Katie Street is the Founder and Managing Director of Street Agency, the “agency for agencies.” Street Agency helps clients develop marketing strategies to get noticed and attract more leads. Katie launched the company after realizing she could create an easier way for agencies to build engagement with brands and companies.
Katie is also the Co-founder of Tanba, The Agency New Business Academy. Tanba empowers agencies to grow by sharing content and insights from the best in the business. Additionally, Katie hosts the Word on the Street podcast and is a New Business Peer Network Chair for BIMA (British Interactive Media Association).
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Katie Street discusses the rise of Street Agency and the mission behind Tanba
- How Street Agency helps clients engage with brands by developing a content strategy and plan
- The three most important types of content to include in your strategy
- Who are Street Agency’s ideal clients?
- Katie describes the team structure at Street Agency
- How Tanba is empowering agencies who can’t afford an expensive consultant
In this episode…
Agencies help clients with marketing, strategic planning, building out processes, and so much more. But who helps agencies find those clients in the first place?
Street Agency does — and that’s why it’s been dubbed as the “agency for agencies.” Street Agency’s team knows how to build a personalized content plan that will attract more clients and increase sales for any agency. Agencies are lining up to work with the company — business boomed by 300% last year alone. So, how is Street Agency working its magic?
In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray MacKenzie is joined by Katie Street, the Founder and Managing Director of Street Agency, to discuss how she develops marketing strategies to help agencies attract clients. Katie talks about the process of building up Street Agency, how she collaborates with clients to increase leads, and her tips for creating an engaging content strategy. She also gives the inside scoop on her new project, Tanba.
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Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Katie Street on LinkedIn
- Street Agency
- Tanba
- Word on the Street podcast
- Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn
- ZenPilot
- Kulea
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast where we connect with agency leaders to uncover the hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let’s dive into today’s show.
Gray MacKenzie 0:17
Alright, welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie. And this week, I’ve got the pleasure of bringing on Katie Street, who is the Founder and Managing Director of the Street Agency, and has some other things for Street, which we’ll talk about here today as well. But Katie, thanks for jumping on today joining us.
Katie Street 0:34
Hi, Gray, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to chat to you. And yeah, be connected.
Gray MacKenzie 0:39
So you’re the agency for agencies? Is our run the marketing firm? For a number of agencies? Do you use quick breakdown on who you are what you do?
Katie Street 0:49
Yes. So I guess I’ll talk about myself first. So I’ve worked leading new business agencies prior to launch my own agency for agencies. And I guess I launched Street Agency, because I knew that there was a better way for agencies or an easier way for agencies to build engagement with the brands and the companies that they were looking to prospect to, I’d worked with loads of lead gen companies I’d worked with, and run marketing myself within the agency. And I just knew that there was a better way for it to be done. And I was kidding. I was always getting headhunted it was it’s really big networks, agencies, and also, using the likes of Omnicom and others are actually some of our clients now. And I just knew that there was best buy for it to be done. So off, I went and got myself a decent client, and launched my own agency. And really what we, what I want wants to do is to provide something different to the market. So not your kind of normal, cold calling lead gen approach that that often solves a problem. But as your is a short term fix, and you’re just quickly trying to build engagement and taking a sales approach. And I’m not saying we don’t advocate doing some of that. But what we aim to do is to help solve the new business problem permanently, and make it easier, both now and into the future. So we help agencies build really engaged audiences by pushing out marketing tactics. And so and we do that predominantly using email marketing, automation tools. And it works really, really well. So much so that my agency grew 300%. Last year, we practice what we preach, we put helpful content out into the market, insightful content, we produce webinars, we do events, I have my own podcast over in the UK, which you can listen to anywhere in the world. So I don’t really know why I said over in the UK, so we practice what we preach. And we really help and actually what we do you it, it works. Our clients stay with us. We don’t have the short retention that a lot of other kind of new biz agencies have we do we do focus more on a marketing approach, which enables us to get better, more consistent results, and it solves things forever, not just a quick fix. So that’s, that’s straight. And then, because I’m insane, and already have a very fast growing agency for all I know, I’ll do, I’ll launch another business. But I saw a real gap in the market. And predominantly, this is UK focused as we launched, but because I think there are similar ish things over in the States, but we are launching a membership business called the agency New Business Academy, or, as we call it, Tanba, and that aims to basically give all the knowledge insights, there’s training course, courses on there, there’s templates and things that you can work through, we’ve got a hook up with alpha and winmo, to give kind of live feed of leads and opportunities. So it’s an awesome platform that empowers anyone and everyone to improve their chances of attracting and winning the right kind of clients for their agency business.
