This video and article contains an interview with with Tim Roho, the CEO and founder of Wallkit — a CRM subscription and membership management tool. Tim is going to take us on a tour of the platform today, share a case-study of an integration and talk about the Wallkit roadmap. (Transcript follows)
So Tim, I guess first, maybe you could tell us a little bit about Wallkit and the core of the offering. What is the value proposition?
We’ve designed Wallkit initially as a platform that enables publishers to successfully and seamlessly run their subscription paywall membership business. Over time, Wallkit has evolved into an enterprise grade product that now provides and enables much more than that.
So now Wallkit is also a data management tool and event management tool and a contact management tool as well. So let’s talk about that and happy to introduce the audience into what we have here.
So let’s break that down a little bit. Perhaps we can talk through the lens of one of your customers to help explore the product a little bit more. I know that VentureBeat is one of your newest customers and you can tell how Wallkit is helping them to grow and succeed.
So VentureBeat is a publishing company that writes about all the cool things in technology, in hardware and software and in the games industry. VentureBeat is a company that is twofold: the general VentureBeat website and content that’s all around technology.
But the second part, which is cool is the GamesBeat which is like a separate division under, under this company that writes about the gaming industry. And specifically the content is tailored more towards the audience as professionals.
In 2020, VentureBeat approached Wallkit with this strong desire to actually connect their online presence to The membership and paywall mechanisms that Wallkit had. And we started the conversation and immediately we realized that Wallkit is the perfect technological match to the way VentureBeat business is structured.
And we have connected seamlessly to the existing membership architecture of that VentureBeat had.
If I can elaborate a bit more into that. So by the moment we have started connecting Wallkit, VentureBeat already had an existing membership database that. Had reached around 100,000 members at that point. That membership database had been collected with the Google Firebase authentication. This is a simple, and we can see it right here in the top right corner. And this is a classic example where, where we provide one tap, sign-in option. Where people just pick a bottom and boom, they are locked in, or if they didn’t log-in previously into this website, they have the account instantly create. So this is where our integration has started and we have connected Google Firebase, so Wallkit and Right connected the Google Firebase authentication that venture bit already.
We just connected that to Wallkit to provide an in-depth sign up registration payment, paywall and data capture in-flow.
Before connecting Wallkit, VentureBeat didn’t have any of this but now there are fields to capture data about the subscriber, that there are abilities to actually manage email subscriptions managed on platforms like Mailchimp through Wallkit. And as a subscriber, I can add or unsubscribe from certain newsletters with a click of a button.
Clearly you’re integrating with a number of services: you’re integrating with the payment platform, you’re integrating with some type of newsletter mailing platform — and then of course you have Wallkit, which is the membership data platform. So it’d be interested tounderstand exactly how those all connect within Wallkit.
Yes, here’s the plans page at VentureBeat is. It’s the perfect place where we can see what’s the step of different technologies that got combined.
So right now, if you sign up as a free member to VentureBeat, you get access to free weekly newsletters, which is VentureBeat daily and GamesBeat daily, but you don’t have access to the. Premium newsletters that are only available to the higher tier paid plans. All that is controlled and managed through Wallkit.
You get live stream access to the digital events, but at the same time, you do not get access to the VIP rooms and VIP features of those digital events: You’ve got to be a VIP member to get that. As a free member, you get limited access to the video library but you’re limited by the metered paywall to only see three videos per month.
These access restrictions are fully controlled with Wallkit.
If you upgrade your account to an insider plan, which is only $9 per month, you get. Few additional perks number one, and most importantly, you get access to the exclusive newsletters. You can also read all the editorial content that is not being published and released by rockstar authors at the VentureBeat editorial team. You get unlimited access to the premium content, which are event video recordings from previous events. You get additional offers from VentureBeat and partners again by subscribing you to specific lists in mailing software and you get 30% of a discount when you purchase passes to digital events that VentureBeat is running.
Got it. And all of this is ultimately being powered by Wallkit. So, Wallkit is giving you the ability to attach specific members to specific plans that you seemingly have defined within Wallkit you have the ability to provide different levels of access, build different people different amounts based on the tier that they’re associated with.
