With an exceptionally unique content offering that can’t be replicated in print, A Story Before Bed is changing the way parents and children connect online. CEO Hillel Cooperman spoke with us about the technology behind the site, its native iPad app, and how donating subscriptions has generated tremendous PR. Plus, learn how separate landing pages for gift subscriptions can help your conversions. Plenty of great creative samples, too!
Company Profile
Founded: 2009, parent company Jackson Fish Market founded in 2006
No. of Publications: 1
Employees: 2-3 full-time, plus lots of contractors (both full- and part-time)
Business Model: Hybrid (90% subs, 10% one-offs and site licenses)
Paying Subscribers: Undisclosed, but the site gets a steady 10,000 unique visitors a month, with nearly 30,000 around the winter holidays.
Location: Seattle, WA
Website: www.astorybeforebed.com
Target Market
A Story Before Bed’s primary market consists of grandparents and parents who want to read a story to the children they love and have it available for replay repeatedly and indefinitely. Many of the grandparents and parents live far away from the children they want to connect with (in the case of parents, it might be because of business or military deployment). They are primarily English-speaking, although the site is branching out to Spanish- and French-speaking audiences.
The site’s secondary market consists of librarians and educators interested in the site’s unique service and content for use in the classroom.
Content
The easiest way to describe A Story Before Bed’s content is that it’s akin to Hallmark’s recordable books, except online with a video feed.
By using a Webcam, A Story Before Bed is able to integrate video, audio and an online PDF (see sample story recording). Parents and grandparents select a story (from previously printed or new titles) and record themselves reading it aloud. The service is set up to sync the A/V components with the PDF, so that during playback, if a child clicks forward or back, they get to see their parent or grandparent reading that particular page.
Parents and grandparents can also use the camera on an iPad. Separate video recordings are not accepted since they cannot be synced to the books. The site does not edit any of the recordings, so users need to make sure they like their recording.
Parents and grandparents can then share their creation via email or social media with whomever they want. The recording is viewed online. There’s no authentication required for the person who receives the email or clicks on a social media link, and A Story Before Bed preserves all creations, even if a subscriber should cancel his/her subscription.
The site adds more titles (supplied by publishers) on a quarterly basis, and works with more than 25 publishers to license the titles. The publishers get a fixed licensing fee. The site also recently created its own imprint, which gives authors and illustrators a flat fee up front but no royalties. This allows them to own all the content in their imprint.
The site currently has more than 500 titles, which are sorted into sections like “ABCs,” “Classics,” “Asian-American,” and “Francais.”
Cooperman and his team created the software that tracks and syncs the video stream and PDF. They are not licensing this software to other companies at this time.
A Story Before Bed utilizes a native app for the iPad. (A native app uses the code and framework most comfortable for that device — for Mac, that would be Object C and the iOS framework. A non-native app runs through a Web browser. Cooperman explained that the advantage of running a native app is that it has faster and better performance. The advantage of a non-native app is that you can write the code once and have it run on any device.)
Revenue Streams
While A Story Before Bed would not disclose its total revenues, it has been profitable since day one, says Cooperman. Revenues are gleaned through subscription plans, one-off sales, and site licensing. Subscription plans make up 90% of revenues.
Individual Subscription Plans:
- 6 month for $9.99/month, with a total upfront charge of $59.94
- 12 month for 7.99/month, with a total upfront charge of $95.88
- 24 month for $5.99/month, with a total upfront charge of $143.76
Cooperman says the 6-month offering is the most popular, then the 24-month plan, then the 12-month one. However, the subscriptions are not on auto-renew.
One-off book recordings can be purchased for $6.99 per recording.
The site also offers site licenses for schools and libraries, priced at $499.95 for 12 months per site license, which includes 10 accounts. Cooperman would not disclose how many site license subscriptions they have.
The site ran a lot of pricing tests in the beginning, particularly with their original one-off sales. They found that anything above $0 had the same results — from a penny to $10. When they increased their number of titles, they found that subscription plans were well received by their audience.
Marketing Tactics
A Story Before Bed gets most of its site traffic through SEO, referrals (by customers and media organizations), and social media (particularly Facebook).
SEO v. PPC
The site is ranked #1 in organic search for keywords like “recordable storybooks.” However, Hallmark is also competing on that term with organic and PPC ads. Cooperman said their organic search traffic has been great, but they found PPC to be worthless, which he attributes to the fact that the content and service is not a quick buy. As Cooperman explains, the content and service is a unique and new idea, and therefore it takes a while for people to understand what it is.
Donated Subscriptions
A Story Before Bed has donated more than 250,000 subscriptions to deployed U.S. military personnel to date (and is continuing to do so). While they do not use this as a tax write-off, it has generated huge PR opportunities for the site, with coverage by major news organizations and publications like the Today Show and the Kirkus Review.
Orders for these donated subscriptions are converted through a separate order page. Recipients of these donated subscriptions get access to record stories on the site for a year (recorded stories are available indefinitely).
Additional PR
In addition to its donated subscriptions to military personnel, the site gets a lot of press coverage likely because of the uniqueness of how the content is presented.
The site has done some press releases and media blasts about new titles and services, but not a single journalist has ever said he or she discovered the site via a press release, so Cooperman and his team have stopped issuing them.
