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Voiceflow: Kristin Hillery on bringing a new category to market · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Hey, everybody. Before we get into this episode, just wanted to share a quick and exciting announcement. The Superpath Slack community is moving from a primarily free model to a primarily paid model. That's right.
• 0:09
  So we're gonna start charging for the Slack group.
• 0:11
  If you've been in the group or you've seen our emails, you know there's been quite a bit of discussion about this lately, and I just wanna take just a quick moment to explain what we're doing and why.
• 0:19
  Over the past couple of years, the Slack group has grown to about 16,000 people, and there have been so many wonderful things that have come as a result of that.
• 0:28
  It's turned into what I truly believe is the best community for content marketers out there. There have been some growing pains that have come along with that as well.
• 0:35
  The group has become a little bit noisy, quite difficult to manage, and I think the biggest thing is that I'm no longer able to create the community experience that we used to have and that I still believe we should be presenting for our members.
• 0:49
  That's the thing that I feel the most conviction over is that this new model will allow us to create the best community, not just today, but going forward. You can check it out if you'd like.
• 0:58
  We're running a promo through July 31st. You get 25% off, so it's 20 bucks a month. With the code, it's 15 bucks a month. There's also an annual plan which you can get a discount on.
• 1:08
  You just go to superpath.co/community and use the code SUPERSLACK. If you go in the Slack group in our announcements, there'll be information about it there too. So there you go.
• 1:17
  Now, there are also a couple of channels that we're leaving free, so if you're already in the group, no action required. You will still have access to all of those channels.
• 1:24
  And if you are curious in checking it out, you'll still be able to get access to those free channels. And you can think of it as kind of a trial to see if the paid version is for you.
• 1:32
  If you have any questions, feel free to email me, jimmy@superpath.co. Thanks so much to everybody for providing input. We've had a lot of people weigh in.
• 1:40
  I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that people care enough to send their feedback in and to weigh in on the future of Superpath. I really, truly believe we've settled on something that will be fantastic.
• 1:51
  We did a soft launch last week. A ton of people joined. It's already starting to show signs of that same community experience that I'm hoping to get back to. Kind of a back to our roots type of thing.
• 2:00
  So anyways, I'll get out of the way. We have a fantastic episode today with Kristen Hillery. Hope you enjoy it, and thanks so much.
• 2:06
  [gentle music] Everybody should be excited about what you're doing and should understand the why behind it and be able to speak about it in a way that gets other people excited too, and you can't do that if it's not clearly documented somewhere, then people are just gonna...
• 2:22
  It's gonna be a game of telephone. [gentle music] Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. As always, I'm excited for this conversation. Today, I'm talking with Kristen Hillery.
• 2:34
  She's the head of brand and content at Voiceflow. Really interesting conversation in a few different ways. One is the brand component of her role, which we talk quite a bit about.
• 2:42
  Brand and content don't always fit together, so we talk through some of the ways that it does and some of the things that they keep separate. We also talked about the product itself. It is kind of on the forefront.
• 2:51
  It's not necessarily an established field yet, and so that creates some marketing opportunities and challenges. Basically, they're building from the ground up. They're figuring out the product.
• 3:00
  They're figuring out how to sell it. They're testing a lot of different things. So it's quite interesting to hear how she and her team are going about that. I'll get out of the way.
• 3:08
  I think you all enjoy this episode, and if you do, we sure would appreciate a rating or review in whichever podcast app that you use. Thanks so much, everybody. [gentle music] Hey, everybody.
• 3:18
  Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly. Very excited to talk today with Kristen Hillery, head of content and brand at Voiceflow. Um, Kristen, I was just looking at your LinkedIn.
• 3:29
  You have a really interesting and really impressive career in content marketing. So maybe we start there actually.
• 3:35
  Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about some of the work you've done over the past couple of years? Yes. Well, thank you.
• 3:41
  I have a weird background, as I've been told, and I've hidden a couple of things on there that I think translates to content marketing but confuse a lot of people. Oh, interesting. I was a sous chef for a while.
• 3:54
  I went to culinary school after I got super burned out working in marketing. And so I did that. I just got really sucked into it. I loved it. I had a ton of fun. It was the most wild thing ever. It was just nonstop.
• 4:08
  All I did was work and burn myself [laughs] all the time. [laughs] And then I got burned out of that because I wound up running a restaurant in Austin, really doing nothing but working and never saw any of my friends.