Wallkit is acting as a sort of middleware product, if you will: it’s connecting with MailChimp and Stripe, for example. How flexible is Wallkit to connect with these platforms?
Wallkit has gone miles ahead in terms of allow when each individual publisher to set up their exact business logic in the way that their marketing analytics and executive team have envisioned it. We have the technological means to customize all of these things and for VentureBeat there was a lot. I mean, there is a lot you can do just with your mailing list software. There’s a lot you can do with the payment process and with the events and with your CMS essentially — and plus Wallkit can connect your audience to your CRM!
For example, if you’re actively using the HubSpot or Wallkit connects to that and Wallkit can synchronize the data streams into into the analytics tools that you use in your existing business.
I gather that you just launched a ticketing platform powered by Wallkit and it powered the GamesBeat 2021 summit. Maybe you could just talk to us a little bit about what you’re doing in the ticketing space.
Just few weeks ago GamesBeat 2021 summit took place and essentially it featured rockstar speaker speakers from the games industry.
There were over 2000 event attendees and a solid percentage of those had actually signed up for VIP access to gain access to the VIP inside their rooms. Wallkit was used as a ticket sales platform work and was used as an event is live event access permissions platform.
Also, Wallkit had been used as a data management platform in order to sign up for the event. People filled out quite lengthy form telling VentureBeat about the business, their role in their business, whether they are a supplier or or a buyer in the games, their industry and more information. So VentureBeat had captured significant data about the event attendance and that data had been stored in both Wallkit and posted into other data processing mechanisms that VentureBeat is using in their business.
So maybe just to wrap things up, you could tell us a little bit about what your sort of major milestones are that you have ahead and what the plans are for the future for Wallkit in particular.
So the next big milestone that we have is there is We have an event of upcoming, which is VentureBeat Transform 2021, it’s going to take place mid-June and this is the largest event.
Ran by VentureBeat each year, Wallkit is already used for ticket sales and registrations. We are advancing ourselves in technology and especially in we are fine tuning the event tickets and that data processing technology that we already have and followingtThis event, we’re going to connect many more events from other Wallkit customers to our ticketing platform.
By end of year 2021, we can imagine we would be managing several dozen large events through Wallkit, and that would be a success for this ticketing module that we have only rolled out earlier this year.
One other thing that we are super excited about is Wallkit being able to serve as a data processing platform. Now we have just connected our software Segment, which is the leading customer data processing platform in the world. And the way it works right now is that e now have a bridge between all the vast amounts of data that Wallkit connects, which includes signups, transactions, content access, content inquiries, all the data that audience members provide and all the emails those people read.
Before we connected to Segment, wee only had this data in Wallkit and we wanted to enable our customers with a way to actually navigate and make use of that data. So now we use Segment as a data bridge Wallkit is being pushed to customers, segment account and within customer segment account.
There’s a huge number of integrations that you can magically connect to segment in order to be able to navigate, analyze and process that data that you already have. So Wallkit and Segment combined is already a strong data management platform and we’ve made one step ahead by connecting at establishing a bridge between Segment and Variance, which is platform that enables companies to actually establish actionable pipelines and flows based on the actions that take place on their website platforms.
It sounds complicated, but essentially Wallkit now acts as a bridge that can allow a sales person or a sales team to take actions based on real time audience activity taking place on the website right now. So for instance, if we take VentureBeat transform as an example, let’s imagine that I have clicked the Transform 2021 webpage and I have scrolled but I didn’t sign up. We know that I’m already an authenticate member at VentureBeat and VentureBeat knows about me at this point. The event sales team can get a Slack message that says Tim Rojo has reviewed the Transform signup page but didn’t sign up and the sales team can reach out to me immediately to see if the user has any questions.
Fantastic. Well, that’s all really exciting. I wish you the best of luck with rolling out all that technology and scaling it. Appreciate you running us through the platform and I’m sure we’ll chat in the future as more of this stuff continues to grow.
www.wallkit.net
Interview with the kind assistance of Jeff Weiner.
