Lucy Mort Portfolio

Sessions

Creator Monetization Tool (MVP)

Role

Co-founder & CEO

Product management

UX/UI design

Branding

Date

Jan 2024

Problem

While working on Sunroom, we found it difficult to expand to new creator niches with the photo/video forward subscription model. Our thesis was that we could reach new groups of creators, whose value to their audiences was not oriented in visual media, but rather in advice, often relayed via text, voice notes, video workshops, or retreats. Sessions was one of two experimental MVPs that we built to test this hypothesis, and attempt to expand the overall reach of our products. We also hypothesized that conversion to payment was more difficult with the subscription model. We suspected it would be easier to convert people to one-off payments for one-off experiences.

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Solution

Sessions is a simple web app that allows creators to host one-off audio sessions with their community, for a fee of their choosing. From our time working on Sunroom, we knew that audience members valued feeling seen and heard by the creator, on an individual level. We also knew that creators often don’t have capacity to monetize from a series of 1:1 interactions. We combined both of these insights into Sessions. A large number of people can join a Session, but each person has the option to submit a personal answer to the question/topic set by the creator/host. The creator then selects some of the submissions to respond to, by ‘pinning’ each answer for the group to see, and (with permission) brings the respondent ‘on stage’ to share a live audio session with the creator. This continues until the creator feels they’ve provided enough value to the group. The group chat serves to involve the listeners and bind the community as their responses are workshopped in real-time.

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Key Focus Areas & Results

We ran 5 test Sessions all up, with different creators. And while the feeling of a Session was quite magical, we discovered several blockers that deterred us from continuing the rollout:

Creators were quite nervous about hosting Sessions. It was a new format that required creators to think on their feet, and manage the group in real-time. The live format required creators to promote ahead of time, and corral their audiences into the Session at the same time. This made it difficult to recruit new creators to try Sessions.
Considering the ceiling on what people are prepared to pay for a live session where there’s no guarantee they’ll get to speak to the creator, creators did not earn enough from Sessions to make it worth their while. We built in tipping, and played with increasing the floor price for the ‘Pay what you can’ entry fee, but neither yielded strong results. We learnt that people often weren’t prepared to pay when they weren’t sure of the value they’d receive.
It was difficult for creators to get the volume of participants needed for an engaged Session. We tried making changes to the landing page and entry flow into a session, to make people feel more comfortable participating and to generate more material for the creator to riff off. For example, we made responding to the question/topic mandatory, but with the option to not have your response spotlighted.

Branding

I designed the Sessions brand in a weekend, since the product was only at an MVP stage. The goal was to create a brand that feels intimate and friendly, yet conveys value and exclusivity. The personality traits we used to inform the brand are: dynamic, friendly, passionate, authentic, and charismatic. The wordmark had a slight nod to handwritten type, with its slant and unbroken form. The lowercase letters helped give the brand a friendly, low-key read. And the left to right slanted forms, combined with bold line weights, added a sense of excitement and movement. The two-circle motif was repeated across all the illustrations — mirroring the two thumbnails that dominate the real estate of the Session user experience. At its core, the product is about the energy that’s shared between the two people sharing live audio in a session.

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Lucy Mort