• 4:21
  The only time I would ever see anybody, I'd say, "Yeah, if you wanna hang out, meet me at this bar down the street from my restaurant. It's 11:45 tonight." [laughs] Right.
• 4:29
  And they would say, [laughs] "You're living in a different reality. I have to work at 8 AM, so no." [laughs] So I stopped doing that, and I was like, "You know what? I really miss writing.
• 4:40
  I miss all of that stuff back before I left that first marketing job." It was before content marketing was really a thing. And then when I got back into it, it still wasn't really a thing.
• 4:51
  We were still kind of in that era of, "Let's put out as many articles as possible on our blog." Mm-hmm. "Let's hit people with these really heavy key phrase articles and be really [laughs] gross about it."
• 5:03
  And so I wound up getting a job at a startup, and that's what I signed up to do. And I was really happy about it [laughs] because-I was happy to get back in there.
• 5:14
  And then the reason I got that job, people didn't understand when I was applying for jobs. Everybody was like, "What is this person working in restaurants? Like, w-what are they... What is this?
• 5:24
  This doesn't make any sense." And, and I was like, "No, wait, but I used to do [laughs] marketing, but I'm also a writer. I ran my university's humor publication, so I have all these skills."
• 5:33
  And also, I had to be on top of everything running a restaurant because there's a million things going on all the time. You're organizing a bunch of different people. You're watching out for people's safety.
• 5:46
  In a way, it's UX design because it's all about experience and delivering a really consistent experience that goes above and beyond people's expectations, hopefully, so they come back, so they tell their friends, so they're delighted by it.
• 6:00
  If you miss one thing, like one time I was working at a gastropub where we probably served, like, 40 or 50 pounds of fries, and I forgot to order potatoes one night. And [laughs] guess what?
• 6:14
  The next day everything is gonna come crashing down. Oh my gosh. That sounds so stressful.
• 6:19
  [laughs] Another time, I was working a brunch shift, and it was right when I got promoted to sous chef, and my egg cook, that was the day that he got back on heroin. Oh my gosh.
• 6:30
  And I didn't, [laughs] I didn't realize that until the first 10 tickets came in in the first two minutes of us being open, and then it became really obvious.
• 6:40
  So I always said, like, nothing could ever be more difficult, more chaotic, more overwhelming than that.
• 6:47
  We always got through it, and I learned so much about organizing and just how important your team is, delivering that consistent product, how everything just connects.
• 6:56
  Also being creative, too, because you can't just be serving the same stuff all the time. So that's hidden from my LinkedIn. [laughs] It's buried down there. That's fascinating.
• 7:04
  I mean, that sounds really challenging, that environment. I mean, is running a content team a breeze? Obviously there's some transfer of skill, like the organization, the people management, some of that stuff. Mm-hmm.
• 7:13
  But I would imagine that the pressure of it is much lower- Yes... running a content team because there aren't customers waiting for stuff immediately. Yeah.
• 7:21
  And there's such a weird thing, too, culture-wise with the restaurant industry where people are just kind of doing the same thing that they've done forever. It's similar to the military, you know?
• 7:31
  It's expected that people are gonna be really mean to you. People are gonna say awful things to you. If you burn yourself, you gotta keep going unless your arm has fallen off. There is no HR. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
• 7:43
  So it's weird that way, too, and I, I would have many moments in the industry where I was like, "Have we ever thought of not doing it like this?" [laughs] Like- [laughs] Right. Right.
• 7:54
  [laughs] Have we ever thought of being collaborative and asking our line cooks to contribute to the menu?
• 7:59
  Or a simple thing like once brunch service starts we know that we're gonna get a bunch of orders for beignets, which are cooked in the fryer. We only have two fryers, so you can't be cooking a million orders of beignets.
• 8:11
  You could only probably do three orders at a time. So what if we started making them five minutes before we opened? Stuff like that, where there's just, like, efficiency and creativity.
• 8:21
  Innovation isn't always valued at most places. It always makes me think with content teams, everybody knows something. Not just on your content team, but on your sales team or your customer service team especially.
• 8:35
  What does everybody know?
• 8:37
  Everybody probably knows something really important, but they're never gonna tell you because they either don't realize that it's valuable information, maybe it just feels like a known thing, or it doesn't seem important to them.
• 8:48
  Just checking in regularly, what does everybody know? How do you create the space for people to feel like they're welcomed to do that? That is so interesting. I'd actually love to go deeper on that. Yeah.
