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

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.