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Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5 Town Hall: Matterport New Pricing (16 May 2019) We Get Around Network Forum | www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com WGANTV Town Hall Matterport New Pricing (Thursday, 16 May 2019) with Matterport Chief Marketing Officer Chris Bell, Matterport Vice President of Product Management Damien Leostic. Moderator: WGANTV Managing Editor Dan Smigrod ( www.WGANTV.com ) Transcript Dan Smigrod: Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, May 16th, 2019. You're watching a special edition of WGANTV Live at 5 today Town Hall: Matterport New Pricing. We have two executives from Matterport that are joining us. Hey Chris. Chris Bell: Hello.
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Dan Smigrod: This is Chris Bell, Matterport Chief Marketing Officer with us today from Chicago. Hey Damien. Damien Leostic: Good afternoon. Dan Smigrod: Good to see you. Damien Leostic, Matterport VP of Product Management. Chris, Damien, thanks so much for being on the show today. I think it's really tremendous to have you be able to talk firsthand with some members of the We Get Around Network Forum Community. Chris, Damian, do you want to talk a little bit about the pricing announcement on Thursday, May 9, 2019 and what that pricing announcement means both for the existing Community as well as those that are new to Matterport thinking about getting Matterport? Chris, Damien? Chris Bell: Sure. Dan, thank you so much for having us on. It's a pleasure to be here. One of the favorite aspects of my job is to get to talk to customers, users and partners all around the world. Through this medium, it's even easier because we've got people tuning in from Brazil and Turkey. It's wonderful to have the opportunity. Chris Bell: The first thing I wanted to say is hello to everybody. You may not know this, but all of us at Matterport spend a bit of time on the We Get Around Network. I recognize some familiar names and faces, mostly names. It's nice to be interacting directly with the Community because we're as enthusiastic about the possibilities of this technology as you all are. We also know that not everyone is thrilled with our announcements. We want to really create an open dialogue here and just hear both the good side and the not so good side of what you're concerned about. Chris Bell: It's not going to work for everybody, but we hope it works for everybody over the long term. What we announced on Thursday, and Damien is going to go into a little more detail about the specifics, is really a whole new way of putting value into the subscription tiers. I like to call it a blueprint for growth because it's the starting point. It's a place where we're able to do more in each tier and provide more value to the brand new person that's just starting out with Matterport, all the way up to someone who built a business on it and is moving towards enterprise solution and going way above and beyond what are our off the shelf offerings have to offer. Chris Bell: But we really are looking at this as a way to get started with a whole new chapter of Matterport. The goal here is to grow the pie, to grow the business for you and us and the whole world. As excited as we're and as much time as we spend every day using that report and scanning and doing our work both at the company and out in the field, there's still a very small population of people who have used it and heard about it. There's so much more ground to cover. We think that our new offering and the way we've organized it will give us what we need to scale. Page 2 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Chris Bell: I'm going to ask Damien to just introduce the basic tenets of the new subscription pricing, what's in each tier. I'll just introduce kind of the value that we've added. For those of you who may not know and might be just tuning in to learn more about it or get information for the first time, we've got unlimited uploads, which is a new thing for us. No more processing fees. So there's not a need to gate keep in terms of how much content you're uploading to the Matterport cloud. Chris Bell: We've introduced the concept of archiving, and it's unlimited archiving. So, once again, there's been a history of figuring out what to delete and when to delete. Now every space that you create, everything that you store in the Matterport cloud can be archived and stored indefinitely. We have no more fees for larger spaces, which was a common request for a change that we've gotten over the last few years. It's a very predictable cost. Chris Bell: You're looking at a price per month and a price per year that's super predictable. Not a lot of overages, no overages as a matter of fact and no addons. It's something that our customers have been asking for because the bill tended to be variable depending on what you did with it. One of the things I'm most excited about, I know Damien is too, is that we've now got access to multiple cameras from the low end to the mid end all the way up to the Leica BLK 360. Their ability contribute to a project. Chris Bell: We're really excited about these five. We're also really excited about the future where these new innovations and capabilities take us with the new subscription pricing point with all the value that's associated. So with that, I'll toss it over to Damien who's at headquarters in Sunnyvale to tell you a little bit more about the specifics of what we announced in the product and on the subscription prices. Damien Leostic: Good. Thank you Chris. Hello Dan and hi everyone. Again, my name is Damien Leostic, I'm the vice president of product at Matterport. I've been here coming on three years now. So not so long, but it's been a great journey. My role at Matterport is