Gray MacKenzie 4:23
Right. Looking back at him, but going to the Street Agency level specific questions that I think might help folks understand more about what you do. On the email side. Are you a HubSpot partner or you
Katie Street 4:38
Oh, yeah, I guess. But we are agnostic as well. So so we’re agnostic, we’re kind of we have two preferred partners. We’ve investigated quite a few platforms over the years and that’s not to say that we won’t add others in the future but we are a HubSpot certified partner and we are also partnered with a similar platform called kuliah, Kul, EA, and they do everything that we need them to do between the two of them. They work slightly differently, but they they give you the same end
Gray MacKenzie 5:11
result. Right? So on the email side, you can help help us help you understand what does a normal engagement look like? Like I’m bringing you in right now, our email marketing needs a ton of work. We’re using ConvertKit. Right now we can go back in ecosystem since 2012. But now it’s through ConvertKit. And I would imagine, I mean, this is the power of serving a niche that you’ve got pre built template, we already know the flow is no sequels, you know, the timeline that you had generally worked for agencies and the type of content that needs to go out there, obviously, the actual content or size, the services you have audience that you’re talking to. But what are those first couple months is that hitting month one is kind of strategy and tech setup month two is building out those campaigns? What are those engagements usually look like?
Katie Street 6:02
That you know how it’s done, right? So yeah, exactly that. So initially, we start with all our clients, I guess, you obviously onboarding and we we kind of refer to it as an immersion phase. But really understanding the agency and starting to look at the market and the opportunity to make sure that we are targeting the right audience at the right time with the right subjects in the right place. And, and you we say we do email marketing, we also use social channels, LinkedIn plays a big part in and what we do often as well. So the initial engagement is really as you’re looking at the market, we often speak to our the agencies, clients that understand what it is they truly value about them. We do some up and competitor research to understand what their peers and competitors are talking about, are their social posts getting engagement, what kind of content are they putting out what kind of events, webinars, podcasts, etc, subjects that they talked about? Because hopefully, there’s been a little bit of a strategy in science behind that. So initially, and then, once we’ve done that, where we really tried to define what is your unique value or your value, and sometimes isn’t always totally unique, but what is your value proposition? What’s your niche, your mission is really important, that’s agencies think they want to don’t want to cut off their nose to spite their face by you by niching in and just go wide to everyone, but actually, that’s terrible. You need to dish is my experience. And having done this for the last garden, in a box in sales and marketing for my entire career, like 20 years. But definitely, you’re from an agency marketing point of view, you need to understand who your audience who the likely audience that needs you are, what their problems are. So the initial thing we do is that, then we once we’ve defined a kind of key proposition that really helps tell your and when I say value proposition, we’re talking to the needs of your audience, what is, what are their problems, and how can you help solve them, we then dive a lot more deeply into that and look at some of the key trends and problems that we maybe saw amongst all of our research. And we develop a content, strategy and plan. And when I say content, strategy and plan, that’s the kind of subjects the tactics that we use will often vary. So we will think about where where the audience live, you know, what specific services that agency may have, and or sectors that they serve, that can be very, very different. And then we’ll produce content in different ways to engage the audience different ways to sometimes be putting on webinars for clients, sometimes, and we’re helping you with Speaker outreach. And for interviews, sometimes we’re doing video interviews, sometimes we’re helping them put podcasts together, sometimes we’re writing insights for them. So we basically develop a strategy, go ahead and actually create all of the content and the things are put together, the ideas and make them happen. And then in the background will have been getting all the tech setup happen, we will pull a data set that matches the audience that we’ve researched, that we know need them will use the content and the tactics that we’ve defined in the plan to push it out. So it’s very much insights driven, and the content is talking to a problem that we know those people have here. Hopefully they’re sat there going on worrying about that last night. Now you’re talking to me about it. And you’re answering the problem that we have. We want to understand the problems of the audience, and we want to create content that helps them answer those problems, hopefully, in a unique and different way. I think agencies often think they need to have case studies. You do not need to have case studies. You just need to have an opinion based on what you do. And you know something that’s different and it’s going to help them answer things that keep them up at night. Basically.
