The Most-Asked Questions About Ashore

Cody: Welcome to the Ashore podcast! This week, Ashore’s customer success manager, Kaylie Meek, joins Abby Nash to discuss the challenges that creatives face with approvers. And you might be surprised, and probably even relieved, to discover that we all generally struggle with the same issues. No matter what kind of creative you are, there’s a good chance you struggle to get high-quality feedback or/and that you struggle to get any kind of feedback at all.

If you have ever created an account on Ashore, there’s a good chance that you’ve spoken with Kaylie at least once. She’s an inspiring person to me who thinks deeply about virtually everything she’s paying attention to and, in her role, she understands the creative mind better than anyone I know.

You’re really gonna enjoy this podcast, I can’t say it enough. I’m out this week, but this was a very insightful discussion, and I know you’ll benefit from these two brilliant thinkers. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Ashore, reach out to us at info@ashoreapp.com.

Enjoy the show! Talk soon.

Kaylie: We are live. I don’t know how much clearer I can get than a thumbs up. We are live.

Abby: Yeah, but this isn’t like a radio show – you just say it!

Have you ever had a startup idea?

Kaylie: Hmm…Startup idea?

Abby: This is Cody’s favorite part, so we have to honor it.

Kaylie: I don’t know, I’m not that business-minded. I always wanted to open, like, a midnight art store. ‘Cause art supplies are one of those things you run out of 12 o’clock at night and no one’s open.

Abby: Yeah! So I have a startup idea, and I never do, so I wanted to share it. Okay, so this is because we have to move houses and stuff. I don’t drive, so I walk to work. And we have to move out of this neighborhood this summer into a different neighborhood somewhere in the city. I’m going to have to get a ride to work, every day. It’s gonna suck – mostly for the people giving me a ride, honestly, I’ll be fine. I just sit in a car.

But there are people like me in the world who don’t drive and it’s hard for them to get to work and they don’t live in a city where transportation is easy to get. So what I’m thinking for my startup idea is some sort of company that links people who need remote work, like customer service or support, things like that, sales, marketing, content-writing and then people with disabilities. It’s a great marriage of these two people. You know, people who have a hard time leaving the house and people who need employees who can work remotely. Or you know, from anywhere.

Kaylie: Yeah, I think that’s a solid idea. Especially because, you know, there’s a lot of services for at-home work, and you can find it, but if you had an app you could kind of consolidate it into one area. Because, to my knowledge (and I have looked at that sort of stuff before), there’s not really the “one ring to rule them all” – the one website that’s gonna be the definitive end-all-be-all like Google is the end-all-be-all for search engines. Sorry Bing users.

Abby: It’s like the way everybody goes on Indeed to find work now, like, an app that is specifically for posting jobs that can be worked remotely. I don’t know, it could be contract work or you want a more permanent position filled. That’s my startup idea and I’m really excited about it. Now I’m not gonna have one for another six months, but, you know.

I guess we should get to the point of why I’m talking to you anyways!

So you, for Ashore, are the customer success manager, right?

Kaylie: Yes, it is customer success. So what I do is like sales, but sales itself is a lot of different things, because I’m the first point of contact for a lot of our customers. And sales involves a little bit of marketing in that sort of way. These people are already interested but a lot of them haven’t made that final decision. So you’re still doing that sort of coaxing, “here’s what we have to offer, here’s why you should pick us over anyone else you’re looking at”. And a lot of that is that relationship building. And then I’m also just basic customer service, I’m here to answer your questions, because, you know, I’m building that relationship.

Abby: So everybody that becomes a user on Ashore hears from Kaylie, the customer success manager.

Kaylie: Ideally, at some point, yeah. I mean, if I’ve missed you, please let me know!

So mostly what I do in sales is I take that marketing stuff and then I just rephrase it in a conversation with someone. You and I both work together to develop like, what questions I keep gettings asked, what features should we highlight, and all of those come from me talking to people and having their questions and hearing what they like most of all. So it’s that sort of constant communication between me speaking with customers and you trying to find new customers.

Abby: That’s true. I definitely ask you a lot of questions whenever I’m preparing my marketing material because you’re on the front lines, you talk to people. So I can assume that someone is really interested in this feature or that somebody.. You know, we have a lot of compan-er, we have a lot of customers who are printers but…

Kaylie: You would think we have a lot of print company customers – and we do! We really do. But we also have a lot of people who do apparel design, and newsletters, and like, pretty much every company that exists has some sort of marketing company they have to create. Marketing materials, fliers, etc. So they have a proofing process. I’m assuming, you know, that Google doesn’t just have a marketing department and they just make stuff and put it out there without any sort of checks from anyone.

Kaylie: I definitely had a computer in the house at four.

Abby: Well I guess I did, too, but it….

Kaylie: We definitely had computers, they just made god-awful dial-up noises.

Abby: I don’t think we had the internet on our computer but we would run those…

Kaylie: I played video games on the computer at four.

Abby: We had those little CD ROMs and you could put them in and run a program. You remember floppy disks? Wow. Way to make myself look old. Remember VCRs? Remember how you had to rewind the tape before you sent it back to the tape store?

Kaylie: You mean Blockbuster?

Abby: That’s what it’s called! The “tape store”…

Kaylie: The tape store. VHS, Abby.

Abby: Whatever, you know what I’m talking about. The olden days, whenever you had to carve into a rock the movie you wanted to see and then throw it at a caveman. And then that caveman, after he woke up from being knocked out, he would pick up the rock and be like, “nope, that tape’s still checked out” and then you had to go back home to your hut.

Kaylie: I don’t know why that makes me think of, is it ancient Sumer where they have all those tablets complaining about that one dude, that one grain merchant, that one grain merchant and they didn’t like his prices and there are so many, so many complaints. They’re written in stone.

Abby: Imagine being dedicated enough to your complaints that you write them in stone. It’s like Capterra, but in a cave. Caveterra!

Kaylie: That’s a good startup idea. My complaints certainly won’t survive the apocalypse, because they’re stored in a computer, let’s make sure they do – Caveterra.

Abby: Okay I think we should end, right?

Kaylie: I believe we should end.

Abby: So Kaylie, before we go, as the customer success manager, Ashore users, or future users, or like, literally anybody who wants to talk to you, how do they talk to you?

Kaylie: Politely.

Abby: No, I mean….

Kaylie: The manner in which I prefer to be spoken to is with politeness. However, if you’re on the Ashore page, on the Ashore website, you can always hit in the bottom right corner we have a little message box, so you can always chat me there – or Cody, usually me. You can also shoot me an email at kaylie@ashoreapp.com.

Abby: And you’ll answer promptly and politely.

Kaylie: As long as you were prompt and polite in sending it!

Abby: Otherwise you’re going to be “respectfully”.

Kaylie: I will be very “respectfully”.

Abby: I love whenever people end their emails like that. So I guess, respectfully, we’re done.

Kaylie: Respectfully, I guess we are.