🤖We asked ChatGPT for help with our marketing (and...wow!)

The latest news from StreamAlive and the world of online, offline, and hybrid live events.

Hi there!

In this newsletter…

• Painkillers, vitamins, and ChatGPT

• Join the StreamAlive community

• Register for the Digital Stage Summit event

Are we a painkiller 💊 or a vitamin ❤️?

It is said that there are two types of (SaaS) products in this world.

1. Painkillers

2. Vitamins

If you’ve got a headache, you’re reaching for the painkillers to solve your problem right away. If you don’t have painkillers handy, you can bet you’ll be heading to the shop immediately to pick some up.

If you’re on the dark side of 40 like me👴, then you might hope that taking your daily vitamins is going to keep health problems at bay. If I forget to take them for a few days or if I run out before restocking, then no big deal.

A Dall-E take on painkillers vs vitamins

Most investors like to invest their money into apps that are painkillers.

Think things that make the business money (sales outreach, lead generation, email marketing, conversion optimization), things that save you money (ad spend optimization, automation tools, CRMs), or things that save you time, and hence, money (analytics, AI, project management).

A great example of a painkiller. How else are businesses going to email their customers at scale and on autopilot?

Then there are vitamins.

Vitamins in the SaaS world are apps that enhance your work, but you might not be knocking down doors looking for a solution to your problem like you would with painkillers.

Think about apps like DocuSign or Calendly or Dropbox or Notion. These are wildly popular apps, but I’m not sure that I’d personally call them painkillers. Not for me, at least.

Digitally signing documents is important but a business isn’t going to fall over a struggle to trade because their customers can’t digitally sign a document.

I don’t think anyone tore their hair out because they couldn’t write a to do list!

Sure, many vitamin apps make your life easier, but if the CFO made me decide between a Dropbox subscription and a CRM subscription, I know which one I would choose!

When does a vitamin become a painkiller?

And yet, for the sales team, getting a contract signed a little bit quicker, or making it slightly easier for prospects to book a meeting with you, perhaps DocuSign and Calendly are painkillers.

Perhaps for the video production agency that needs to share enormous video files, DropBox is critical to their business.

The key is to know your audience.

That’s got us thinking about how StreamAlive might be seen as vitamin to many people who run live sessions.

Sure, you can run a live session just fine without StreamAlive.

Live sessions with low engagement has been the norm since speakers have been up on stage delivering monologues.

We’ve seen Twitch streamers do some amazing things with StreamAlive and they have great things to say about the app, but most said they wouldn’t pay for it because higher engagement didn’t make much difference to their livestreams, they just wanted to chat and play games.

But we couldn’t help but wonder, is there anyone running a live session to a group of people where engagement, attention and knowledge retention is a bona fide PAIN that they are having.

An app can be a painkiller to one group of users and a vitamin to another

This has brought us to instructors.

What pain might instructors, trainers, and educators be facing in their daily work which relies on talking to groups of people in live sessions, online and offline?

You have the obvious ones:

1. Feels like talking to a brick wall with a sea of blank faces

2. Need to prove that training is having an impact

3. Dealing with knowledge loss days and weeks after the training

But we wanted to go deeper and find out on an emotional level what keeps these people up at night.

To find out we used this awesome free AI tool: The Ouchy Pain Finder (a vitamin app!)

This bot was created by the folks at Why We Buy. We strongly recommend you sign up to Katelyn’s incredible marketing newsletter for more buyer psychology!

This ChatGPT bot asks five very simply questions:

1. What is the name of your product or service?
   
   StreamAlive
   

2. Describe your product or service in ONE sentence.
   
   StreamAlive transforms sessions on Zoom, Teams, YouTube, etc into AI-powered interactive experiences
   

3. Who is your target buyer?
   
   Trainers, Educators, Learning & Development professionals
   

4. What problems or pain points might push someone to buy your product or service?
   
   Low learner engagement in virtual instructor led sessions
   

5. What is the main benefit your product or service offers?
   
   Easy and frictionless participation by learners through the native platform chat

To see the very real and very compelling pains that instructors are having in their live sessions, tune in to next week’s newsletter…

…just kidding 😁

Here’s what AI came up with, and to be honest, we’re a little bit scared at how on-point the emotional struggles are:

Life-Altering & Urgent Pains of Instructors

(These are the pains that make trainers, educators, and L&D professionals feel like they NEED a solution ASAP.)

1. "If I don’t fix this engagement issue soon, I’ll be replaced by pre-recorded training videos!" (Fear of irrelevance)
   Live trainers risk losing their value if engagement stays low.

2. "Half my audience zones out within minutes, and I have no way to bring them back!" (Inadequacy)
   When learners disengage, trainers feel ineffective and powerless to create impact.

3. "I can’t tell if my audience is understanding or just pretending to listen!" (Uncertainty)
   Trainers struggle to gauge comprehension in a virtual setting, making it difficult to adapt in real time.

4. "People are multitasking and checking emails instead of participating—this is a disaster!" (Failure)
   Virtual distractions kill engagement, making sessions feel pointless.

5. "My learners barely interact, and I’m starting to feel like a radio broadcaster instead of a trainer." (Loneliness)
   Talking to an unresponsive audience feels isolating and frustrating.

(There are loads more pain points like the ones listed above, let me know if you’re curious to see the rest!)

Before seeing pain points described in this way I think we’ve been guilty at StreamAlive for being too generic in our messaging by just saying…

Boost your engagement! 💪

Sure engagement is important, but we weren’t tying it back to these pains that people who run live sessions day in and day out are facing, or why higher engagement is going to make a big difference to the personal struggles facing our users.

Now that we have a whole new way of thinking about our customer’s problem (thanks, AI!), we’re going to be using these ideas from ChatGPT and actively weaving them into our website, ads, and marketing materials going forward.

As the saying goes, one man’s vitamin is another man’s painkiller.

What do you think?

Did ChatGPT hit a bullseye with these pain points? Should we be careful about following ideas generated by an AI? You can let us know in our Facebook community.

Join the StreamAlive community on Facebook, connect with other users and let us know what you think of the upcoming quiz interaction!

How to grow your digital presence and engage your audience

On March 18-20th, the Digital Stage Summit will be taking place.

It’s a three-day workshop that has the who’s who of expert speakers teaching attendees how to elevate your content and create a professional online presence.

The best part? It’s free to attend! The organizer, Alec Johnson, is a multi-talented and generous host. Our CEO, Lux, recently attended one of Alec’s masterclasses, and was raving about it to any of us who would listen.

Who is this event for?

The summit is perfect for entrepreneurs, content creators, and professionals looking to enhance their online presence, engage their audience, and scale their business. Whether you're new to the digital stage or already established, you’ll find valuable insights and strategies tailored to your journey.

Catch us on our social pages

If you haven’t already, check out our social media pages to stay updated on our quirky takes on the latest social media trends and the occasional piece of engagement-related advice.

All the best,

Peter and the StreamAlive team
100% human written with ❤️