Gray MacKenzie 9:57
You’re talking about email when the person that goes My mind is the automation side. But sounds like there’s a good amount of campaign building as well. So in you mentioned kind of strong retention with agencies. Are you starting with the automation? Can I set up the workflows? And usually when I have when people go through, and I guess there’s a two part question, as soon as you start there, and then maybe move into more campaign driven the webinar stuff, or maybe that’s me, you’re flipping that and you go the other way, do some campaigns TV, the content to do your automation. I should never ask a two part question. But this is just what I do. You have a philosophy around for agency specific, do you like to start with bottom of the funnel content and build that content set up first, which would be and then work your way up the funnel, or go the opposite way, and do a high level awareness program? Right back down to the bottom?
Katie Street 11:00
We’ll do a mixture. But I must say, to answer the first part of the question, we start, we don’t start with a kind of sales journey, we always start with insight pieces. So we always start with those helpful pieces of content. And we we we usually want to go with impact. So we tend to start with the bigger, your most interesting and the most relevant, insightful pieces, because they’re going to get us the best engagement. And it’s more than anything, if you need, we need to be sure, and certain that the content that we are pushing out is helpful. But you’re more than anything, I would say the most important type of content that you need to have is something that is answering a problem. So as insights driven, so whether that is an article or like I say a podcast or something else, it’s it’s talking to your audience about the things that are keeping them up at night. So we always start with that. And there are lots of things that are important, obviously, we then go on, obviously, to set up automated journeys, we tend to be sending out emails on a weekly basis, sometimes, you know, one a week, sometimes two weeks, sometimes three a week depends what the ambitions of the client are, and what we’re able to, you know what we’re able to manage it for them through the marketing automation platform, and also what they’re able to deal with internally in terms of the amount of leads and conversations that regenerate for them. So we’re always starting with that insightful piece. But I always talk about, so I’m kind of I’m kind of moving away from talking about automation and more about the content. But I think it’s important because the content that you use, and how we set up the automation is very much based on this. So we will start with an insightful piece of content. And that’s the, the Attract piece, that’s the bit that is answering the problems that we have, we then have. So there’s the Attract piece, which is your insights, you’ve then got the second piece, which is prove it. So that’s telling them how you’ve done that, you know, that might be in the form of a case study, it might not it might be in a different way. But it’s the it’s the prove it pieces that you know, that insightful thing that I told you about. And I gave you some ideas and things to ways to deal with that problem. Oh, here’s our statute, solving that problem for someone else. So prove it is really important. And then the third piece of content that we push out is making sure that you’ve got something that’s really easy to buy so often packaged up. So it could be you by this workshop, or we can help you do this by giving you there. So three really important pieces of content that you need to have in your content strategy. And that is the kind of order that they go in. And the way that we will automate the journeys. And it’ll be if they do X, Y, and Zed, they hit a certain score that you know, they have anyone who doesn’t know about marketing automation, basically, what what it enables us to do is to not just see what they’re doing and react in real time by setting up journeys based on their activity. But also, as they engage more and more with certain content type content types, or they attend a webinar or they do you know, they’ll get certain points. And when they get to say at one point each for doing each thing, or some things might get two points, some things might get three points. When they reach 30 points, we go, right, they’re really hot, they’re hugely engaged with us and the content that we’re pushing out, we’re going to send them this thing, or invite to join something or sometimes it can be manual as well. So sometimes that alert will go to the campaign success manager who’s running those campaigns. And now, they’re actually going a little bit more deeply into this because they’re super engaged. And I can see a bit of a trend that of new this type of content, I’m going to actually send something that I’m gonna write myself rather than it being an automated thing. So it gives us a really good deep dive, but it has to start with good content or good tactics in the first place.