really to connect all business functions, sales, marketing, media representing our customers and the product. In product engineering to support essentially our mission. Damien Leostic: What I wanted to do today actually is maybe me start with taking a step back. Why did we take a look at pricing? But before I even do that, I want to talk about a few things you guys have seen over the past couple of months and how we're rebooting the company and taking some actions, some key actions across some very important pillars within the company. Page 3 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Damien Leostic: A few months ago, you saw a cloud [inaudible 00:06:06] announcement where we opened the ecosystem of devices to new capabilities. That started last year when we opened up the platform to the BLK 360 and that continued back in January when we opened up the ecosystem to 360 cameras. As we looked through that and as we look through how to onboard customers, we looked at pricing and really fundamentally, we are now engaged across the globe in more than 90 countries with a set of very diverse customers. Damien Leostic: Customers of different scales. Customers of different profiles. Customers that serve in different verticals and different industries. We looked primarily at the existing pricing and we looked at the problem statement of the pricing. It's a pricing that we all became used to, but has some fundamental scaling issues. If you look at the pricing today or yesterday or a week ago at Matterport, you'd had essential a subscription. You guys are used to that, the classic professional and business subscription. But you had a collection of what we do call a lacarte or usage based pricing on top of it. Damien Leostic: It made for very complex and combat some ecosystem to deal with it. It's a very complex narrative to explain to our customers. The way to support our mission, we looked at the construct of the pricing. We spent a good year talking to a ton of customers, doing a ton of analysis in terms of usage and adoptions from different customers, different cohorts of customers across again different verticals and industries and formulated essentially the new pricing strategy to respond to the scaling issues and complexity of the existing pricing. Damien Leostic: As you effect change, of course it's difficult to serve everyone in the same way. What I mean by that is we looked at the most efficient ways to serve the broader audience of our customers. Again, like Chris said, we looked at the notion of processing. The notion of free models that expires every month. The notion of processing by camera type. Again, we're dealing with the [inaudible 00:08:39] of Matterport. We're dealing with a high end device like the BLK 360. We're dealing with 360 cameras. Damien Leostic: On top of it we also had our Pro2 Lite Camera which while being a poor Matterport camera had a different pricing structure associated to it. One of the key principles that we had was how do we eliminate the complexity on processing again by a camera type and by space type? The second one, we're responding to some requests from all of our customers on hardware management model in a much more efficient way. This is where archiving come into play. Archiving really means to help our customer keep the models that they've built, used and want to keep in the portfolio. Dan Smigrod: Damien, I got to interrupt. These folks have read the press releases. They're eager to ask. They're eager to tell you how they feel and they're eager to ask questions. If you don't mind, how about we jump into that. We feel like we've missed. Page 4 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Damien Leostic: Thank you, Dan. Thanks for moderating. Let me add one quick statement. Absolutely [inaudible 00:09:55], you guys have read it, just want to set the stage as to, and I'm happy to answer the question as to why we made the changes. That will inform obviously the decisions we've made. Hopefully we can walk you through those changes and the journey ahead. Dan Smigrod: All right, cool. Ross, I'm going to start with you. If you don't mind, just give me a moment. Maybe you can unmute your camera. I just want to let those that are watching on YouTube, you can join us live. If you go to the We Get Around Network forum wganforum.com. Just simply look in the bottom right, there's a red bar, just click on the bar and you can join the discussion. Ross, how about telling us your name, your company and your location and then what you'd like to share? Then if you had some questions for Damien or Chris. Ross Zanzucchi: I don't know, can you hear me yet? Dan Smigrod: Yes. Thank you. Ross Zanzucchi: My name is Ross Zanzucchi, I own 3D RoomScapes. I've worked mostly with the right now residential realtors. Also, I do quite a bit of a retail business too. I guess, I think what everybody here is wondering, I have yet to hear how this is really bad. I hear how it's beneficial for Matterport, but I'm yet to hear how it's beneficial for us as the service providers. I don't care how I spin the numbers, I can't make it work, especially the monthly, the yearly fees that you're wanting to charge. Ross Zanzucchi: Maybe I'm not like everybody else, but coming up with seven even $5,000 every year will at one point. Then wondering if you're going to have that business for the full year. I don't know, it's just the pricing structure doesn't seem to make sense to me or I haven't heard anybody on the forum that... well maybe a couple people, but very few that it makes a lot sense to. To throw and on to, I guess it was a good thing that you let us grandfather in the old pricing. Ross Zanzucchi: I fortunately had just signed up for the... I'm not sure what it called, the $149 a month plan, like two months ago. But I can imagine that if I had just