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> You have to talk to a sales person because there isn’t a good way to communicate complexity today in an asynchronous manner. A salesperson would much rather work asynchronously if they could be equally as successful -- but they can’t!

Sales is more effective when direct in real-time because it lets the salesperson drive the conversation to an action.

Marketing is storytelling... sales is driving actions after the story has been told. Understanding that difference, and the different skills and approaches needed because of that difference is what helps drive success.

Jessica Livingston had a good quote about how sales was making a few people love you and marketing was making a lot of people know about you.

I agree with you regarding sales and why its effective in real-time, but it doesn't have to be that way — technology is rapidly changing that, software is getting so good you can now just signup for products you'd typically previous have to talk to a human to use.

I think this trend will continue, and with Journey my belief is we can accelerate that even more with powerful marketing tools.

I would add that sales is absolutely also storytelling - a great example is fundraising! I joined a B2B technology company (AdRoll) and worked there for 4 years and saw first hand how effective sales people sell - by telling stories, not reading from slides.

I agree with both of you. You're absolutely right that effective salespeople are fantastic story tellers. They are also fantastic at reacting to the subtle and overt signals the buyer is giving off. I struggle to see an Enterprise sales person (or buyer honestly) going for something like this today. So much of sales is relationship building and non real time communication methods will never be that.

I'm not even sure you can ever replace salespeople flying out visit people, even with 50 years future VR tech, because part of the value of flying out is the sacrifice of time, money and focus that helps build that trust and relationship.

I really really like this product and I feel it could have a sweet spot in that upper SMB space where it's still fairly short sales cycles with fairly short close times. Those buyers are not getting any personal attention today and something like this would probably feel more akin to 'flying out' than they'll get otherwise.

I hope there's a bunch of analytics in there too because that would be another awesome part of this. Seeing engagement through a set of materials would be pretty interesting. Nice work!

Thanks for the comments. We’re still figuring out the ideal target market from a b2b sales perspective (as you probably can see :)). However, on one side, we have enterprise sellers with ACVs above $1mm willing to put time into the journey creation as well as SMB sellers creating journeys “at scale” with light personalization via templates. We think its been powerful that a Journey typically gets shared with 3+ people inside an org so it helps with async stakeholder management instead of getting a 10 person buying committee on a zoom call (but the next zoom call will be more impactful due to the context shared in the Journey!). Lastly, we have detailed viewer insights/analytics on Journeys as well as the ability to email gate or password protect!

I'd refine that slightly: marketing is telling an interesting enough story to get an enquiry, sales is telling a relevant enough story to get the action.

Communicating the complexity of the product is only part of that. It's the "so based on what you've told me about needing to replace x that takes y hours per week, this z minute process I'm walking you through will generate u more v". For simple, universal value propositions you might be able to turn that into a calculator on a product page, but a lot of value propositions involving salespeople aren't simple or universal. (Also there's the navigating large organizations bit and the outbound bit, but they aren't competing with or complimenting this product)

Ironically one of pclark's comments elsewhere about Journey's value proposition being "so meta" makes me think that's exactly the bit a good salesperson solves for you: figuring out the gap in the specific client's marketing capabilities that Journey can fill

Great comment!

I don't think Journey is gonna replace humans for selling all software, I just think some interactions are better async. A friend of mine, Sahil (CEO of Gumroad) once told me that "live meetings should be used for closing" and that maps to how I feel too.

For example I believe over time discovery can actually be made superior async than live, since with async we can do all kinds of crazy personalisation - rather than expecting a sales person to know all the questions to ask on a live meandering phone call.

BTW we actually sell Journey by simply building a custom Journey for the prospect we're selling to. For example for calixa.com (a killer new CRM) I sent them a Journey of me "selling" Calixa so they could imagine how Journey could be used to sell Calixa to prospects. IMHO this is how selling should be, not generic materials or even sales speak — real world use cases!