Gray MacKenzie 14:54
Sample framework in three core pieces is three core themes is Alpha Kramer to what I was excited about this conversation for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons was, you’re selling to agencies. So I get to grill you on some questions around, what is the value prop to agencies. And for folks listening, we get to listen to this as a, from a customer perspective. And I think that that includes some introspection and some reflection around. It is stuff that we’re saying like if this isn’t making sense, or how does this make you feel on your side of things? Like what are what are the answers that you’re hoping that you hear from Katie, kind of a reflection back into how should you be selling your audit? You haven’t you haven’t gotten to sit on the other side of that seat before? So in that vein, I have a couple more tactical questions. One would be from a goals perspective, when agencies are hiring you, what are you? I’m assuming it’s retainer based on assuming it’s not pay for performance? Because you don’t control the variables in the sales process. But what’s the main value prop? Or what is another way to answer this would be what do you highlight most in your monthly reporting back to these agencies? Are you primarily focused on number of deals or opportunities generated for their sales team, which might qualify as a SQL for providing for you or someone who feels expert? And both of you break that down? Or most agencies? What are the things that you focus on? And is that aligned with what agencies are looking for? I’m sure, obviously, there’s there’s alignment that you get to there. But I think it can be easy for agencies to focus on pipeline traffic, and you’re going to lead generate it. And from a business owner perspective, on the flip side, taking care less for the most part about what the top on traffic? Oh, how many conversations react?
Katie Street 16:45
Yes, exactly that. So actually, we do, I’ve set quite a I’m hoping inspiring vision for my team. But at the end of the day, we are judged. Most of our clients only care if they win work. So actually, we do kind of, I guess, KPI ourselves to a certain extent to help them convert clients. So that has meant that my business has evolved slightly, because as well as doing the attraction piece, to actually attract qualified leads and opportunities in the right kind of prospects, which makes the conversion better because the people that are engaging, have the right kind of clients, because we’ve done the marketing, right. And we’ve also introduced this kind of wind process, that where we actually deliver, we do go a bit more deep, and we deliver sales coaching, because most clients will come to us and go, we just need more leads, we’re really good at converting them. And then we start working with them. And we go and converting the leads that we’re giving you, there’s not there’s something that’s not quite right here. So we’ve actually introduced a kind of sales coaching element, which is, so we now have this kind of attract, which is what the business has been built on, which is all around the stuff that we’ve just been talking about, and marketing and getting engaged prospects. And then the second piece is the wind piece. So we are actually a lot more consultative and proactive in that kind of sales coaching to make sure the agencies that we work with are set up well to convert the leads, because there’s no point in us feeding a leaky bucket. So that does mean that my team are we have a quite a unique model. And I don’t know how it is over in the States, probably slightly different again, but we are on a retainer, but we also get rewarded on commission. So we get usually it’s 5% of the first year’s revenue for any clients that we introduce to the agencies that we work with. So the team that my team are then with, although they have some KPIs around the amount of meetings that they booked, and of course, there are some KPIs around the engagement and the other levels underneath that. Actually, their focus is to make sure that their clients are converting and winning those opportunities. So we report on everything, everything, we go quite deep we you, we make sure that they can see the brands and the companies that are engaging with the content that we’re pushing out for them. But in terms of how I set the vision for my team is yeah, they’re responsible to help feed that funnel, but also to be working with their clients to go, okay, what can we do to convert some of these you have you thought about doing this? What did you speak to them about? So they’re prepping to the meetings in a really constructive way?
