Onward and Upward for Trisio.

( This is Part 2 of our three part series covering Trisio and their team. If you have not read part 1 & 2 - def check them out here )

The last two series were highly technical and my attempt to dig in more on the vision of the company, the technical capability of the company and some of engineering decisions they made. This final post is more about my thoughts on the future of where Trisio is going and some of the challenges they will face in the market. I also speak to JJ and Maria who are incharge of the international marketing and commercial direction for Trisio.

Vineet:  Maria, can you tell me more about the challenges you have faced marketing Trisio to a more international audience.

Maria: We are very confident of our product so we never were skeptical that our product would perform but we have faced some push back as we are a new company and there are specific challenges around data privacy and compliance for us as a new company. As a huge focus for us is primarily business this was something had to think about and also have a plan for. We also saw that we lacked some features like floor plans that stopped us from doing the best we could in commercialising the product. We hope to bring more AI into our products in the future so that we can meet that market demand.

Vineet: Yes, data compliance is a huge concern and we have a lot of corporate asking for that. I remember you saying a lot of the sales done in China was face to face and on the road sales people. How was this experience different for you going to sell online and international, something that your company had never done ?

Maria: Yes, we had to adapt quickly to this new way, the pandemic helped us in making the transition faster because we could not really go out for sales so we had to adopt online methods. We have started experimenting with Google ads and also working with our marketing team to build a better Facebook presence. Our focus on getting more and more retailers to sell our cameras was also important so thats going to be something that's on top of mind for us.

Vineet : JJ, we all understand sales might be a bit more easier than marketing, what were some of the top challenges you faced ?

JJ :  As I personally have not been in Trisio for very long (2022.3), perhaps many of my perceptions are still somewhat limited.  But in my opinion, the main challenge for Trisio in entering the global market is experience.  This is in two ways. Trisio - or our company name HZNOVI - already have more mature marketing experience in the local Chinese market, we understand the local market and know how to reach the users in the most appropriate way. We have had considerable success in renovation, real estate, insurance, retail and other areas.  But on the other hand, the experience is a double-edged sword. When first entering international markets, the instinct is to directly transfer this experience, but given the differences in industries and users, this "experience" becomes a burden because we don't have a key that can open both locks at the same time.  So the first challenge was to start from scratch, to find out about international markets and the habits of users, and to re-establish a methodology.  And the other point, as Echo said earlier, is that we are latecomers in the panoramic sector, and it will be very difficult to hand out our business cards to international users when there are already very good panoramic camera manufacturers in the market around 2019.

Vineet : Maria, how do you look at pricing strategy for Trisio moving forward ? With a focus only on photos do you think you can increase prices by a lot ?

Maria: Most of 360 cameras are designed as Consumer products and you can see that every year and every version the price keeps going higher. We dont believe in that model, firstly it's not easy to find 360 cameras that are tailor made for  business purposes with quick workflows and out of the box features. We want to focus on that and a wallet-friendly price will help to promote 360 virtual tour in commercial use. This will ensure that everyone can enjoy the convenience produced by tech

Vineet : JJ , how have you thought about future strategy and positioning from a marketing perspective ?

JJ : As my colleague mentioned earlier, Trisio started out as a company with a core of technical experts, so although we now have many more employees than we did at the beginning, the core of the company has always been R&D, and that has never changed.  Trisio Lite2 seems to many users to lack personalisation options, which is actually related to the positioning of our product. After the rise of panoramic photo applications, we saw a need in the market, but high quality photos often require a professional photographer to take them with a DSLR camera and spend a lot of time adjusting them afterwards, but this cost is not something that a large number of retailers and small businesses are willing to spend.  We wanted to bring panoramic photos to more people with a simple product that they could take by themselves, enhancing the customer experience, and the value of business.  But in any case, "business", "value", "marketing" and so on, which sound cold and distant, are ultimately made up of people. So from a marketing point of view, I think that being a relatively small company also gives us the advantage of being able to reach our customers in the first place, treating them as our friends and family, listening to them and understanding their ideas.  I hope that through my personal efforts and those of the marketing department, we can make consumers feel that we are sincere so that they can trust us. We want to be able to enjoy the convenience of panorama with our users and let more people know that panorama is not something that requires so much foundation to reach, it is just a tool to bring people closer together.  We want technology not to alienate people, but to make it easier for people to get closer to each other. This "human connection" is the value we want Trisio to bring to our users.

My Final thoughts

Trisio has impressed me with their product and vision. This is the most important recipe for success, I believe their next generation cameras are going to be better and significantly upgraded for the business use case. My fears have been around sticking to ONLY photos long term, this would mean having very tight margins and price points. Other than that, they definitely have to come up with a much better product next time, rushing a mediocre second product might be not such a good idea and the 360 crowd might just not be very interested. I have seen that happen with other camera companies. Sometimes your second camera is more important than your first.  I am happy to be associated with Trisio and hopefully we can work together long term and unlock a lot of possibilities in the future.

This concludes our short series that was a peak into the Trisio company and its working, I want to thank JJ for really organizing all the content that you can see in the posts . I want to thank everyone from the Trisio team for their cooperation in sharing their story with me and being open and transparent.  I want to end this by sharing some photos of the Trisio team who have moved into a new office space.