John Howard With Use Slingshot

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have John Howard with Use Slingshot. Welcome, John.

John Howard: [00:00:50] Hey, how’s it going?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:51] It is going well. Before we get too far into things, tell us about you. Slingshot, how are you serving folks?

John Howard: [00:00:58] Yes. So basically we work with startups and agencies and companies like Adobe and help them give swag to their people and make that super effortless.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:07] So swag, can you explain what it is and why it’s important?

John Howard: [00:01:12] Yeah. So apparel, gifts, little knickknacks, but things that make your people feel good, that’s either internal your employees or external being the people you’re trying to serve as customers or leads. And it’s important because they want to feel love, they want to feel heard. And showing this kind of admiration for them during a deal or doing an onboarding for a customer or employee is very important.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] So this would be different than than what I would see at a trade show where they have, you know, a jar of pens or flash drives.

John Howard: [00:01:47] Yeah. So those things we consider a little bit kitschy, but they do work, so we try to actually make sure the experience that means the package, the handwritten note, how it feels, what it’s paired with is an experience that they feel not just something they pick up and throw in the bag and forget about. So it’s all delivered directly to their doorstep. And so trade shows can actually send this from the trade show just through a QR code without having to worry about how that gets lugged around and thrown in the trash later.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:14] So you are trying to elevate kind of this industry a bit?

John Howard: [00:02:18] Yeah, it’s it’s not that it’s antiquated, but usually people are going for quantity, not quality. So customers come to us for that higher experience because you’re competing with their closet, you’re competing with their wardrobe. And so you want them to pull out the thing that really means something to them. So instead of sending just a bunch of things out into the wild with no tracking, we help you elevate not just the items themselves, but the experience when it’s opened and the follow up behind that to make sure they’re onboarded or go to that next step. You want them to.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:47] Now, how do you help your clients kind of determine if it’s even possible, like an ROI for something? Because I’ve been to a million trade shows and some of this stuff, I’m like, how can they, you know, what’s the ROI of, you know, a pen or a flash drive.

John Howard: [00:03:05] Right? They already have marketing budget for this, which is funny. But the baseline for years and years and years historically has been brand awareness. Basically. I hope they really have my shirt on. I hope they pull my pen out to use that and remember us. That’s the baseline. What we do is create a funnel, just like a marketing funnel, and when someone goes to redeem your gift at the end of that, they’re asked for an action that could be jump on a call with me. Schedule a Zoom call, download a PDF about our sales products. Or it could be somewhat internal, like go to the next step of onboarding. So we really measure that and measure those click through rates so we can actually put real numbers to the impact, not of the item itself, but of the emotional transaction that just took place.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:46] So this really are the item, really isn’t the important part. It’s the relationship that’s the important part. And these are just a means to an end to build and nurture existing or new relationships.

John Howard: [00:04:00] Right. Yeah. And then we the high end stuff allows it more to be more shareable, naturally. So we try to create that organic sheer ability. But yes, it is not the item itself inherently. It is that whole experience. And then being able to track that in some kind of way, that relationship is there in and out of our forms in 15 seconds. So it’s a really quick transaction and then they’re asked to do something optionally. So those click through right through those conversion rates that more traditional marketers would measure can actually put to real dollar spend and really measured that way.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:30] So what’s your back story? How did you get into this line of work?

John Howard: [00:04:34] Yes, my last company was Black Airplane. It was a design agency in Atlanta. And so I sold that to two people back in 2017. I stayed on for two years and I saw that our customer swag, we just didn’t slap our logo on it. We tried to make it real experience internally. People love that. And so I wanted to go back into building another project or another business. And so once I left there in March of 2020, historically a bad month to leave, but had no idea. We started this new company and it’s been great because everybody’s been distributed. A lot of people are trying to reach people they could not normally reach, and we shipped to 88 countries last year. So it’s not just here locally in the United States, the world has been impacted with distributed teams both in a good way and of course, historically otherwise. You all heard about.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:19] Now when you kind of made the leap into this industry, did you have kind of some breadcrumbs or some clues? It’s like, Hey, this is something that could work out. We’re starting to get traction. What were some of the earliest kind of hints that you were on to something?

John Howard: [00:05:37] Yes. So I’m a big believer. Again, I sold an agency I’m big believer in like UX and research and discovery before you actually start something. So I went and met with a lot of companies here in Atlanta just to say, Hey, let me buy you coffee, just not pick your brain, but just sit with you and find out what your industry does currently with this. And so there was obviously an incessant need that nobody had a full time job doing that. It was pretty much the number one identifier that people were being asked to do this job and hand out swag and put together these packages and run to the post office, deal with the customer service, all of that kind of stuff, and gathering the stuff in spreadsheets. And they weren’t paid to do that full time. They were paid normally to be people ops, meaning focus on my people and make them happy. This was a small subset of the job, but it took out an enormous amount of time. So it was a really easy win for us to say, Hey, what if we relieve that part of the process for you?

Lee Kantor: [00:06:23] And then once they kind of raise their hand and say, sure, we’ll give that a shot. What were some of kind of the the earliest iterations of what swag could be for like an early customer?

John Howard: [00:06:36] Yes. So actually one of our first companies luckily was Adobe. And so they’re a big company like Photoshop and Illustrator and XD. I had met them when I had my agency at a at a conference. They took us they flew us all out there, a few of us designers to LA to do a new product demo. And so while I was there, I had already been working on this, conceptualizing it. So I said, Hey, who’s your people ops person? Are they here? I just I don’t need to meet them, but just to know who they are. And somebody said, No, no, no, let’s actually go up there and meet them. And so they took me up front to meet this person. So I guess it was serendipity in a way, but basically got to talk to them and six months later we finally won them and we kicked off our major product that we have now. So it was kind of easily validated, but we had spent a lot of time to get all that prepped, a lot of research to build the product. I mean, that first version was built in and done with no automation, but the customer didn’t know. It was built in a weekend through web flow and WordPress, a few other products.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:34] Now, when you’re working with a client that maybe hasn’t invested in swag in the way that you deliver the experience, like what is that kind of onboarding? Or what are some of the questions you’re asking them and they’re asking you about what it could be and what it’s going to look like.