Gray MacKenzie 19:40
Right? That makes sense. I’ll assume for a number of entities, maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume for a lot of folks. Most agencies out there growth through referrals are like a badge of honor. This is the only way that it’s not that’s great that you have a pearl but if you’re offended grosses nothing. That can’t be the only source of leads. And working you referral, even though there’s a lot of similarities between working, referred leads and inbound lead that they both come to you, there’s already a little bit of that predisposition that still Cynefin in terms of level of education, knowledge graphs baked in. So that makes sense. You get both sides of that piece from an internal team structure. View or what around 13 folks right now? And does it look like kind of a typical agency? Here’s your account manager, and then we’ve got specialists supporting the strategist or what what does that look like?
Katie Street 20:40
Yeah, kind of Yes, I think we are gonna lose track now. I think including me, we are 14, but probably scarily be near a 20 by the end of this year, which, which is exciting, but also scary. Sometimes. I’m sure you can, I’m sure you can really stand with me on that one. So yeah, in terms of how we were, I guess, to a certain extent, we are yes, that we have. We don’t call them account managers, but campaign success managers, they’re responsible for the success of the campaigns. So that’s why we call them that. And they are your leader, they’re at the frontline leading the campaigns out managing the client. And, you know, but predominantly responsible for, you know, the campaign success and getting engagement and booking meetings for the agencies that we’re working with, and getting them leads and opportunities. So campaign success managers are the central point for everything. And then, because we do a lot of the doing as well. And we have quite a wide team, and you’re in our team, we’ve done things that you’re we when we help agencies redefine their value proposition, we’ve even, you know, help them redesign we’ve we’ve got people that can do brand work and designers. So we’ve rebranded agencies, we’ve got a development company that we work with, we don’t actually do this, but in house, but we’ve actually even designed and built websites for some of our clients and microsites, we’ve done two or three of those, just recently, actually. So our team have kind of, we then have a kind of strategy and content team, who are responsible with coming up with campaign ideas, developing content, designing assets to power the campaigns that we have. And that can be anything from very motion graphics, and editing videos through to designing social posts, and writing written content. And you’re reaching out to speakers and helping manage events. So exactly that we have a team of campaign success managers, and then a team of people that you help create and develop and come up with the ideas for those content and tactic pieces, tactical pieces that we need to take to market. And then of course, the other thing that I know, we don’t talk about enough, and is super important and has been, I think, the reason that we’ve been, we grew 300% last year, and it’s the pandemic, lots of agencies, you know, crashed and burned. So I’m really proud that we have everything that we’ve achieved. And the reason that we’ve done that is because we have dedicated resource for marketing. Now, we haven’t had dedicated resource for sales apart from me. But I am your new season’s new biz person. So I do know the importance of sales. So I focus a lot of my time on that. But we are actually bringing someone in at the moment to work with me on sales and new business side of things. But we have a dedicated marketing team. So for quite a small agency, where you met two of them, I think, in preparation for this, and hopefully, you’re going to be coming on our podcast grow. So we, you know, we have actually in our marketing team, now, three people, one of their people actually go on maternity leave. So it’s usually two people. But that’s been really important for me from from day one. Because if we don’t do that, they will you know, if you’ve tried to double down or use someone else within your agency to do it, you know what, it’s all like, you’re you’ve all been there, you it just doesn’t happen, you get busy on client work, is the first thing to get pushed. So having a team even as a small agency, you know, we had, you know, our head of marketing was here, you know, right at the beginning, whenever you’re only sort of for people 25% of the agency has often been, you know, not something that we built to clients, but it has meant that we do we practice what we preach, and we push out really good, helpful content. We’ve got a huge engaged audience, like to my webinars that I host on the first Tuesday of every month, we talk about various different new sales, new business and marketing tactics for agencies put 1200 people signed up. I mean, I’m super proud of that. So that’s because we dedicate time and resource to it in exactly the same way that we do that. And that’s really what we then do for our clients. And so because lots of people don’t have the time to do it, so we we make it happen,
Gray MacKenzie 24:57