• 8:59
  Maybe, though, we could just give people some background on what you're doing now. I'd love to talk a little bit more about...
• 9:05
  In each episode we get into a little bit of org structure, team management, meeting cadence, and things like that, and I feel like some of that will come out, and I wanna do that 'cause that's super interesting.
• 9:13
  But maybe first could you tell us about Voiceflow? What is Voiceflow? Like, who is Voiceflow? Yeah. And then sort of as a follow-up to that, could you talk about where content fits in.
• 9:21
  Where does it fit in within the rest of marketing? And maybe talk a little bit about who's on the team and sort of give us, like, a sense of bigger picture. Yeah.
• 9:28
  So Voiceflow, Voiceflow is a collaborative AI agent building platform for product teams to design, develop, and launch chat assistants. Basically, you could think of us as the Figma of conversation design.
• 9:44
  So if you've ever had the unfortunate task of writing out, like, a chatbot script, you have to write out every possible thing that somebody could type into the thing. It's a mess. The homepage, it almost looks like Miro.
• 9:59
  You know? It's like a whiteboard except it's not just a design. Like, you...
• 10:02
  as you build the blocks, you're actually building a logic and a workflow for a chatbot, not just a design that then someone else has to go turn into a actual functioning chatbot. Yeah.
• 10:11
  And it's super cool because you can collaborate with people, so there's a huge pain point for cross-functional teams is they're trying to build these enterprise level AI agents, and they need to have a lot of different people involved.
• 10:24
  And then, you know, you might have your designer build something out, and once the developer gets it, they have no idea. Like, they can't build it.
• 10:32
  So it gets everybody on the same page pretty early on.Which is really cool. And then anytime you wanna change something, if you were using a static tool, oh my gosh, what a mess.
• 10:41
  It's just a unreal amount of work that goes into these things, like looking at the back end. And then instead, you can just go in and update everything. It'll take care of where all that appears.
• 10:53
  And then now we even have generative AI features built in too, so it's solving... There's a lot of very repetitive tasks that conversation designers have to do.
• 11:03
  Like, if you're building a, an agent that's gonna be, like, a customer service for a retail store or something, you'd have to write out every different way somebody could say, "Where is my refund?"
• 11:17
  So they might say that, like, 20 different ways. When am I getting my money back? Using Voiceflow, you can use AI to just automatically take care of all that stuff. That is cool. Yeah. So it's...
• 11:28
  Most of us probably look at these experiences as like, oh, it's a robot, and it's kinda dumb, and it's [laughs] not a great experience.
• 11:35
  I just wanna deal with it as quickly as possible so that it puts me in touch with an actual person. Yeah. And then we actually get to talk to a person, and things get better.
• 11:44
  But this is making, in that specific use case, the job of a customer support person so much better because now they get to spend time making it a good experience.
• 11:55
  Like IKEA, I think, because they're saving so much time using this type of technology, now they have a team that's basically upselling furniture because they're providing interior design advice. Oh, wow.
• 12:08
  So stuff like that, where it's like your job could get way cooler and way less rage-y. [laughs] 'Cause I would imagine a lot of people are angry when they talk to customer support. I totally get that.
• 12:18
  It's like the equivalent of calling an 800 number and just screaming "representative" into the phone- [laughs] Yes... until you can talk with someone. But in some ways, it's just, it's been a shortfall of the technology.
• 12:26
  Yeah. And so that's super interesting. And I feel like this is cool because this is bread and butter SaaS, but also, like, at, just at the very forefront of generative AI is changing a lot of things. Mm-hmm.
• 12:36
  This is the type of use case that I could get really excited about, whereas like some of the content use cases I'm not as excited about. Yeah.
• 12:42
  But also just in terms of the way that people are gonna interact with businesses. So I'm curious how that sort of flows into the marketing and the brand stuff that you're working on. Yeah.
• 12:50
  Could you talk about the team itself, like who's involved in content and brand, and then what do those roles look like? What are those people working on? Yeah. So we are a two-person marketing team.
• 13:00
  It's me and my teammate Sam Burns, who's brilliant and amazing. And we collaborate on all of the [laughs] stuff. We're in touch constantly. We both work remote. He is more on the data side of things, which I love.
• 13:14
  For me, somebody who's more on the creative side, so we complement each other really well. That's cool. That's really cool. He has also just like a tremendous understanding of the space.
