- Hello and welcome to Community Chats,
I'm Aley Hammer.
And today we're interviewing Matt Vaughan Jones,
the CMO from Naoca.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Can you start by sharing a little bit
about your business, Naoca?
- Yeah, and thanks for having me, Aley.
It's great to be here.
Naoca provides a live-streaming
and video-on-demand platform for the funeral industry.
Among other things, the platform is used to schedule streams
and can automatically push a tribute
to the client's website with an embedded live stream.
We leverage the funeral home
or crematorium's existing processes
and equipment where we can,
but we can help them out with audio-visual equipment,
if they need.
Our point of difference is that we spend about 30%
of our operational time on client engagement.
We provide training and support,
we facilitate installation of equipment.
Yet 99% of all streaming issues
are due to situations on the ground.
So a funeral streaming company
really needs to be an AV company first.
But we're also on standby 24/7
to resolve technical or user issues.
And this is something that's really important
for our smaller clients,
all the way up to the larger clients that will stream,
you know, 20 plus services in a day.
People love having a real person that they can speak to.
I'd say that this service and the support,
and the close relationships we've built with our users
is what distinguishes Naoca
from the other options out there.
This is how we achieve our real purpose,
to give family and friends the opportunity
to participate in a funeral service,
even if they can't make it in person.
It helps expand the community around the grieving family,
and this is a need which really became salient during COVID.
- Absolutely, I mean, 30% of your operational time
being focused on customer engagement is huge.
That's so amazing.
And of course the need would've become even stronger
during COVID, as you mentioned.
So, what incredible customer service.
And on that topic of COVID, Matt, I wanted to ask you,
what has the impact been of COVID on your business?
- Yeah, okay.
So Naoca started in April 2018,
and funeral streaming had been around since before COVID,
but adoption was slow.
We were going steadily, but it really acted as a catalyst
and kicked the industry into action.
You know, pre-COVID we were a team of two,
you know, doing 400 services a month.
Alex would jump into his hearse, which he bought for $99,
it was actually his family car at the time.
You know, he'd drive 15 hours to set up a new client.
But today we have five staff,
we're looking for another developer, if anyone's interested.
And we're streaming 2,000 services a month
during the quiet periods.
What instant was spiked to,
pre-COVID you might expect
maybe three viewers watching live,
and another 10 after the fact.
But I just had a look at one of our clients,
Bowra & O'Dea in Perth, and they've done 391 streams
in the last three months, that brought in 31,000 views,
and an extra 65,000 clicks on their website.
So it's been huge for their brand engagement.
- Wow, well, it's evident from the data
that more and more people are becoming reliant
on streaming services,
and your business is definitely supporting
so many grieving families in needs of, you know,
less conventional solutions.
So congratulations.
And Matt, I wanted to ask you,
how do you guys actually use AWS?
- Right, so we only moved our infrastructure
across to AWS last year.
Previously, we used a combination of services,
and initially intended to use AWS
just as a cost-effective server farm,
do as much as possible on our own.
But as we began to use the AWS ecosystem,
we found more and more ways to streamline our platform
with your services.
So a key feature that we like,
is that AWS is infinitely scalable.
And for a growing business like us,
that's expanding overseas, this is really important.
Another thing that we really like
is the support that we've had from Issa,
Justin and Mike has been unbelievable.
I was honestly shocked to hear
that such a large company as Amazon
can pay such close attention to their users,
and it's been inspiring for us.
And it definitely fits Naoca's ethos.
We're also absolutely customer obsessed.
And this mindset has underpinned our growth,
and a lot of our product development
has been in response to customer request.
I'm a big fan of the customer-centric approach.
- Well, I really love it
when customers say that they're shocked
with the love and support
that such a large company like Amazon give to our customers,
because we truly are customer obsessed.
And it sounds like, you know, you're very aligned as well.
Matt, you recently released features
to specifically meet custom demands, on this topic.
So what were some of those custom demands
and the features that you've actually released?
- Yeah, yeah, so as I said,
a lot of the features we have released
have been in response to customer requests,
and this is really how we fleshed out a lot of functionality
of our products.
So, most recently we've been working
on an IoT-enabled touch screen.
This is what people mean
when they talk about Internet of things, or Industry 4.0,
and it's just communication networks between devices.
So when a customer live streams
from an audio-visual system in their chapel,
we'll send them a touch screen,
and they'll control the live stream from that.
But with this new firmware,
they'll get a whole bunch of useful information
about the health of the stream,
they'll be able to schedule services during a live stream,
and they can automatically start and stop the stream.
A whole bunch of useful features.
This came out of a request
from the Propel Group in New Zealand.
They run a really tight ship over there,
it's very lean and efficient,
but it does mean that the funeral director is really busy,
and needs live streaming to be as hands-off as possible.
We believe that our users in other businesses
will find this really useful as well,
and even in other industries.
- That's really cool.
And Matt, to round up this interview,
are you hoping to expand your services
to cater for other industries?
Or you guys gonna stick to the funeral services for now?
- Yeah, we're definitely looking to expand
into other industries.
At the start of 2021, we released a new version of Naoca,
in which much of our infrastructure is modular,
so that it can be used in other applications.
So while our frontend is designed specifically to cater
for the exact needs of the funeral industry,
our backend can be applied to other applications.
So although we already do have a bunch of users streaming,
you know, weddings, church services, even sports events,
and without giving too much away,
we do have a couple of other really exciting projects
in the works which cater for even more diverse applications.
Like a platform we are piloting for StandardAero,
which will support the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
I'm particularly excited about that one.
So watch this space.
- Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
All the best for your future endeavors.
And if anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much for sharing your story.
- Yeah, thanks for having me, Aley. It's been great.