right? That has been A common thread for agencies who are growing at significant rate is investing in their own growth in treatment planning going way back to the podcast, your time with HubSpot, ecosystem impact, familia impact brand design, but impacted HubSpot eagles. Were one of the first folks in Mr. ouput dominating runs marketing data box has been on the podcast before. You know, he led up marketing, they grew way faster and mouth on the audience perspective, they built an entire business around doing that. And I’ve seen that consistently in a number of stores. Remington Begg, impulse creative. The just the initiative investment they’ve made in terms of marketing. So I love having you on being able to share kind of got the opportunity that you can hire folks internally. And I think a lot of the tactical stuff that that you shared with us, there’s an opportunity to go implement that internally signed somebody or to work with someone like Street Agency and say, Hey, here’s a, here’s another way to go make that investment and scale from there. Let’s talk as we’re wrap up here, a little bit about opponent the Tanba site right now. What was the I could I could see a world before we had this conversation. Because I wasn’t educated yet, where a lot of your stuff looked project based on you know, in our world, we do a lot of heavy lifting projects were in there for two to three months, four months, and we are basically over the we take over your apps department for a little while and then hand it back to you when it’s ready, when it’s cleaned up, ready to go again. And so I certainly see a membership, being a piece of help stabilize revenue there, that’s been something that we’ve built up over the course this year, we’re a little bit different, where it’s all in the back end, you’re actually you already have a retention based business service base. So it looks a little bit different. But this seems like then this wasn’t driven from, hey, I need to get more recurring revenue perspective. What kind of story and help us understand what if I’m joined hand but what that looks like I’m an agency and get involved what does that look like in the day to day? So I guess you were
Katie Street 27:27
expensive. That Street Agency not found but and not every agency can afford you to to pay someone 1000s of pounds every month or 1000s of dollars to do this yeah, or and can’t maybe afford to your inexpensive New Business Director or their salesperson or marketing person. So really, Tanba was born out of the idea that your all agencies deserve to get noticed and deserve to know how to better attract and win more new clients. There are some amazing agencies out there that are maybe too small or too busy, or whatever it is that they can’t, you know, they can’t, you can’t recruit an expensive newbies person, or they can’t use an agency like Street. So the idea was, came really out of that, that you this is something that anyone and everyone can have access to the costing is 75 pounds a month. I don’t know what that works out in dollars, but probably not much starting point in terms of pricing. And you get access to not just us in my vision for how to run your business, but the best people in the industry. So it is kind of UK focused at the moment. But we have got people from the AAR, we’ve got brand leaders, we’ve got an amazing board. We’ve got people, you know, varying different people with different experience, but hugely respected in the world of agency and new business and winning new clients, posting training programs for us giving us insights, hosting events, we’ve got templates on there. So anyone whether you’re just starting your kind of career in an agency, and you just want to hone your skills, because you’re going to start to be involved with pitches, and you want to get better at converting negotiating whatever it might be. Or if you’re a leader of an agency and you want to know how to define your value proposition and set a strong sales and marketing strategy and how to recruit the right kind of person when you get to that point. It’s got content on there for everyone. It’s got some really awesome partnerships as well as we’ve got a really amazing partner marketplace with some of the best leading agency tech partners and I’m hoping them pilot soon. So we’ve got some partnerships and there were some really amazing discounts people like HubSpot, etc. that are offering really good deals to you exclusive deals To anyone who becomes a member. Yeah, it’s super exciting. It’s got everything in there. And it’s really accessible in terms of cost. And it will also put you in touch with loads of experts that you might go to not want to do some bespoke work with them. And you can then go and work with them separately. So it’s just one cost. It’s a membership base, there’s going to be an awesome community, I think that comes out of it. We’ve got Remita, actually, at the moment, going live, probably two to three weeks time on sale. So I’m looking forward to that start making some money. But it also services, you know, an audience that we can’t sell to at the moment. So I have you, I have to qualify out of a lot of the opportunities that we get coming into us. Because they can’t afford us. I want to help them. I wish I could mentor and help everyone. But we’re a service business and I can’t whereas this model, anyone and everyone can sign up to, we can push the leads that we can’t take on That’s Jason, there is obviously a little bit of that involved as well. But the idea really was born out of being a bit less selfish. I don’t, I don’t need it to make money. I’m actually doing it because I and it will help refurbish this district as well. Of course, I don’t need it spent money. I did it genuinely. Because I want to provide something that helps you agencies get noticed, basically,
Gray MacKenzie 31:14
this is something that a lot of people are trying to figure out right now. How do we have all these people kind of in the ecosystem, who’s a little bit more help? They’re not ready to work with us right now. And one of the one of the conversations that comes up a lot, I think of like, in the UK. Yeah, obviously Ian Harris running agency. Hackers are some of the Yes, love en communities out there. How do you think about staffing the commuter like, have you appointed one person internally, who’s going to lead and driving the community? What does that look like?