• 13:25
  He is a conversation designer too, so he brings a lot of understanding of how everything works. He hosts a lot of our webinars and events.
• 13:34
  He's a great host because he has a little bit of an improv background [laughs] which I think is really cool. Wow. He sounds like a real unicorn. Yeah. He's great. So we also bonded over that.
• 13:43
  I haven't done a lot of improv. I've done enough improv to where I can say I've [laughs] done improv. But we have a little bit of a humor background going on, which I think is a superpower for content marketing.
• 13:55
  That's very interesting. Does that make its way into the stuff that you publish, or is... or do you mean more from like a culture perspective?
• 14:01
  That the two of you are able to sort of find lighter moments in your day-to-day work, kind of have inside jokes, that kind of thing. I think both. We're trying to do more humor-wise. It's snuck in there already.
• 14:11
  I've only been here since the end of last year, so not super long.
• 14:16
  Because of where the company is, how young the company is, there's been a lot of figuring out who we are, what we wanna do, and what we can realistically accomplish with such a small team. Mm-hmm.
• 14:26
  And I think naturally, for me anyway, I think it's the same for him, it's natural to have some humor come into your content.
• 14:33
  It doesn't mean you have to have a straight-up joke in there, but we had, for example, we do a show, a live show called Breaking Bots, and it's where we invite two conversation designers on to break a chatbot or an assistant of some kind.
• 14:49
  And we did the California DMV's assistant a couple of weeks ago. And in our copy for the event description copy and the social copy, I was like, "Oh, I gotta make some kinda driving joke," because I love cars.
• 15:04
  I do autocross for fun. I'm, like, super into car racing. Oh, super cool. And I think the last line of it was like, "Save your spot. No parallel parking required." I love it. And it's like, that's not a cheesy joke.
• 15:17
  It's just like a cute, clever thing, which I think adds a lot. Oh, definitely. I love that.
• 15:23
  I can think of a lot of times, especially, like, in my agency days, bringing on new customers, building content plans for them, and you talk to them about the voice and the tone they're hoping to achieve, and it's a lot of like, "It's professional, but informal.
• 15:34
  Concise." Yeah. It's like, what are you gonna do with this? And I remember there was one time I talked to a customer, hopefully it's okay to say this now 'cause it was so long ago. His name was Greg.
• 15:42
  He ran a company called ReadMe, it's like a API documentation SaaS product, and his answer was that when we talked about voice and tone, he wanted it to be whimsical, and that was, like, way off base. I was like, "Whoa."
• 15:54
  Like, "I've never heard anybody say that. Like, what do you mean by that?"
• 15:58
  And he ran me through all these examples of stuff they had already done and kind of what he was trying to get at with it, which was just sort of like lightheartedness and, you know, little jokes here and there.
• 16:06
  And actually, it made the work that we did way more fun and way more creative because it just sent us off in this new direction, and we got to flex a muscle that we really had never used before, which is super cool.
• 16:15
  So I love that. I feel like bringing some of that lightheartedness into B2B SaaS is a great thing. Yeah. I like that too. Whimsical, I would imagine that as being...
• 16:23
  If somebody just said, "Okay, that's our voice, whimsical," I'd be likeAll right, children [laughs] Yeah. Come down to this magical pond. I don't know. [laughs] But I like that. Yeah, and maybe it's also...
• 16:35
  I think the default with voice and tone is what you were just saying, like, we're intellectual, but not academic. We're cool, but not arrogant. And it's like- Yeah... what does that really mean?
• 16:47
  So it has to be something that's different than that. Maybe it has to do with the real voice of your lead writer or lead content person because- Hard to fake. Yeah.
• 16:58
  When I'm thinking about, like, what does that mean, humor, humor can mean anything. What it really is for us is, like, we're just being self-aware. We're poking fun of ourselves whenever we can.
• 17:09
  Think you also have to get specific about that type of humor. That's really cool. I really like that. I'm curious, like, to go a little deeper on the strategy component, what's the go-to-market motion look like?
• 17:18
  Meaning, like, is it all PLGs? Are you driving people to demos? Is it some mix of those two things?
• 17:24
  You know, is content really all about accumulating organic traffic and page views, or is it more like product-focused stuff?
• 17:30
  I guess the thing I'm really getting at is, like, how much do you write directly about the product? Yeah. Versus, like, how much other, like, content growth stuff do you do? Yeah.
