One of the more elusive aspects in the customer life-cycle and one critical to a company’s long-term success is retention. The fleeting satisfaction of acquiring a new customer is quickly supplanted by the age-old business conundrum: The party’s started and guests are here, but how do you create an experience that makes people stay and tell their friends to swing by, too? It’s an evolving but worthwhile challenge for any company to keep pace with technological advances, societal shifts, cultural expectations, and the whims of human beings who, let’s face it, get plenty of party invitations.
So imagine our delight when Ben Thompson (Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer of GitPrime) one of the OG users of our sketching app Paper, emerged as an early adopter of Paste!
From Sketching Ideas to Sharing Them
We first met Ben in 2012 through a series of skillfully rendered UI sketches that he shared online. At the time, Ben was creative director at a brand strategy and design firm in Durango, Colorado, and our team loved how he pushed the boundaries of what a humble iPad sketching app could do. He made detailed UI/UX sketches, fanciful designs (like this one for a “bunk bed/fort type thing”) and off-the-cuff drawings for web and mobile.]
As Ben‘s creative and professional path has grown and evolved over time, so have our tools. Paper helped people bring their ideas to life through sketches; Paste is a natural extension of those messy, individual ideas — a way to align collaborators around your idea.
Sometimes, improvements comes organically: “I was pleased to go into Paste this morning and make a deck with just a few minutes before my executive call,” Ben said during our video call this summer. He pointed to the multi-select feature we introduced earlier this year where users can quickly select and delete multiple slides in a deck. “I’d been hoping for that feature,” he added.
Keeping a Big Team Aligned
Paste has become the go-to presentation tool for GitPrime’s 100+ employees across locations in Colorado, Utah, Florida, Texas, and more, for everything from weekly team updates to external keynote presentations. In a typical marketing update, Ben says, “we might talk about trends in lead generation compared to what our goals were. Then we’ll talk about upcoming events that everyone in the company should know about; we’ll announce partnerships.”
To our surprise, the feature that ultimately convinced GitPrime to switch to Paste from presentation tools they previously used is remarkably simple: “The day we found out that Paste supported custom fonts was the day I said ‘Sign us up — for the year!’” he said. (It’s easy to use your own custom brand font in Paste. Give it a try.)
GitPrime in Paste: Conference Talk | New Employee Onboarding | Engineering Impact Magazine
Focus on What Matters
At GitPrime, the ability to quantify effectiveness is core to the company’s mission and its raison d’être, serving tens of thousands of software engineers with objective data on their contributions and impact. “Engineers just want to build stuff, but sometimes there’s misalignment with the business side,” explains Ben.
It’s been a win for us, as well, to continue building tools that benefit creators, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs like Ben, though long-term satisfaction and loyalty of this level is harder to measure.
We’re reminded of a simple remark he posted some years ago: Your users don’t care about features — just benefits. It’s just one of many pieces of feedback we took to heart when building Paste. So let us know how we can make pitching, presenting and collaborating on your next idea a better experience. We’re listening 👂.