Oh yeah, I'm not saying there isn't a use case for this sort of thing. I think you'd need human level AGI to do the sort of real world use case personalization I did on sales demos, but there's definitely plenty of sales processes and parts of sales process where the generic product copy/video isn't enough and yet another demo/call isn't good time management. Not to mention jazzing up final proposals with reminders of things clients should have already seen.

Yeah - for mature sales teams, sales follow up is actually more of a use case for us than cold outreach.

Bit different for founder sales though.

(I think you meant `calixa .io` not `.com` — the latter gives a Chrome security warning.)

Indeed - calixa.io is correct

Do I get it right that it's basically a tool for making (interactive?) pitches and/or presentations? Presumably with a focus on ease of creation.

If so, you'd probably want to explain it like that. Because the presentation on the site and your description here are pretty dense and take an effort to parse. If only there were a good tool for efficient pitch crafting... :)

Haha, yup...

My biggest challenge right now is Journey is so meta when discussing Journey. It's why we're trying to lean into success stories: https://www.journey.io/success — but yes.

Like if you're describing Journey in isolation, without discussing how someone uses it, you sound like a crazy person:

Journey is a builder that lets you embed all sorts of content (slides, video, forms) into a sharable site. These sites can be used for when you want to convey complex ideas in an accessible way.

Maybe that is pretty good actually! I had actually always wanted to post on HN with "how would you describe Journey?" :)

In the gumbo journey intro, the tool is as a replacement of the common approach of a “long boring Dropbox folder.” I liked that. Seems like (just poked around a little) it’s a guided tour for all necessary and typical marketing/sales media. Looks cool! Async vs sync...I’m assuming you’re talking about back and forth sync interactions (emails/zoom) vs customers exploring async? Framing as push vs pull model might better focus on the pain relief. Lets Journey contrast with a pushy sales person.

Sounds like you need a meta journey.

Congratulations on the launch! In my experience: This post was too long, I found the gist that made sense to me pretty low down:

>helps fix such interactions by allowing you to send users a specific page that has all the content you want them to read

There are different approaches to pitches, but in my experience, I want the 'blurb'/core pitch pretty high up. I looked at the demo and for me a talking head Is an allergy response, of all the videos/meetings I have to sit through. Some people, I've user-tested this, LOVE to have a talking head screen greet them. So I'm not making a wide statement here. However, I know all user feedback is valuable for a start-up, so I'll go on rambling about my first impressions.

I would want a more website-like experience, such as a clickable menu that makes sense. What I mean is the sections to the right did not show anything that was "attractive": summarizing a positive outcome if I clicked on it.

Again is debatable if this is for the presentation demo or if this has to be addressed through thinking about how the UI and the userUI for building a journey should be more adapted to target user-valuable outcomes.

I would want a chart/mind map overview on the first page and not a full-screen talking head. I can live with 50/50, video and some summary that addresses my needs for pitching, which are: show a capture page that can give the visitor a quick overview of what pain solutions my product has and how it can be used and integrated into their current reality. That way, they will come back to it and share it.

For now, my reaction is: I should check this out, but I would have to spend time, I estimate 20 minutes, to understand it, and my gut reaction is: I don't have mindspace for this right now. THe presentation did not present the value of the product and the idea so that looking at it further would be clearly not painful.

But I think the core pain identified is very real. I have to make a presentation next week and I dread how much mindspace I have to dedicate to it.

Break all their legs!

Thanks for the feedback. First impressions matter and we can definitely improve.

To try and bring Journey into your world - your upcoming presentation is likely a live meeting with slides? Totally guessing, but we'll go with that. Perhaps you wanted to send attendees a teaser prior to the meeting which included some voiceover context + your slides or a typeform questionnaire to collect questions prior to the meeting so you know what content to include or touch on (this can all be done via a pre-meeting Journey) or perhaps after you give your presentation, you want to follow up with all attendees on the next steps perhaps recapping the meeting, clarifying people's questions that you didn't have time to cover on in the meeting via videos, and then offering your calendar for a follow up discussion (this can all be in a "follow up" Journey). Usually people send long emails with multiple links/attachments in pre-meeting or post-meeting touches, Journey brings this in one link and makes it easily share-able, regardless of the types of content you're looking to share.

