The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

I just returned from Ad:Tech San Francisco last night. This was our second year exhibiting there and I love that conference. We’ve decided to exhibit at Ad:Tech Miami as well, which is June 26th-27th, so if you’re attending be sure to drop by our booth there.

We usually stay at Maxwell Hotel in Union Square. It’s a decent hotel for the price and it’s in a central location, however this year I thought “hey, let’s try something different” and I decided to book us at Renoir Hotel on McAllister. If you’re ever going to San Francisco and you’re looking for a good hotel at a decent price avoid Renoir Hotel. The place is a dump and smells horrible. The cab driver told a couple guys with us that he hasn’t driven anyone there in years and asked if they were armed for their own protection. Seriously, if you’re staying in downtown San Francisco and you’re looking for a decent hotel at a good price I recommend Maxwell Hotel in Union Square. The rates are around $130/night. So, we’re heading to Miami in late June, any recommendations for hotels there?

One thing that I’m noticing about these conferences is more and more people are coming up to us saying “hey, I use IntelliContact. I love you guys!.” It’s awesome to meet our clients and it’s certainly a sign that we’re getting the word out about our application as more and more people are approaching us at these events having used our software. It’s a great feeling when you see your hard work paying off.

Last week we added our 10,000th customer. It’s been an amazing journey. Broadwick was incorporated in July 2003 and I joined the team full time in August 2004 after working on a few freelance projects for them while in college. We started out in a 700 square foot office at the corner of Franklin and Columbia Streets in Chapel Hill which soon became cramped with four people stuffed into a single office and a few of us working in the hallway. Today we have over 50 employees and as of this morning 10,094 customers. It has been amazing to think about how much we’ve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. Early on we bootstrapped because we had to and invested little in marketing.

Budget constraints can really bring out the creativity in you. Early on we marketed IntelliContact by creating a resource site dedicated to those interested in learning more about email marketing. We wrote articles for the site and added articles from other writers. We built incoming links to the website and added a “Sponsored by IntelliContact” banner where visitors could click to learn more about our application. Soon this site was ranked within the top three in Google search results for “email marketing” and “email marketing software”. This obviously brought a lot traffic and customers to IntelliContact. Another big driver of traffic for us was the “Powered by IntelliContact” graphic that we included in the footer of every email sent through our system. In the beginning we were sending only a few thousand emails each month. Today, we’re sending over 90 million emails on a monthly basis. That’s 90 million monthly impressions for the IntelliContact banner and costs us nothing.

Because we were able to bootstrap our marketing efforts in the beginning and be creative, we have had the ability to scale our efforts as we’ve grown. Today, we invest six figures in cost-per-click advertising on a monthly basis, invest in exhibiting at tradeshows and attending conferences, and hired a Director of Public Relations last July. The point I’m making here is that you don’t need to run out and raise huge sums of money when starting your company. You have to be creative and approach problems as opportunities. Our current market is flooded with competitors, but we’re one of the leaders in our market. This is due to our hard work, creativity and resilience.

If you’re reading this via your feed reader, be sure to click over and check out the new design. Special thanks goes to James Mathias from Onelotus Creative for whipping up this design. If you’re looking for any design work I highly recommend Onelotus Creative. Thanks again James!