the old plan, which was just the basic plan of this, whatever it was, a $49 plan prior to that, I'd be pretty upset right now. At least now that the plan that I have fits my business, I don't think I have to worry about changing at least for a year. Page 5 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Ross Zanzucchi: But this new pricing for new people and for the people that didn't know what was coming like me and weren't able to switch to the higher plan of the old pricing, I see a lot of people having big issues with this. I don't know who you talked to, but you keeps saying you get all this feedback and that's why you created this. The feedback all of us here is the complete opposite. So I don't know who you talked to and where are you getting your feedback from, but that's something we kind of like too know I guess [inaudible 00:13:06]. Chris Bell: Ross, I appreciate all the comments. The first thing I want to say is we're actually here to listen directly to the feedback because we actually have talked to a lot of customers. Those customers span, our different verticals. We talked to people in architecture, engineering, construction, insurance. Many people in the commercial real estate business have different needs. I just want to let you know that we have an open mind with this. We want to hear about what works for you and what doesn't, and we'll take that back. Chris Bell: Some of our executives are listening right now and we'll be back in Sunnyvale talking about exactly what you folks tell us and what we need to hear about. The other thing is when we talk about feedback, and Damien can elaborate on this a little bit, we're not just talking about a feedback on the boards or feedback through email. We have a lot of data, we're a data driven company and what you're seeing in the tiers and the way that they're organized is largely a reflection of actual usage behavior, what customers are doing, where the price points kind of cut and the usage points change. Chris Bell: Damien had a formidable task to create a set of tiers that really could serve a whole wide variety of industries and use cases and users. We'd like to think that we're off to a good start. Now, you don't share that view and I'm not going to try to talk you out of it or anybody out of it, but we aren't just trying to build a foundation on which we can grow. To answer your specific question with our enterprise customers and some of our larger plans that are sort of beyond the rate card, when we're working with larger corporations, there's a request that often comes into to make it a yearly payment and make it predictable on a yearly basis for budgeting and planning purposes. Chris Bell: That may not work for all of you and we understand that. But the good news is, you can stay on your current plan and adjust either the way that you're billing customers. Give us a chance to sort of talk with you and figure out if there are any changes we might want to make over the long term. But for now there's literally no risk to just staying where you are on the current classic plan and continuing to run your business the way it did. Chris Bell: But we didn't really talk to a lot of customers around the world. Damien looked at a ton of data to help inform the decision about how many models, how many users, how many spaces and how it should be organized in the most optimal way. Damien, do you want to elaborate on that? Page 6 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Damien Leostic: Thank you Chris. I mean to say, thanks for the setup. Ross Zanzucchi: Can I just ask you a question that I think a lot of people probably want to ask. Why not just have that option of a monthly, maybe it's a little bit more per month, but why make it just a yearly payment? Why not make it an option of [inaudible 00:15:49]? Damien Leostic: Look, let Chris said, Ross nice talking to you, so we here to listen. On this particular one, we're taking the feedback. Like Chris said, we're both here. We have folks listening in from from headquarter, heard you. We heard the community as well, so we're here to listen and we'll followup. We'll take that back and return for a statement on this one. Chris, anything to add? Chris Bell: Well, no, I think that that's where we are right now and I want to let everyone know we're not making any changes immediately. We're just collecting data and feedback and information. We really do want to serve your community. I promise you that. Our new CEO, relatively new CEO, RJ Pitman is extremely committed to the MSP community. If it means that we need to look at rebooting MSP program and inviting some more ambassadors in, I personally as the head of marketing will take some responsibility and action on that front. Chris Bell: But this should be the start of a conversation and we're all ears. We're taking the feedback, Ross, that you're giving us and if anybody else would like to make a point we understand that a yearly price maybe difficult to stomach. But for some customers it's actually preferred, believe it or not. So we wanted to create a balance and a blend. Ross Zanzucchi: Well, wouldn't the balance and a blend be an option? Chris Bell: An option to pay monthly instead of yearly. Ross Zanzucchi: [inaudible 00:17:28] fee monthly. Chris Bell: Hear you. We're listening. So let us go back and take a look at what we do with that. Right now this works for us as a business model with the professional tier also available at monthly. But we know that we're going to need to grow and adjust, test and learn over time. This not forever. This is not fixed in stone. Dan Smigrod: Ross, let me circle back to you. Kevin, how about introducing your full name and your company and where you're located? Remember to take it off of mute too. Kevin Dole: Does that work? Can you hear me now? Dan Smigrod: Yeah. What