• 17:38
  The thing with this space is there is a lack of information about it, so you have all these people, these conversation designers are doing this job without being able to Google, like, "How do I, how do I conversation design?"
• 17:54
  Yeah. [laughs] There's so few resources out there. It's just so new, and there's so few people doing it.
• 18:01
  So I think what we're trying to do is realizing that, putting people first because above all, we wanna elevate the industry. We wanna help people get promotions.
• 18:11
  We wanna help them get a seat at the table and be taken seriously.
• 18:15
  So we've got our education portal that's one team at Voiceflow has been working on and doing a phenomenal job lately, like, really putting a lot into it, especially templates and tutorials.
• 18:27
  So templates and tutorials are a big part of a education portal, and they also appear on our YouTube channel and on Pathways, our blog.
• 18:37
  What's also interesting to me is when I first joined, we had the Voiceflow blog, and it was just kind of a mix of anything and everything that they wanted to publish, which is normally how it goes for a company blog.
• 18:49
  But it's like, "Hey, how about we turn this into more of a publication that's just for people who are really passionate about this thing? It's not for everybody."
• 18:59
  So we worked on this thing, got it launched pretty recently, a couple months ago, and in researching that, I was like, "Oh, let's never talk about Voiceflow. Let's just make it... It's just about conversational AI.
• 19:10
  It's about conversation design. It's about the space." And then talking to customers and people in the space, they were like, "No. Please make it [laughs] about Voiceflow."
• 19:19
  Like, your software has a steep learning curve, so they're like, "No. Please put out tutorials. Please put out resources. Please talk about yourself."
• 19:27
  So then we wound up incorporating those tutorials and templates in there, and then the templates just make it so much easier to actually get started.
• 19:34
  I think for a lot of people, you need something to start with to just, like, walk you through it. Yeah.
• 19:39
  So we've been really going hard on those templates, and it's having a great effect on getting people up and running with Voiceflow. That's really interesting.
• 19:49
  How great is it that people want to know more about the product- Yeah... yeah, [laughs] rather than not. That's just so cool. And then are you... You're driving people towards trials, is that the main thing? Yeah.
• 19:57
  Or just a free account too, so that they can just play around with it with a free account and just play around with building something.
• 20:05
  And I think the other part of it, of creating those tutorials and templates and all of this other stuff is in the process of doing this, we're also showing what's possible because you might not know that if you have a Wix website or something, you could use Voiceflow.
• 20:22
  You could give it your documentation of some kind. We call it knowledge base. So you could feed it your entire website, the URLs. You could feed it a PDF or a text document of whatever.
• 20:34
  Say you have a Wix website for your restaurant. You could use Voiceflow to create really in, like, a few minutes a bot that would be able to tell people on your website who are asking, "What time do you open?
• 20:48
  How late are you open? Do you serve pizza?" Stuff like that. "Are you hiring?" And as long as it's in your documentation that you gave it, it can answer for you, so that's also saving people a ton of time.
• 20:58
  So creating tutorials and templates like that were, yeah, they're cool use cases, but they're also a light bulb moment for a lot of people who are like, "What?
• 21:06
  I could just have a chat bot [laughs] on my restaurant website or whatever it's..." So that's cool too. And build it yourself too. I feel like that is so- Yeah... interesting.
• 21:15
  I don't know if Voiceflow identifies with the no-code trend, but to me, this kind of fits the bill. And to me, like, no-code is, like, the greatest thing in the world.
• 21:22
  Once I realized I could build stuff that I didn't need to pay a developer tons of money to do, or maybe I could at least build an MVP of something before I- Yeah...
• 21:29
  made a decision about whether it was worth investing more or whatever. Like, that's a total game changer, particularly for small businesses. Yeah.
• 21:35
  There's that element to it where, yes, there's plenty of people who potentially would, would benefit from the no-code uses, but at the same time, we're also trying to convey that if you do know how to code, our thing gets really powerful.
• 21:50
  Interesting. It's essentially a developer tool when it comes down to it because you can build some really incredible stuff if you know how to code. Gets really powerful.
• 22:00
  You know, I have a couple of just, like, quick hitting questions. You mind if I run through? Just kind of like nuts and bolts stuff that I like to kind of check off. Sam, I mentioned, is your coworker, right? Yes.
• 22:08
  Do you all have a formal meeting structure, or is it just because it's small, you're just kind of talking frequently in Slack or Teams or something?
