First Look: Spreadable

Thursday Sep 23, 2010 by Nathan Burke - Marketing Manager, Aprigo

How do you get people to talk about your brand? There are dozens of tools out there that allow your content to be “sharable” (ShareThis, AddThis and AddToAny come to mind), but Spreadable, the new product from the team at Grasshopper Group is taking the focus away from sharing content, and instead concentrates on building referrals for brands. And it gets a lot more interesting once you peel back the layers.

Spreadable is the newest product from the people at Grasshopper Group, a Needham-based company making products for entrepreneurs. You’re likely to have heard about their first product, the aptly named Grasshopper Virtual Phone System, which launched in 2003 and has over 100,000 entrepreneurs as customers (Source: The Grasshopper Website). The story goes as follows: two

young entrepreneurs needed a phone system that was simple and met the needs of entrepreneurs on-the-go. With nothing out there, they decided to create their own, and thus, Grasshopper was born.

Then, they needed the ability to do monthly recurring billing for their customers. After looking at the “clunky, off-the-shelf systems that fell short, and enterprise solutions that charged huge set up and transaction fees,” the Grasshopper Group built their own system called Chargify.com.  Starting to see a pattern here?

Finally, the marketing team was trying to figure out how to create more buzz, and generate more referrals. They built a tool internally called “refer-an-entrepreneur”, and added it to the grasshopper.com site. “Since adding the refer-an-entrepreneur feature,” said Jonathan Kay, Ambassador of Buzz at Grasshopper Group, “we’ve generated well over $100,000 in sales that were directly attributable to the app. And after seeing people coming in from the button converting at over 20%, our CEO decided to turn the app into a product.” That’s how spreadable was born.

What Is Spreadable?

In my conversation with the Ambassador of Buzz (do you get special license plates with that title?), I wanted to understand what makes spreadable different from all the other share-it services out there, and why someone would pay for a product that has so many free alternatives.

“Let’s say you’re on a website, love it, and you want to tell your friends. You open an email, twitter, etc., and send a referral. But you’re always a few steps removed from sending a referral due to distractions, so there are times when you intend to send a referral and just never get to it. On the company side, there are a lot of benefits. First, there’s the convenience factor. Having a button everywhere on the site that pops up a window with email, twitter, and other social network sharing capabilities makes it really easy for someone to share info on a brand,” said Kay. “Second, as a brand, you get to control the messaging. In the email, in the twitter post, and elsewhere, you get to set the default message that will be sent in the referral. Where other sharing services simply let you share a single piece of content like a blog post, spreadable lets the company decide what they want to share about their brand, not just a piece of content.”

Another benefit of using spreadable is the analytics, allowing you to see where people are referring their friends, which social networks are generating the most referrals, and which users are your best word-of-mouth brand ambassadors.

Finally, the most interesting feature to me (and it is not yet in the product) will be an upcoming integration with chargify- which will be a game changer- as it will allow companies to give referrers financial incentives to get others to buy the service. Let me give an example. Let’s pretend I use Basecamp, and it costs me $50 per month, and they use Chargify to bill me monthly. They then put up a spreadable button, and give me $25 for each friend I refer that signs up. I refer a couple of friends, and they end up subscribing. Since I sent them, I now get a $50 credit that can be automatically applied to my account through chargify.

In essence, the integration between chargify and spreadable will be a dead-simple, lightweight affiliate program. And that’s something.

When I asked whether the Grasshopper Group sees spreadable as a standalone product or more of a hook to get people to use chargify, I was surprised. “We think the spreadable product alone will be more profitable than chargify,” said Kay. “At a price point of around $50 per month, there’s a low barrier to entry, and it becomes an easy decision. Even in a small company, a CEO doesn’t want to see anything that costs less than $50 per month.”

Getting a little bit ahead of myself, I asked whether there were plans in the roadmap to integrate with CRM systems. There are. As a marketer, it would be awesome to be able to see:

• Which customers are referring others
• Where are they referring them- Email, facebook, twitter, etc.
• How do incentives help conversions- Give the referrer $$, give the referee a discount, both
• Where in the process are people most likely to refer someone- When they buy, in an email, during a trial

And it would be great to have all this information available in one place.

Right now, it looks like spreadable is able to answer most of these questions, and it really is simple to get started. While the integration with chargify and CRM systems is in the roadmap, the app has enough right now to start generating referrals and know who and where those referrals are coming from. And chances are, that’s something most entrepreneurs simply can’t do right now.

Nathan Burke is the Marketing Manager at Waltham, MA startup Aprigo. He is an infrequent writer at both Blogstring.com and MarketingStartups.com and is uncomfortable describing himself in the third person in italics at the end of an article. You can find him on Twitter at @nathanwburke. 

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