From making babies to making videos: The WHY behind expeerly.

As many of you know, Ava, the company I co-founded in 2104 with Pascal, Philipp and Peter, helped 50,000 couples conceive. While impressive, its significance goes beyond mere numbers. People today still approach me in public to introduce their Ava babies (or should I say toddlers :)), and I'm fortunate to have two Avababies at home.

While many seek meaning in their professional endeavors, the depth of identification, purpose, and inspiration I found in co-founding Ava is rare. In essence, Ava became an extension of myself, and vice versa.

Following the sale of Ava in 2022 (details for another day), the question loomed: what next?

Impact is often measured in sales

At that point, the market environment specifically for startups had turned. Money that was pretty free-flowing before dried up while advertising costs on all major platforms increased.

Any founder knows that having a vision and passion for the idea is key. But true impact of the idea is often reflected in scale, and therefore in sales. Recent data suggests that companies able to raise a Series A round need a staggering 6.3x growth, while maintaining an impressive 80% gross margin. And this rise in profitability expectation isn't exclusive to startups but to any kind or organization.

Today's founders, marketers, and sales professionals face unprecedented pressure to deliver growth without sacrificing profitability. Leading to many sleepless nights for whoever is in charge of making these numbers a reality.

Mission: Reduce sleepless nights

So instead of venturing into the next direct-to-consumer startup, I decided to make it my mission to support the founders, marketers and salespeople around me. To make them successful and help them create the impact they envision.

Reducing their sleepless nights by sharing what worked best for Ava and make it easy, accessible and cost effective for them to apply to their companies.?

Enter: User-generated content.

Let your community speak on your behalf

User-generated content (UGC) refers to content created by your users, such as video testimonials, reviews, and unboxing videos. Traditionally, companies simply reposted content that customers shared online. However, nowadays, companies are more deliberate about UGC, actively encouraging customers to create content or collaborating with authentic creators.

At Ava, we prioritized UGC from the outset, focusing on sharing genuine stories from our users about how Ava positively impacted their lives. For instance, in 2017, we highlighted the heartwarming story of our first Ava Baby, Jace (??), and his parents, Lizzie and Sam.

After that, telling the story of our users became a key strategy we used over and over again. With Sharee Gibson , Lindsay Meisel and Anna in the driver' seat.

I guess it’s obvious why it works. But let’s dive in anyways

Reflecting on these captivating pictures and videos, it's evident why user-generated content proved to be so effective. Let me outline the key advantages we observed at Ava.

1. Communicate complex information

As marketers we often find our products quite simple. But for a customer that might not be so familiar with your category, it is actually often tricky to decipher what your product actually does, how it actually works, how it actually looks, how it compares to others and - most importantly - why all these things actually matter to them.?

And while we explained in every possible way how Ava and the data science behind it detects the fertile days, we could never beat a customer saying “I used this, it was easy and I got pregnant”.?

2. Outperformed in performance marketing

User testimonials consistently performed significantly better for us both organically and paid than any other asset types. Yes - that includes the fancy & expensive campaigns we did with agencies. User testimonials got more engagement, were watched longer and lead more often to purchases than other asset types. We also know that user generated testimonials lead to higher conversions on the product detail page, which is why we displayed them there prominently. (Thanks to Ana García Colomina for that)

3. Cost effectiveness allows for scale & diversity

When starting out with user generated content at Ava, we still flew a camera team across the country to take the videos. Today, mobile phone cameras allow users to tell their story in the quality desired.?

That makes user generated content the most affordable way for brands to get video content on their products. Besides the possible cost savings we cared about two things. A) Lower cost content allowed us a faster content iteration, fighting ad fatigue. B) Lower cost content allowed for a higher content density which is the entry ticket to pure video channels like Tiktok and - today - Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts.

4. Community Building

At Ava, building a community around our product was a key strategy for us.?A center piece was the flourishing user community on facebook, consisting of ten thousands of our users.

User generated content served as the visual embodiment of our community. Facilitating user interaction and fostering a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose.

5. Authenticity?

For Ava, trust was key. We often spoke of the "trust level" people needed to reach with us before making a purchase. The reason is simple: People entrusted us with their most private information.

Leveraging our customers' genuine voices not only fostered trust but also reinforced our commitment to authenticity.

6. Social Proof

At Ava, we maintained a detailed Excel sheet listing all channels featuring reviews of our product, spanning app stores, retailers, social platforms, and external sources like Trustpilot. Keeping track of this extensive array was no small task.

Internally, we were committed to authenticity, with a strict policy against fabricated reviews or irregular incentives (credit here goes to Peter Stein for having the necessary foresight). Yet, as many marketers can attest, reviews tend to skew negative due to the reluctance of satisfied customers to leave feedback. Consequently, we consistently sought reviews to counterbalance any negative sentiments, a challenging endeavor given the multitude of platforms.

While user-generated content didn't replace traditional reviews, it served a similar purpose in establishing social proof. This allowed us to address gaps in review coverage and build trust with our audience.

7. We just kind of loved it

In addition to its business benefits, we had a genuine affection for user-generated content. As employees and founders, there's nothing more gratifying than hearing our customers express appreciation for what we do, especially on a Monday morning.

We made it a point to showcase our customers' voices during team meetings, sharing them with business partners, friends, and family. These testimonials served as a significant source of motivation for us.

Why start a company in the space?

UGC is undeniably powerful, but it's also quite challenging to perfect and implement seamlessly.

The process of strategizing, sourcing (often globally), briefing, providing feedback, and editing this content can place a significant strain on internal resources.

And remember, the mission was to help marketers get more sleep. Not less.

That's why I've decided to simplify this process by assisting marketers, founders and key accounts in swiftly and cost-effectively sourcing user-generated content while ensuring its optimal performance and distribution.

Our approach is straightforward and serves companies across sizes & industries:

1. We maintain an extensive, global network of creators / users.
2. We've built best-in-class software to streamline the entire UGC process. We use the software for our own purposes, allow companies to use it themselves (Upwork for UGC) or license it out to companies who need a UGC CRM for their in-house teams.
3. We provide expertise on effective strategies tailored to different industries.
4. We have the capacity to cost-effectively run the operations behind small and large UGC projects, locally or globally.
5. We've built our own product test brand - the so called expeerly testimonial videos - with its own standards and a selected group of expeerly testers.
6. We partner with retailers to distribute expeery testimonial videos across their product detail pages and have built a content distribution engine ourselves.

Here are examples on how we support marketers, founders and key account managers:

1. We support brands like Dyson, Miele, Haier, Groupe SEB and others by producing and distributing expeerly video testimonials on their products. These are then displayed among our retail network as well as our own channels.
2. We support large global enterprise clients like GetYourGuide with their global user generated content needs and take over the entire UGC process with creators from Sao Paulo to Madeira, from Berlin to LA.
3. We support ecommerce companies like Shop Apotheke, Thalia, Qualipet, ifolor and others on their tailored UGC needs on specific SKU's.
4. We support various startups by providing them access to our UGC platform ("Upwork for UGC") and allow them to source and guide creators independently.
5. We plan on supporting enterprise customers with internal UGC teams with licenses to our UGC CRM, so they can run their own processes more effectively.

If you've read this far: Thanks for being a part of our journey. And I look forward to sharing more on expeerly in the future.

Philipp Schwendimann , Sophie Engelmaier and me are just getting started :)

And of course - I'd be a bad marketer if I didn't mention this: If your company has UGC needs - just email me at [email protected]. I'd be happy to jointly evaluate if we're a fit. Or just set up your first campaign at www. expeerly.com.