Good luck on the preso!

Great, that makes sense. I'll give it a try!

> "Userfox"

That memorable era when names were just things plus animals.

> really hard to create an email that performed really well because if an email is too long users will skim over it

On the other hand, how do you know, really, that videos convert more? They too can be tedious.

> choose your own adventure sales story

This is a phenomenal concept. Is it really this interface in your demo? My feeling is your leaning into the TurboTax wizard - that the kind of person too stupid to read in order to help themselves benefits immensely by reframing their problem as a chore with a deadline and these nice people will do it for you for $100 - is "choose your own adventure sales story."

Haha, thanks. I remember coming up with the userfox name pretty much solely because I really like foxes and we had an awesome logo :)

It’s worth noting Journeys can be much more than just videos - interactive slides and charts for example.

You make a good point about people being too laissez-faire but what we know is: a) people already do a ton of research before being compelled to talk to a human - Journey allows companies to slide into that research process without being annoying

b) we fundamentally believe you’ll get more sales if you empower people to think for themselves rather than forcing them on to a call. Lead submission forms convert at approx 1.5% —- there must be more users out there that are intrigued but not yet willing to talk to a sales person (and btw we don’t cannibalise those that want calls, if anything we make it easier to coordinate since we embed meeting booking right there)

… and yeah our UI is a bit Turbotax right now and that isn’t the desired first impression, we want people to think we are Nethack (well actually a more accessible and beautiful video game) or something equally fun and interactive.

One of the fun but hard things about building this product is we have to dogfood aggressively - but then we are only as good as our product, not our sales slides. Which is how it should be! But it makes you have to be very intellectually honest about where you’re at today…

Lots to do…

Congrats on the launch.

FWIW, your main CTA ("See a journey") on your home page doesn't seem to work very well. A video on the modal does start playing, but silently and with no controls. However, there's also still the usual Firefox play icon overlaid on top. If you click that play icon, it restarts the video and then plays it normally. I wonder if this was deliberate, as it seems like what is auto-playing might just be a short snippet that repeats.

In any case, I found it confusing and distracting. Rather ironically, it seems I myself or one of my colleagues might also be in your target audience, so what you've inadvertently done by motivating me to write this instead of continue watching is demonstrate to a potential future customer that your presentation style doesn't work. You might like to fix that. ;-)

Congrats on the launch.

I checked out the demo, and I have some feedback on the accessibility of the page with a screen reader. It appears that there are some clickable text elements that aren't marked up as links or buttons. I suggest using actual HTML links or buttons if you can. Failing that, you should use the role attribute to give them the proper ARIA role, and use tabindex="0" to make them keyboard focusable.

But overall, I like what you're doing. HTML-based slides or other forms of interactive presentation have the potential to be much more accessible than either a static video or a typical screen sharing session.

Thanks! to be clear I believe accessibility is hugely important but also that such accessibility is beneficial to everyone. I am super excited to allow videos to have transcripts for example. I think the lack of investment in accessibility is a miss for everyone, not just those that require it.

(Seems like we have some short term basic tech stuff to improve too!)

I'm happy to answer questions about the tech stuff. My email is in my HN profile.

Transcripts is a big one. Consider letting people click round to different parts of the videos from the transcript.

YouTube's new "Chapter" feature is a great model as well.

This is a nifty idea. Some thoughts:

1. B2B is as much about product fit as it is with the sales contact / company fit. People buy other people's stuff. There is a ton of potential here in humanizing the person pitching.

2. Absolutely love the UX. Clean and all the relevant links are succinctly put next to the content (videos).

3. It's not clear through the demo but what tooling/processes are in place to enable me selling to be able to personalize the pitch to the client? It would be nifty to have video editing tooling where I can add a personalized pitch to the end of the standard video.

Sorry for the delay, I was walking my dog.

Re: 1, I would also add that I think Journey may win because of our virality. If I send you a Journey, its a conveniently packaged experience that you can then share with your co-workers or boss for feedback and approval. Suddenly the buyer is empowered to properly sell the tool.

