulls in the person’s name, location, other information, and what they purchased. You can then hit that person and record a quick 30-second message for that individual.
Here’s what it looks like as an example:
- Katie signed up or downloaded your book from Orlando. And you can see that maybe she already purchased 2-3 of your previous books.
- Then you can record the video saying “Hi Katie, it’s amazing to have you come back and to have you with us. I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
- You press stop recording, and that’s it!
- Bonjoro sends your email along with the video in it.
- Then Katie receives it and watches your video and she’d be blown away that you actually took the time to send a video to her.
The video is an amazing way of getting across who you really are. The fact that you’ve stopped in a for a minute or 30 seconds and just said thank you, that’s pretty amazing!
Katie will now feel it was absolutely the best purchase that she made and there’s a good chance she’ll come back and a better chance that she’d go tell her friends and talk about you.
[15:23] Creating a Bigger Following
Because you’re mentioning by name and you’re sending it to them, it’s not generic. It’s not a canned response which most emails are where it can feel like you’re getting bombarded with information. It makes them feel like they know you. And in some ways, they actually do because you’re talking to them specifically.
This is how we should treat everyone. We treat our customers well. We try and make the best first impression today with everyone.
If you can do this with 100 people, a few of those hundred people are going to have large followings. And if they start to talk about you, you start to get more traffic. You start to get more readers that come into your funnel. And again, it’s a process of being wonderful to everyone.
[23:34] The Benefits of Bonjoro
- Sending personalized video messages to your customers or to your workforce.
- Send it to your email list or a group of 500 people.
- Send updates about what you’re working on. Or send random messages of encouragement.
Personalization works in two ways. One is mentioning the customer mentioning their name and where they’re from and making it all about them. The other part of personalization is it’s about opening up your world as well.
[31:55] Create Your Brand Early
Think about your brand very early on. You can launch a brand tomorrow without even having written the book. Secondly, the brand is something you create from scratch.
The brand that you create behind the word when people say the word, it brings up all the brand values and the feelings behind it and everything that you do.
Episode Resources:
Twitter: @bonjoroapp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bonjoro/
Check out Bonjoro’s Video Funnel Playbook
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