Hi folks, welcome back to another post about our monthly DigiDinner – today I’ll be taking you through a couple of apps we covered off which included:

We will also touch upon:

  • Bitcoin
  • Siam Kidd
  • Reddit &
  • Kings Cross

So keep reading! But to set the scene, members began to arrive from around 5pm.

James was already seated when I arrived with my guest, Tom Mortimer, who I’ve worked with for 10+ years until 2014.

Tom had managed digital communications for Virgin and at that time used Emailmovers to deliver their emails – that’s how we met.  He is now focused on launching an agency called HeartShaped that works with customers focused clients

Now to the apps:

Reply.io

An app that puts prospecting on autopilot.

You can:

  • Create an account
  • Connect to your gmail then upload your list of contacts
  • Create your email and reply.io will send one out every few seconds during working hours, Monday to Friday.

I tested this last week with a product I am working on called Contact Enhance:

  1. I uploaded around 1,000 contacts
  2. Cut and pasted an email in that I typically send to prospects and hit send

The results are as follows:

(please note that I stopped the campaign as soon as a reply came in, in order to create a benchmark)

 

The Big Thing with reply.io

It saves you time as an entrepreneur so you can get on with other stuff.

A really nice feature is that if the person does not reply to the first email – you can automate a follow-up email.

If the person does reply – their emails comes straight to your inbox and the prospect is marked as finished by reply.io.

Clever little system.

Great onboarding too: I was contacted by their customer success team and given some excellent tips.

  1. One of which was to try and upload as much as possible about the prospect to help me personalise the email (Contact Enhance helps makes this relatively straightforward) as I would if I were writing it myself.
  2. She also said to keep my email short.

Do you really send long, drawn out initial emails to all your prospects? Or do you drop them an email asking who the right person is that you should be talking to?  My email was long and drawn out, my next one will be short and straight to the point.

My email was long and drawn out -my next one will be short. And to the point.

Bitcoin

Next we got talking about Bitcoin, obviously!  I mean isn’t everyone?

We have been dabbling in Bitcoin for a few years now so the recent explosion has been good for everyone except the member that sold a large chunk of ETH in Jan only to then see it explode in price this week.  In a quick poll half the room voted to sell, half the room agreed to buy & hold.  One or two suggested selling a few but holding.

Someone even suggested BTC would rise to $7,500 which sounds barmy but not so long ago it was only $10!

Siam Kidd

Long term member Siam Kidd then gave us the member focus – this is the part of the dinner, after all the catch ups when we focus on one member, their ups and downs whilst zoning in on their learnings.

Siam has a great story from Fighter Pilot to Trader.  As he admits, like any good entrepreneur he focuses on far too many things, spreading himself far too lightly.

He spoke in detail about the important of due diligence when purchasing businesses – and how important it is to focus on a niche to then scale.

Siams site is The Realistic Trader.

Manychat.io

Manychat.com is an app that allows people to subscribe via Facebook Messenger.

Siam told us of this and actually we did a #DigiDinner on bots last year just after Facebook announced its bots for Messenger – and this is one of the first I have seen.

It looks really good!

After hearing about it from Siam I got back to my Airbnb on Leicester Square around 10:30pm and thought I would give it a shot.

Within about 30 mins I had created an account, watched a couple of tutorial videos and created my first Facebook Messenger Landing Page – I published this link to Thomas Power’s WhatsApp group around midnight and when I checked a moment ago had already had 5 people subscribe.

You can see the chart below.

You can see in the image below:that

  •  I have had 9 impressions
  • 5 subscribes
  • And a whopping 100% open rate on the welcome message (which is sent directly to those subscribers via messenger.)

 

Reddit

Finally, not sure if you use Reddit but I have become increasingly interested in the whole reddit community recently.

I have joined a few of the sub-reddits (groups) and commented on various different posts.  When I logged in this morning (via my mobile) I noticed that Noah Kagan had done an AMA (I think this stands for Ask Me Anything).

Noah was employee #30 at Facebook before being fired for one thing or another (a lesson that he says cost him $428M), he then went on however to setup some great businesses including Sumo and AppSumo (which I love).

Read the full AMA here – it is well worth it.

Kings Cross

On a final point, as a Northerner and father of an 11-year-old daughter currently on a school trip to London, I was left struggling to comprehend the events in Manchester this week.

I cannot even begin to imagine the heartache the parents of those that lost their lives must be feeling and my heart, prayers and sympathies go out to those families.

At 11am in Kings Cross Train Station this morning, whilst I waited for my train they held a one minute silence to remember those caught up in this tragedy and the whole station stood in respectful silence.

Of the thousands stood in silence around me, I saw people from all different backgrounds – together, for a single moment, sharing in something very spiritual.

And then just as quickly as it had started, it was over and life returned to Kings Cross.

Duncan