would you like to share with Chris and Damien? Page 7 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Kevin Dole: From all the comments so far on this video including Ross's, my first request when this change came up, it was kind of sudden and we who have been working Matterport for several years, did not have essentially a preannouncement notice of this change. My specific request is that as part of your grandfathering offer for those of us who've been with the system for a year or longer, I've been about three years, that you extend to us the ability to switch between the traditional preexisting plans, not just stick with what you have right now or go to the new plan. That's a specific request. Chris Bell: Kevin, I think that's a reasonable thing to talk about and I appreciate your need and position on it. Change is not not easy. It's not easy for any company, for customers. Even internally, we've spent a lot of time figuring this out. My answer to that is if we hadn't sort of given you a very open ended indefinite period of time that you could keep the classic plan that you're on, I think the feedback that we did it quickly or abruptly might be well taken. Chris Bell: But really, we really felt it was a good compromise and it's difficult to make these transitions technically and business wise. We made an announcement on Thursday. We turned over a whole new leaf and a whole new paradigm, which we believe in. Like we think this is the way forward. No question, blueprint for grout growth. I hope that most of you who are opting to stay on the classic plans feel that, that's a good compromise and an adequate solution. Chris Bell: Again, we're here to listen and we're taking all the feedback, back with us to headquarters and people are listening now so we can discuss it. But at some point in business and the way that we run the company, we have to make a decision and move forward. We're being bold. We believe that we have a lot of growth that we can bring to all of us. We're hoping that the fact that you can not only stay on your existing classic plans for the time being, but experiment with the new plans as well in parallel if that's what you choose to do is a viable option. But we don't have any plans at this time to sort of open up or move between tiers on the classic plans. Those are going to stay as is. Dan Smigrod: Kevin, do you have a follow up? Kevin Dole: Yes I do. It's obvious since you're keeping the door open for people to stay on the classic plans, it's obvious that you're accounting algorithms maintain the ability to calculate work done in any of the classic plans. So it is not a question of having to do any additional work for you to be able to extend to any of us who have been on the classic program to switch between the classic programs as well. There's someone on screen here right now that is probably utilizing any of the classic plans. Page 8 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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– Transcript: WGANTV Live at 5: Town Hall: Matterport Service Provider Pricing (16 May 2019) –
Kevin Dole: So your system is still maintaining all of these. You've just chosen at least by what you just said, you've just chosen that, boom, as of last Thursday, you can never change again between the classic plants. That seems to be, okay. Your argument is that you've crunched your data and you think that you have a better way forward. Well, we've been part of your ecosystem for years and if it is a better way forward, believe me, we're going to want to go there. But we want to go there by choice, not by dictate. Chris Bell: Which we agree with 100%. In the meantime, the classic plan is available to you. We have no plans to change it. Look, I'll just answer it this way. Building products Ross Zanzucchi: May I just say something? Chris Bell: One second, let me just let me finish. Building products and adjusting technology even accounting and financial systems in order to make it all work together and work the way that Matterport does seamlessly in the ecosystem, it's quite an undertaking. At some point as technologist, we have to decide that we're moving on, we're innovating. I've been in this industry and related industries for many years. It's not always possible to keep all of the old technology or legacy plans or accounting alive. Chris Bell: We have to make a decision that we're going to go forward. When we find something like this that feels to us like the way that we can grow the markets and grow the pie, we make a commitment to it and we move forward. I hope that those of you who have decided to stay on the classic plans for the time being, take a good hard look at the new plans and also look at the kinds of marketing and expansion that we're going to do around them because we believe there'll be more customers for all of us as a result of this or else we wouldn't have done it. That's the bottom line. Kevin Dole: It sounds to me as though what you're saying in less the right words is, "Ross get ready. We're unplugging your classic plan at 149 flat down the road." Chris Bell: No, not saying that at all. Kevin Dole: If you're not saying that, if you're saying that Ross will have the option to go forward for another five years on the 149 plan I think he said, then why can't I switch to the 149 plan? The software is all in place. Ross Zanzucchi: Then thing keep saying is we're not changing anything. But you have changed it completely. You're not allowing any movement. Before we could switch between plans. So you have changed it, but you keep saying you haven't changed anything. We're letting you stay in your plan the way it is, but you have changed it. Page 9 https://docs.google.com/document/d/14WspJa6zv-orF43aDw2XgYNjWYPVeWCss8pHQ9bYMp4/edit#
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