• 22:15
  We have a weekly standing one-on-one where we'll decide on an agenda together beforehand. Mm-hmm. So we'll say, "Hey, here's three things I wanna talk about with you real quick."
• 22:25
  And then there will be a separate meeting.
• 22:27
  For example, we have a breaking bots coming up next week, I think, so we might have a 30-minute meeting just to go through all the logistics of that and to brainstorm, like, how are we gonna make this one better than the last one?
• 22:40
  What are we gonna do differently? What are we missing so far? Just because think a lot of the stuff we're working onDoes need some brainstorming, and I think as everybody knows, that can wind up [laughs]
• 22:53
  either being really long or completely derailing what should just be like a check-in. Yeah, yeah. That's sometimes the more fun stuff too, though. Yeah. [laughs] That's cool.
• 23:01
  I also wanted to ask, do the two of you roll up to a CMO or directly to a founder? How does that work? We roll up to the CEO, Braden Ream.
• 23:09
  So we work pretty closely with him too, and he is awesome because he just knows everything [laughs] that's going on in the space, and he has a great vision. He knows what's coming before, I think, anybody else does.
• 23:22
  So it's incredible to have somebody like that as a resource of like, "Hey, what do we need to know?" In the space where things are changing every day pretty much, "What are you hearing? What are you seeing?
• 23:31
  What should we experiment with?" It's great. Nothing like having a CEO that is into marketing. It just makes everything so much more fun and easier. Yeah. CEOs that really get marketing are rare, and he does.
• 23:43
  And we've actually been working on a redesign, a rebrand of Voiceflow that everybody will see probably in a couple of months when we roll it out. But he totally gets brand and content and community too.
• 23:57
  So it's been a joy getting to work with him on a rebrand. We're working with an agency called Focus Lab that I would recommend to anybody.
• 24:05
  But yeah, it's been great, and it's not lost on me that that's- [laughs] I'm very lucky to work for somebody like that. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:12
  You know, I'm glad you brought up brand because that was another thing I wanted to ask you about.
• 24:15
  You don't always see brand and content together, and in talking to a lot of folks who lead content teams, occasionally there's a brand element or maybe there's a branding team and the content is attached to that.
• 24:26
  I'd say more often content ends up being part of like growth or maybe even demand gen in some cases, but not all companies are bought into brand.
• 24:35
  I mean, everyone sort of gets it's important, but they don't actually have people on the ground with that in their job title thinking about that on a regular basis. Could you talk about the brand element of your job?
• 24:44
  And I'm just sort of curious like where does it overlap and where is it distinct from the content part of it? Yeah. Good question. Right now, the biggest thing is this rebrand, which is a beast of a project.
• 24:57
  You know, it starts off with the foundational strategy elements of like who are we? Why are we here? What's the point of all of this? What are we doing? [laughs] What do we sound like? How do we describe ourselves?
• 25:09
  Who do we wanna be like? What do we wanna come across as? And then from there, all of that discovery then informs the visual aspects of it, which has been fascinating to watch all that come together.
• 25:23
  And because the visual part of a brand really has to connect to the why, why you're around, what you're doing, so I've really liked the process of that, of just being forced to nail down all of those little details that are so important, I think not just for publicly, but I think for your internal team too.
• 25:43
  Everybody should be excited about what you're doing and should understand the why behind it and be able to speak about it in a way that gets other people excited too, and you can't do that if it's not clearly documented somewhere, then people are just gonna...
• 25:56
  It's gonna be a game of telephone. Yeah, that's so interesting, the documentation part of it. Is it, um, democratic? You know what I mean?
• 26:03
  Like, is it top-down or is it something that like you sort of poll folks on, collect opinions on so that it's sort of representative of everyone's particular vision on it? You know what I mean?
• 26:12
  Versus like is it the founder's why? And I'm not su- suggesting that one is right and one is wrong. I'm sort of curious like how it comes together. Let me see. I think we... Trying to think of how we started.
• 26:23
  We had a lot of homework to start [laughs] which is a good thing, so like putting together all the details from why did the company get founded? What was the reason behind that? Who are your customers?
• 26:35
  Who's your audience who you're talking to? Who are the different people you're talking to? What is this thing [laughs] that everybody's building? How do you talk about that? What's the point of it?
• 26:44
  In terms of how we decided on all that, it was Focus Lab.
• 26:48
  They have incredible brand strategists on their team who during those meetings, those initial meetings, I think we spent four or five weeks up front, almost felt like a therapy session. Amazing. That's so cool.
