XLIVE Executive Interview Series: Josh Hotsenpiller of JUNO

In 2020, Josh Hotsenpiller and his partners founded JUNO, a digital platform company that helps organizations turn their live events into a 365-day-a-year experience. With 10 years of experience building community software platforms, he has worked with a variety of organizations from HP to the U.N. When Covid hit, existing clients asked him to help connect their communities when they couldn’t meet in person, and he jumped on the opportunity. Hotsenpiller and his team are currently set produce about 90 virtual events in 2021. 

Hotsenpiller shared his views on the current state of the integration of digital and live and how it will impact the future of events. Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation. Listen or watch the full interview below.

Back story. “We set out to serve our current clients, but then we landed a couple unique relationships with Digital Now and PCMA, and it just took off. We grew exponentially. We grew our dev team, our sales team and our tech team. We launched last October, so we're not even a year into this. It's been a wild ride.”

Integration of digital and live. “There are obviously a couple of schools of thought right now. Do you do digital and in-person simultaneously? Do you do separate events? The reality is, with technology, you have the ability to connect people year-round. Whether that's at the event or post event, it really doesn't matter. As an association, your goal is to connect and educate people. And if we do those things and we do them well, we'll be in business. So how do we do more connecting? How do we do more education? We can use technology to fuel that. Nothing's going to ever replace in person. And it shouldn't. But what we can do is use technology to bring people together and have more consistent times together.”

Creating an ecosystem. “What does a sponsorship playbook look like? How do you provide value to sponsorships and partners all year long? Every partner and sponsor would like to meet people more than once every three days a year. In addition, how do you create a content playbook all year long so that doesn't put strain on the organization. There are some unique ways to do that with user-generated content. Taking content that is disparate and turning it into micro-experiences for your members all year long. There's so much stuff that exists that doesn't take a heavy lift that you can begin to deploy.”

Delivering user-generated content. “Organizations can host a round table and allow 20 members to come in and discuss five questions. The first 20 who sign up get to come in and talk. You have a facilitator who might even be one of the members. There's a horizontal knowledge transfer that’s happening. Then what's exciting is after the roundtable, now you've got user-generated content that's saved on demand. You can do four or five of these a month with little strain on your organization and its resources.”

Human interest modeling. “With Juno, we use human interest modeling, which means you declare what you're interested in. You discover more things you're interested in. We drive you into three experiences — content, people, and experiences. We've got a profile on you, and now we can begin to say every month, here are five or six people you should know based on similar profiles. We're providing more connection, and we're providing more education. That's how things get really good.”

Serving up personalized content. “The more we use the technology, the greater value it provides to us. The more I use Netflix, the more valuable Netflix becomes to me because it knows me. Same thing with Spotify, same thing with Apple Music, same thing with Amazon. This is how technology works. If our systems are not doing that, we're offering our members an experience that is antiquated compared to the way that they're using things in today's modern world.”

Talent for managing hybrid. “It’s a digital community manager that has the skillset to be a liaison between the digital partner and the association during those three days of the event. The rest days, I am providing value for sponsors and members to connect and educate all year long. This notion of a true community brand member is going to be absolutely imperative, and that would be a digital first person.”

Connecting like-minded people. “Birds of a feather flock together. At the end of the day, people want to be connected to like-minded people. Where software comes in: We have the ability to help you find your people. In an organization where you've got 5,000 members or 20,000 members, how many people have never meet one another who should have? We want to help you find your people and get more value.”

Eliminating peaks and valleys. “Historically we have lived on the peaks of our annual events. We've got these three to five days that we're going to bet the farm on, and then what happens? Every day we get away from that peak, members are like, ‘Am I really getting the value here?’ The next thing you know … we're trying to hype them back up again before we lose them. Instead, you can provide value all year long via digital offerings.”