One thing that has had better results for generating PR is attending trade shows. A Story Before Bed has spoken at Digital Book World, O’Reilly Tools of Change, and other trade events, and Cooperman says they’re a good way to get the word out and get industry press. However, as the site is a consumer product, he doesn’t spend too much time focusing on this type of brand building.
Social Media
Since people are able to share the recordings they make via social media sites like Facebook (with as many people as they wish — just as they would through email), the site has seen tremendous referral traffic through social media. This is despite the fact that the site’s Facebook page has only 5 likes and 19 people talking about it, illustrating how your customers’ use of Facebook can affect your traffic exponentially more than your own presence and activity.
In addition, the site has a Vimeo page with 13 videos, which are also available on the site itself. The videos were all done in-house with Cooperman’s partner Jenny Lam doing the illustrations and Cooperman impersonating an old-style radio announcer on one video called “Grandmas of the Future.” In it, Cooperman serendipitously interviews a grandmother at a book fair about how Hallmark recordable books are frustrating because the recording is lost once the book’s battery dies. (This is a good reason you should always be ready to record interactions at offline events — with the other person’s permission, of course). Cooperman says the production of the video took three to four days.
Affiliates and Group Discounts
A Story Before Bed has tried affiliate marketing and had mixed results. At this time they don’t have any traditional affiliate relationships, but they’re open to them. The site does have a number of relationships with coupon sites, like RetailMeNot, Groupon, and Mamapedia. Cooperman says these sites are better at selling physical products than virtual ones and hasn’t been impressed with the results.
One area that has been successful is working with distributors, who re-sell A Story Before Bed’s products and services to schools and libraries. This is discussed further in Group Sales below.
Conversion Tactics
By far, A Story Before Bed’s biggest conversion tactics are free content and email marketing.
Free Content
The site lets users try out the service by recording any (and all) of the 19 titles available for free recording. Visitors can also view a sample recording.
Email Marketing
The site offers special promotions usually timed for holidays, like Mother’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, and Christmas. Cooperman says the site emails registered visitors and paying subscribers anywhere from once a week to once a month.
At one time the site segmented paying subscribers and free registered users, but then stopped. Cooperman and his team found that email notifications of newly uploaded titles were equally compelling to both paying subscribers and free registered users. Likewise, holiday-themed reminders to use the service were equally applicable to both groups, even though paying subscribers got access to more titles to record than the 19 ones made available for free to registered users.
Other Conversion Tactics
Gift subscriptions are offered at the same price as regular subscriptions, but with a different, specialized landing page (see image below).
The site also lists the CEO’s cell phone number for live support. Cooperman says he receives only a handful of calls a day, despite the number being listed on almost every page. (See image above.)
Group Sales
A Story Before Bed uses distributors to get its content and service into schools and libraries. It offers a free trial to teachers, and the sales are closed in-house. The site has created special pages for schools and libraries, and has even created physical hand-outs to go into teacher mailboxes.
Retention Tactics
Cooperman feels that the social component of the site is a huge retention factor. Social doesn’t mean social media, but rather the fact that the site records and preserves an experience and allows people separated by distance to connect in a meaningful way online that can’t be replicated through any other medium.
About Hillel Cooperman
Hillel Cooperman worked for Microsoft for years before branching out on his own in 2006. Jackson Fish Market started as a software business, and the company was looking for a project that interested all principal staff members. Since Cooperman’s parents were on the East Coast and he’s on the West Coast, he got the idea to create a service that would let his parents connect with his kids.
He states that he was most nervous about creating a tech support phone line since most software companies hide their number. But it’s turned out to be the most rewarding feature of the site for him, allowing him to know what his clients are feeling and gaining insights he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s not a cost, but a way to upsell users into subscription plans, too.
As for advice, Cooperman says this is a hard business, but he’s enjoying it and learning the hard stuff. There’s still a resistance by consumers to pay for digital products, so Cooperman suggests B2C sites look for site licensing and enterprise opportunities.
Vendors & Technology
Given that Cooperman and partner Jenny Lam have a background in IT, they do a tremendous amount of work in-house, from Web design and development to content management. However, they do use some third-party vendors:
Hosting — Amazon and Heroku
http://aws.amazon.com/
http://www.heroku.com/
Payment processing — Braintree and PayPal*
https://www.braintreepayments.com/
https://www.paypal.com/
*Cooperman strongly advises against PayPal, which he says is “awful” in terms of customer support.
Email management — MailChimp
http://mailchimp.com/
Distributor — Creative Company
http://www.thecreativecompany.us/
Subscription Site Insider Analysis
We LOVE how A Story Before Bed has truly harnessed the power of online media to create a product and service that is impossible to replicate in print. This makes it far easier for them to demand monetary compensation, as well as create enthusiastic users and generate powerful word-of-mouth.
We also like how the site is augmenting its consumer enthusiasm with site licensing. Plus, it’s smart to create its own imprint, which will allow it to own its content while also licensing its software to other companies.
We suggest they place their subscription plans on auto-renewal, with an email reminder to subscribers that details what books they’ve already recorded.
They may also want to offer a limited time offer for holiday-themed stories around the holidays, and require a credit card for this limited trial offer. We also think they should reconsider a PPC campaign, as well as segment their email lists; retaining paying customers will be easier if they’re made to feel special.
Yet, given the company’s willingness to experiment and test pricing and plan offers, we are confident it will continue to grow and generate significant revenues with its unique content offering.