• 27:00
  Yeah, and they knew the, the really tough questions to ask to really get you to rethink what you're saying or think more deeply on something without leading you to something obvious.
• 27:12
  It was brilliant, and I've never, [laughs] I've never been a part of something like that, so it was really cool to see. And I was like, "Was I just in therapy?" [laughs] That's amazing. Yeah.
• 27:20
  Probably similar methods, I think. So a big part of that too was taking the information that Braden, our CEO, was a big part of getting all that information and all those thoughts and the vision down on paper.
• 27:33
  So then Focus Lab could then take that and turn it into various documents and then keep iterating on what does this mean? What does it mean that you wanna be a luxury brand?
• 27:42
  You know, I think a lot of people say that because they just like those luxury-looking fonts or something, but like it should mean something. There should be a reason behind everything that you're choosing to be.
• 27:53
  Totally, and I would imagine that also is gonna make its way into the voice and tone of the stuff that you publish and the types of content you publish- Yeah...
• 28:00
  and sort of the way it's presented to customers and some of the messaging, and so that's cool. That's really interesting. To be honest, brand is a little bit of a gray area for me.
• 28:08
  I feel like some people get it, and I don't necessarily count myself among them.
• 28:13
  I would love one day to have the opportunity to work with someone who really gets it that could kind of guide me or super path through a similar process 'cause it sounds really cool, and it sounds extremely productive.
• 28:24
  Yeah. It was great. It's, it's been a great process so far, and working with a team like that is just...
• 28:30
  I've learned so much, and I found it really inspiring too, just the way they're able to defend their work and to explain it and to guide us through this whole process because it's intense.
• 28:44
  Like, the way it's gone is we get deliverables from them on Friday afternoons. We have to give feedback on those deliverables by Monday morning- Oh, wow... the following week.So we're talking in work time, a few hours.
• 29:00
  Yeah. So I'm project managing this.
• 29:02
  I'm the driver of the project, so it's up to me to bug everybody on our brand committee who's contributing to this, and then consolidate that feedback into one voice, and that's every week. Every single week.
• 29:14
  Sometimes there's a 60-page document. Sometimes there's a four-page document. It's the same amount of time every time. That is fascinating.
• 29:23
  I love when you find a vendor that knows what they're doing, and you just feel like you're in such good hands, and you just do what they say- Yeah... and listen to them, and you'll get the result you want.
• 29:32
  Versus, like, certainly I've worked with vendors, not had that experience before [laughs]. You know what I mean? Yeah. When you're like, you're the one driving it all. Yeah. So that's really cool.
• 29:39
  A couple of just, like, quick hitters I wanted to run by you. Are there any data points you really care about? And then do you...
• 29:45
  You know, like, as you meet with Sam or the CEO, like, is there a dashboard or a spreadsheet or something that you're updating each month and checking on how those data points are going up or down? Yeah.
• 29:54
  So we are really looking at sales pipeline. We're trying to figure out what do we wanna measure, what really matters, and it seems like everything just kinda rolls up to that. So we're tracking that.
• 30:04
  And then the other one that we're looking at is branded search traffic. Oh, interesting. I like that. Yeah.
• 30:11
  So for a while, I think we're caught in the trap [laughs] that a lot of content people are caught in of, like, oh, website sessions or whatever traffic numbers.
• 30:20
  But I think if we're really building something amazing longterm, and we're doing our jobs well, we're gonna have more people searching for Voiceflow.
• 30:30
  Not just Voiceflow, but the internal experts that we're gonna elevate as leaders in the space too, which is something we're gonna be working on over the next quarter.
• 30:40
  So we wanna see their names pop up more too, in terms of searches. So yeah, those things are big, and other things that don't look great [laughs] in a dashboard, but are still important are just, like, mentions.
• 30:53
  Like, did somebody on a phone call, did they ask how they could be a participant on Breaking Bots?
• 31:00
  That's a really good sign to me that we've created a great series, is that people are proactively asking how they can be a part of it.
• 31:08
  And then just, like, Twitter mentions, LinkedIn mentions, that sort of a thing, or in-person mentions. Like, "Hey, I really loved your LinkedIn post," or, "I love Brayden's LinkedIn posts. I always learn so much."
• 31:19
  Stuff like that is really important. Just, like, is this resonating with people? Because if it's not resonating, I don't know if it really matters. I love that.