Re: 2, thanks! We're working on it and I think there is much more we can do generally though. It's a super hard problem to make something obviously interactive + compelling without adding friction for creator.

Re: 3, here you go :) https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?em...

This is the same HN Journey but I've personalised it for you with a brief video message at the start (users can record these from within Gmail with our browser extension) - I also added LambaSchool's logo at the top (I just picked that one arbitrarily) as an example of hopefully making it feel even more personal.

The link you provided in #3 finally showed me the unique value of your product. The web site left me confused on how this product was different than just recording videos.

I think you need more examples of real-world journeys on the site, not just videos of people telling me how they find it useful.

Thanks, this is great feedback.

We actually tried making some hypothetical Journeys (for example a fundraising deck for Webvan!) but then people got confused at the content.

But yes we are investing heavily in examples! https://journey.io/success as a start.

I love the idea! The Journey team has a great founder-market fit too :) I am looking forward to using the product by myself.

Congrats for the launch!

Thanks - look forward to seeing your Journeys in the wild.

I had the opportunity to talk with the Journey team a few weeks ago, and I really appreciate their product and approach.

We're going to be using Journey as an augmentation to our pitch process for investors who want tailored/detailed data than is usually available in your standard pitch deck.

Keep up the great work, Journey Team!

Thanks -- lots of interesting "fundraising Journeys" in the wild now. Here to help if you need anything or email us if you would like to chat with other founders using Journey similar use cases for any inspiration.

Would love analytics, ultimately I'd want to better understand where customers are spending the most time (which case studies/parts of a case study) or a slide, I imagine that will come in the future and be in some premium version but well worth the cost!

Yes, we have viewer insights and analytics giving you the ability to see who is engaging with the content and where they are spending the most time - it’s basic right now and will evolve over time.

> Think of it like a website that is specifically designed for a specific individual to take a specific action, which answers any questions or objections they may have.

OK that’s quite a philosophical description for a platform to conveniently share sales pitches.

My hope is that people will use Journey for:

* HVAC quotes

* Concierge shopping

* How-to guides

etc etc! Stories can be all sorts of things!

My favorite method of following a blog continues to be using an RSS feed reader.

(It's kind of like email: email is boring and old-fashioned, and there are many shiny new alternatives, but I still use email more than I use anything else. Same with following a project's progress on a blog using a RSS feed reader).

If you add an RSS feed to your blog, I'll subscribe :)

Sounds interesting, but name is already used by another startup called Journey Apps (or Journey Mobile): https://journeyapps.com

Funnily enough the journey.io logo even resembles their logo with the orange symbol on the left.

I'm seeing a "NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID" error on Chrome when opening the site.

Strange!! You're the second person to report this in 24 hours (the first was an important prospect for one of our users :( )

I don't suppose the HN community has any idea how to debug this? I can't recreate it. I don't suppose you're running a pi-hole? (I had some SSL issues a while ago but it was because of my pi-hole...)

Switch away from AWS global accelerator — seems like a common issue. CloudFront should be more than enough!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62380583/tls-connection-...

THANK YOU!!!

Congrats on the launch!! Love the concept and excited to try it at Clearbit.

Thank you, we're huge Clearbit fans since like 2015, excited to see Clearbit Journeys in the wild.

Congratulations on your launch. Seems interesting, will give it a try.

I can see this being useful for customer support, too. Just signed up!

Yes, we're seeing Journeys be used pretty horizontally (which clearly makes our messaging a challenge!) and CS being one of those use cases - interested to learn more about how you see Journey fitting in for you.

Yes! I have a lot of scar tissue from running Growth alongside Customer Success teams who were struggling to get users to take actions ("Just login, click this URL, then when the lightbox appears, enter 'moof123' thank you good day!")

So is this like hyper personalizable ClickFunnels?

Congrats on the launch, Peter! I want to try this.

thank you! it’s been a while (lyime and i were both in YC S11) — looking forward to your feedback.

Terminal49 looks fascinating!!

Launch HN: Journey (YC W21) – a better tool for selling software