Katie Street 31:44
Yeah, I mean, it’s a challenge because we have no money. But we do but it’s being funded. So the first thing is, it’s not just me. So we’ve got I’ve got the largest shareholding but it’s me and two others. Jody Osman and Richard Accardi, who founded in the UK, the BD 100, which celebrates the top 100 people in the world of agency business development, and civil officers job tie with them, because they’re now they’re now shareholders of Tanba and well, co founders of Tanba that yours is asked to be at the helm. So there’s there’s three of us, which definitely has helped us scale and get everything done. And obviously, it’s been an investment that we’ve started, we’ve all invested in creating. And we actually have when we’re recruiting lightly, but we actually have three people hopefully going to be working for Tanba three full time, so it’s costing us do quite a bit of money at this stage. We’ve got someone who’s responsible for marketing Tanba, and I’m using one of my existing team to help us ramp up and get 1000. And so they’re treating us like they’re treated client. And then we’ve got exactly say, someone to come and manage the membership and make sure all the members are happy, and that they’re aware of the events and that they’re also able to upload and get involved and, you know, do whatever they can do. And then the last one is someone’s managed the content on the site, because the key to the site success will be interesting, helpful content as well as the community platform which the membership person will own. So yeah, three kind of Tanba roles, and the sales one must keep as it is now. And hopefully it will just start to build momentum and sell itself. And the that that’s how it’s structured right now. And it’s big investment. But it we’ve got such great interest, even before we went live, we’ve had 80 people apply for the beta test, which is amazing. Yeah. And without us really even getting a huge push
Gray MacKenzie 33:50
yet. Right? That’s awesome. I think it’s important to share though that, hey, here’s what, here’s what goes into actually running even an early stage community that this is even in the space for a while we’ve been in this space for a little over 10 years, and I’ve seen dozens of agencies launch communities. And there’s four of them that that stuff, a ton of people trying to launch this model, it seems like a great, great deal, we get that recurring revenue coming in with very low effort. And it’s scale. It’s a great business model it at scale. It’s a it’s a challenging business to build up. But you know, that scale without making investment on the front end.
Katie Street 34:29
So yeah, and if it is an investment and we haven’t got any funding, we actually did get a small grant, which was amazing. But it is self funded. And it takes a lot of time with self built the platform. We’ve decided to go totally bespoke because we want to create something that was quite different and had things in that none of the other platforms that we could just buy off the shelf had so it’s been a journey. Yeah, there’s been lots of bugs and things go wrong and keep me up at night. But it It’s been a fun one. And I am so excited to, to see how it performs and to grow it and to make it better and more helpful. And yeah, that’s why we’re doing beta testing. We want to get feedback of the people that are potentially going to buy it and make sure that we shape it around them make it useful for them. Yep. Awesome.
Gray MacKenzie 35:17
Well, good. Well, Katie, I appreciate you want to come on and share? Obviously Tanba is tanba.io. I think. Yeah, you got it. Agency right on streak that agency.
Katie Street 35:31
Yeah, look at me the trendy URL say
Gray MacKenzie 35:36
you’re in good hands. If you’re thinking well, that’s awesome. Anywhere else that you appoint people to follow your journey?
Katie Street 35:41
I would say those the two the best two places that feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Katie with an IE, Street and yeah, any questions bring them
Gray MacKenzie 35:51
my way. Awesome. My project going on do on the share. Thanks for your time today.
Katie Street 35:55
Oh, lovely to meet you, Gray. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks
Outro 35:57
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