• 31:28
  It's funny how you could publish a blog post, it gets 100 page views, and you'd be like, "Ugh, what a disappointment," you know? Yeah.
• 31:33
  But if you have a screenshot of three real people, face, name, and their positive response to it, that carries so much more weight than those, like, anonymous 100 people who hit the site, you know? So I think it's great.
• 31:45
  Keeping track of that stuff I feel like is good, like, hygiene for reporting. I also think sometimes it's really good for morale of content teams. Yeah.
• 31:52
  When you can say, like, "This person who works at this company, who is part of our target audience, said these things," like, that goes a long way, especially when, like, the data doesn't always tell the story you want it to tell.
• 32:02
  Sometimes numbers go down, you know, and like you have to figure out why, but also, like, that can be quite defeating for a team who's really working hard.
• 32:09
  And, like, that anecdotal stuff sometimes can be, like, the anchor that, that sort of keeps it all together. I can tell you a really sad numbers tanking story that happened to me recently. Please do. Okay [laughs].
• 32:19
  So we launch Pathways, our rebranded, redesigned blog. Looks amazing. So happy with it. Getting a great response. But then a few days later we noticed, wow, traffic is really tanking. What's going on?
• 32:34
  This is really bizarre. Dig into it a little bit more. Oh, well, it was pushed live with noindex tags. No. [laughs] So it was all a scramble of like, oh, wow, okay. [laughs] We're gonna need to fix this.
• 32:49
  And there's a whole bunch of things that I did to fix that really quickly, and it's recovered. It's even better now. But definitely in that moment [laughs] it feels like the end of the world.
• 32:59
  So make sure you check for those noindex tags. [laughs] I'm sure that was not a fun discovery. [laughs] So I wanna be respectful of your time, Kristen. Where can we send people to check out Voiceflow?
• 33:09
  And also, if they land on the site, is there a Voiceflow chatbot that they can interact with, like, see what it is and what they could build themselves? We do have one.
• 33:18
  It's called Tico, and that is the combination of the names of the two people who built it. But yeah, check out voiceflow.com, and then voiceflow.com/blog is where Pathways is.
• 33:30
  I would love for everybody to check that out. Cool. We will definitely link to that for folks. And how about you personally? LinkedIn or Twitter or a personal website or anywhere else we can send folks? Actually, yeah.
• 33:38
  I just got a new website up and running, because after a very long time of just sort of editing myself to death and trying to figure out, like, what do you do with your own website?
• 33:49
  You know, it feels like, should it be a portfolio? Should you write about content marketing? Should it just be photos of my dog? [laughs] Like, it's, it's hard to figure it out.
• 33:58
  And then I was looking through Ghost themes, like the platform Ghost. Oh, Ghost is the best. Yeah. And then I saw one for a magazine theme, and I was like, hey, that's it. I have a million interests.
• 34:11
  Why would I not write about all of them? I'll just think of my website as my own magazine. So that's what I've done, and I'm gonna start writing about whatever the heck I want.
• 34:20
  So far I only have two posts up there, but I'm... I love offbeat travel. I mentioned I do autocross. I do like dogs too. Maybe I will post dog pictures.
• 34:29
  [laughs] I wanna, [laughs] I wanna write about marketing and brands. I wanna write about just cool stuff that I come across, and also f- I love writing funny stories too. So that's what I'm gonna be working on a lot.
• 34:40
  And yeah, I'm really excited about that I finally unblocked myself being ridiculous and just...
• 34:47
  I think it's another lesson of, like, we should probably all be having as much fun as possible and not taking things so seriously. I love that.
• 34:54
  That was a good learning for me, was like, why am I taking my own website so seriously? No one's really gonna read it. I love that. Is it just your name dot com? Yes. Uh-huh. kristenhillery.com. Okay, cool.
• 35:04
  We'll link to that for folks too. Kristen, thank you so much for doing this.
• 35:07
  Like I said at the beginning, you have such an interesting and impressive track record, and it's really cool to hear about what you're doing now.
• 35:13
  The product also sounds really interesting, so I'd encourage folks to go check it out.
• 35:17
  I'm actually gonna go check it out, 'cause I feel like I, I sorta think that we don't have something like this, and we have a ton of material that people could potentially be accessing this way.
• 35:25
  So I'll be looking into it. Yeah. But yeah, really appreciate it, and so nice to talk to you. You too. Thanks for inviting me to be on this. I am honored. [outro music]