John Howard: [00:07:50] Yes. So we ask people like, what’s your audience? Who are you trying to reach? If they’re asking us, hey, we’re trying to make our employees feel more love. Well, of course, that’s the baseline. You want them to feel great, but we’re trying to push them into that next step. Well, the next step is I’d love them to tell other people about this company how awesome it is so we can build on those call to actions for that. If it was an external person like, Hey, we’re a sales team, we’re trying to drive more sales, like, how could you help us? Well, of course you could just buy swag and give it away, but let’s actually set up a funnel to get those people to jump on calls. They’re already interested in you. They’ll get some really nice swags for free, and then you can have them jump on a call and then maybe they’ll they’ll give you 15 minutes to talk about that. Since our click through rates are really high, that works out well. So we really try to discover what your audience, what’s your end goal, not just brand awareness. They’re holding your gift in their hand, but what are they actually trying to achieve with this and that? That really helps them elevate that. That’s why we charge for that’s why we’re different services, because we really try to position the swag to do something and to be meaningful.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:46] And so what do you need more of? How can we help you?

John Howard: [00:08:50] Yes. So always leads relationships. We are we’re we’re pretty much humming now at this point. But it’s been a long road. So anybody else has been in this industry or that is just interested in what we do. It’s always fun to have a conversation. I love meeting new people. I love trying to discover better ways that we could use our swag and maybe help other companies elevate this or just talk to other marketers. People that understand the business of marketing, that want to talk about how we could get better about that and more efficient in the way that we use swag to do the same things they’ve done traditionally for years now.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:24] Swag, it sounds like swag could be pretty much anything, right? This is just a means to an end of kind of serving somebody and building a relationship, nurturing a relationship. So what are some of the crazy swag items that you’ve seen out there have used for clients?

John Howard: [00:09:41] Yeah, we’re a lot different than our competitors and the fact that our stuff is much more high quality and you can print in different locations. We don’t do the low quality printing. There’s different types of ways to print on materials, but we do everything. There’s like 1500 items that we’ve done historically, but even stuff is crazy. As last month we had a company called Loops, and so they’re a marketing company. They have nothing to do with the word loops or Froot Loops. We said, Hey, what if we did something crazy and created a viral marketing cereal box for y’all? And so we actually went out and got the cereal. We got the boxes printed and procured. We got a 3D printed. What do you call those things? They are decoder ring and had it solve a mystery so you could pull up this prize and solve a mystery. And through that, you got another prize, which is a hoodie. So it made it an adventure, it made it go viral, and it really helped that company do well. And they actually trended top ten on product hunt last month when they launched this product with us.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:32] Now, when you’re working with your customer, is this something that they’re, you know, getting 1000 of these products, 100 of these products, like what is kind of what what’s kind of the number they’re getting from you? Is is it in mass or is it really kind of targeted like a sniper for a specific group or the type of person?

John Howard: [00:10:56] We’d recommend never over buying. So we really tried to position it based on the audience or the event you’re trying to attend or reach out to. Like in the case of loops, we have them order 100. It was a micro release, so basically only 100 of them were out there and it created more buzz because of that. So we do that or we could do large campaigns for camps or tradeshows, etc. So it really doesn’t matter. It’s kind of based on the item first. Like most of our items start out at minimum order quantities of 25 and there are certain items like pins like you mentioned that that could be like 1000 you have to buy because they’re so cheap. That’s just the minimum order quantity. So it really depends on the item and it depends on the audience and thing you’re trying to reach.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:34] So this this second venture for you to go from a design firm to this, this is still you know, you’re still kind of scratching that creativity itch. You’re still using your skills in just a slightly different way. Congratulations.

John Howard: [00:11:49] Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. So basically I love SAS businesses, but I love something about the brick and mortar and the agency consultative business. So this is a good blend of both. We actually have a physical space in Acworth, Georgia, so about 30, 35 minutes north of Atlanta. But we also were able to build software around that. So our platform on top of it is amazing, it’s magical and it’s a subscription platform. But the swag itself and all that is still the old school physical way of doing that. We’re just really good at that part of the process.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:17] So who is your ideal client?

John Howard: [00:12:20] We love Adobe’s. I mean companies like that, we have agencies that are small, it really doesn’t matter as long as we’re seeing value from you giving away the swag and it’s measurable, it’s a great client. But somebody like Adobe, we basically started with one account and we’ve spread to 13 different business units. So that’s all about word of mouth. So again, it’s fun to go into one company and kind of spread a different departments when they have 18,000 employees. That’s a big deal. So we’ve we’ve done that really, really well. It’s all been by word of mouth, but also we have lots of small companies work, work we work with. We mentioned before that just have cool ideas that are willing to take chances and move the needle a little faster than some of the monoliths. And so it’s been a lot of fun. There’s a lot of there’s a good wide spread of people. Everybody needs swag and everybody wants to give it away more effectively and not do the work.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:04] And if somebody wants to learn more, have more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s a website?

John Howard: [00:13:10] Yeah use so USD slingshot dot com good stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:16] Well John thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

John Howard: [00:13:20] Awesome. Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:22] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:13:28] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta. On Pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free add on paycom.