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DALL·E 2 with the prompt "C-3PO and R2-D2"
I’ve been thinking about using swag (“merchandise given away for free”) as a tool for user retention in the context of B2B SaaS products. Swag is everywhere, but I think it’s used ineffectively: e.g. attracting conference attendees to your booth (for awareness)
I landed at this after struggling with marketing to developers. I’ve built products for developers and seen how methods of marketing are ineffective at moving the needle. Emails land on deaf ears, articles written for the sake of SEO reek of inauthenticity. But developers react positively to swag - as evidenced by our Twitter timelines where a random user would post a picture of the swag that they received from a company.
Those who been in open source would recall how things even got extreme at Hacktoberfest 2020 when the hunger for free developer swag became a DDoS attack on open source maintainers.
I believe this extends onto any sophisticated user of B2B - and we want to nurture sophisticated users of our products (traditionally celebrated in “MVP/ambassador programmes”) - because they create content, are influential in their local online/offline communities, and are a great set of champions to have our own sides.
Note that this swag that is posted on social media is not the swag they get at conferences, but the swag that they got in their mail. Some companies have done this well. From what I can recall:
I’m interested in this topic because I’m interested in building B2B product companies and strongly believe that swag is a underutilised tool. I also - perhaps counter intuitively - believe that it’s never too early to invest in company branding, and swag is also an effectively tool to communicate the emotion and promise that you want your brand to have. And I love getting swag - not just for the free stuff - but because so much of our identities today are online, accessible only via screens, and swag lets me express that offline. I’m proud of the Postman sticker I picked up at their office in 2016, and the hoodie from Devfolio that says “Never stop building”.
Are you interested in chatting about this? Perhaps I got something wrong in the content and it needs a fix? Or you’re interested in doing this at your company?
I want to see more companies do this - and I’d love to chat if you are blocked on implementing this in your company. I’m exploring solutions - and would love to chat with you about your problems. I’m at [email protected] or if you prefer - Twitter DM.
Bulk swag for conferences or events and swag for employees are popular use-cases, and the vendors discussed below are solving them.
Focused on swag for retention, not awareness. We forget that, in the tech business, first and foremost, we’re in the business of retention - given that leaky buckets don’t fill up and corroborated by public companies reporting (and celebrating) their net retention rate.
Retention is hard to define generally, but for the context of this article, let’s use it to mean 2 things: “deepening the relationship that the user has with the company” and “incentivising good behaviour to repeat good behaviour”.
To pick a few examples from above: Gatsby’s example above demonstrates that neatly. Open source contributions get rewarded, doing that another time gives more rewards. Tailscale replies to positive mentions, like this one, and rewards participation in their user research through their newsletter. BCNY gave away stickers to Arc early adopters on the 1.0 launch.
The SyntaxFM x Sentry acquisition announcement extended this to just reward being in the community - following one of the podcast hosts, reading a blog post, listening to the episode. More loose targeting than the examples above, but still aligned to deepening the community bond.
The users incentivised were on the edge of being “ambassadors” - as demonstrated by their actions - and the swag pushed them over the edge. That probably resulted in an expression of their ambassadorship - as a tweet on social or a sticker on their laptop - thereby opening the door to other folks.
I think this is especially relevant to B2B SaaS that starts with the individual, free adopter - who champions and ushers the paid-tier team adoption story. Wearing a t-shirt or showing a sticker kickstarts conversations.
I debated about this, and the reason why I’ve put this here
todo: understand ABM, field marketing and fit Sendoso, Alyse, Reachdesk
What’s a good name for this tactic? I’m calling it contextual swag for now.
I’ve spent the last 72 hours digging deeper into how this can be done. My thesis was that more companies can do this - and perhaps it’s more harder than it needs to be.
I haven’t actually done this myself - and but I’m confident about the research I’ve done on this. I’m happy to modify this if you think I’ve gotten something wrong.
If you think you have a problem that you’d like help on (current solutions are inadequate) -
You need to collect addresses + print swag + manage inventory + ship to the customer. The last 2 are also called fulfilment. I dug into e-commerce to understand what different solutions look like.
The solutions below showcase trade-offs in terms of cost and effort involved. The effort involved is in order fulfilment and customer support.
The vendors below
Seems to be the preferred option for companies that have made it and take their brand seriously. Postman, GitHub are interesting examples - that use agencies like Imprint Engine and BSA, respectively. Both of them expose merch stores publicly, with at least, GitHub having evidence to show people actually order merch on their own.
Notably, Postman’s agency also handles customer support for this - which makes this truly full-stack.
Figma also has a fun merch store, however, I’m not able to tell if they use an agency (they probably do - or have hired for that capability in-house).
This approach is probably expensive - but results in merch that is designed by experts, and not UI developers dabbling in merch design as a one-time task. Gemnote is another such full-stack agency that does this (a YC company no less). I especially dig their work on tote bags for Substack.
Get prints on t-shirts, stickers are a standard category for companies. CustomInk is popular in the US, Sticker Mule has built reputation on stickers. Every major geo has a local player (e.g. Printo in India). These companies deliver bulk prints (e.g. 500 shirts across different sizes) to a shipping address.
My hypotheses is that this is where most companies are - because they have existing relationships with these vendors, and implicitly assume that the bulk model for conferences/events extends to contextual swag. Doing this for events makes sense, but it’s a heavy tax when you don’t have e-commerce skills.
Supabase is doing this - with a Shopify storefront to get addresses on top.
I would pick this option if you have some designers in-house that can pitch in with the merch design and you don’t want to manage fulfilment. This can be done with duct-taping a few tools - and I have 2 examples below.
I think the burden on customer support falls on PostHog - which is what their merch store wiki describes.
I believe we’ll see more offline channels open up given how crowded online is. There’s a template of CRM
Are we going to see more personalised swag? Imagine comic books like Postman - but generated with something like XYZ.
Motivation
Note for myself as I convert this into a CMS with github issues.
Things I'm confused about in 11ty
how things work
references: https://github.com/NickColley/website-from-github-issues
also check against https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog/blob/main/package.json
https://twitter.com/sajithpai/status/1637708835228995586
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
interested in operational excellence
raw notes
testing a description
A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
🖖 Vue.js is a progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.
An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
A PHP framework for web artisans
Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML. 📊📈🎉
JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight interpreted programming language with first-class functions.
Some thing interesting about web. New door for the world.
A server is a program made to process requests and deliver data to clients.
Machine learning is a way of modeling and interpreting data that allows a piece of software to respond intelligently.
Some thing interesting about visualization, use data art
Some thing interesting about game, make everyone happy.
We are working to build community through open source technology. NB: members must have two-factor auth.
Open source projects and samples from Microsoft.
Google ❤️ Open Source for everyone.
Alibaba Open Source for everyone
Data-Driven Documents codes.
China tencent open source team.