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

The last couple of weeks have served as proof of how effective social media and viral marketing can be. Also, there has been a lot of questioning on whether Twitter can act as a legitimate marketing tool…the answer is Yes.

We launched FuelFrog two weeks ago yesterday and have invested nothing in marketing it. As of this morning we have over 2,300 users. Soon after launching the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, took notice and “tweeted” a message to his followers about FuelFrog. Many people then “re-tweeted” that message and sent out messages of their own, as they continue to do now. We were fortunate to have coverage on ReadWriteWeb and others followed including:LifeHacker, Download Squad, WebWorkerDaily, and Bnet.com to name a few.

Much of the coverage has to do with timing as well. Gas prices are quickly approaching $4.00/gallon in some areas and a tool like FuelFrog will especially come in handy during times like these.

We’d like to thank everyone who has signed up thus far and continue to sign up each hour. We have a lot of cool things in store for FuelFrog so be sure to follow us on Twitter and continue sending in feedback.

Thanks to all of you who have signed up!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d share a few things that have been going on…iContact is continuing to grow like crazy. We’ve been experimenting with additional ways of marketing the application –primarily through radio and print.

Most of our marketing efforts have been online. We continue to scale our investments in cost-per-click advertising and have successfully added more and more customers each month. We began working with ROI Revolution a few months ago to help us manage our CPC campaigns and they have been a huge help for us. We’ve continued to make efforts to increase conversions through our CPC campaigns. The biggest thing that we’ve done is added landing pages. I’m confident that we’ll learn a lot from the success of the landing pages that we can then apply to our website.

Back in August we were out in San Jose again for the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo. We met a lot of our current clients out there and also talked to many who were interested in iContact. In September we sponsored Marketing Mania Bootcamp in Orlando, which was hosted by PostcardMania. There were a number of small business owners there and many who were new to email marketing and blogging. This week we’re a sponsor at CED’s Tech 2007 right here in Chapel Hill. The next trade show is Ad:tech New York November 5th-8th. I’ve been working on the schedule for next year and adding more and more shows. I think it may be time to add a trade show coordinator to the team, but we’ll see how it goes.

On Saturday September 22nd we had our 4th iContact Day, which is a day where all employees gather and brainstorm about how we can improve our company and product. It’s been interesting to see how things have changed as the company has grown. One of the biggest challenges has been cross-departmental communication and ensuring that everyone has the information they need and can get it in a timely manner. I wouldn’t consider it a huge issue, just something that has been challenging as we’ve grown, and continue to grow, so quickly.

If you’re attending Ad:tech New York in November, be sure to drop by our booth!

I’m excited to announce that we secured an additional round of funding this morning.

Here’s the release in its entirety:

iContact Secures $5.35 Million in Funding

Online communications software company will fuel already phenomenal growth and expand reach of world-class web-based communications platform

Durham, NC – June 29, 2007 – iContact, provider of the leading email marketing and blogging application, today announced it has secured $5.35 million in funding to increase its marketing and customer acquisition efforts. The funding round was led by Updata Partners with participation from North Carolina-based venture firm IDEA Fund Partners. The company recently changed the name of its service to iContact and its corporate name to iContact Corporation.

iContact will use the new funds to expand marketing initiatives, increase customer acquisition, and support product development efforts. The company currently employs 58 people in the Raleigh-Durham area and expects that number to grow to over 100 in the next 18 months.

iContact is the first application in the world to allow businesses to manage all their online communications in one central web application. iContact allows its 11,500 customers and over 90,000 users to easily create email newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, surveys, and autoresponders.

Commensurate with the funding, Carter H. Griffin of Updata Partners, has joined the iContact Board of Directors.

“iContact is an established leader and innovator in areas where we see tremendous growth and opportunity, serving small-to-medium sized businesses with sophisticated, integrated online marketing solutions in an on-demand delivery platform,” said Griffin. “We look forward to working with the dynamic team at iContact to rapidly scale the company.”

“This funding will allow iContact to move to the next level,” said Ryan Allis, CEO and Co-founder of iContact. “Our rockstar team has built an amazing company over the past four years. We have worked hard to bring the best email marketing, blogging, and RSS feed web application in the world to our customers. It is our mission to be the leading worldwide provider of on-demand software that makes online communication easy. With this capital infusion, we can move even more quickly.”

Aaron Houghton, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder of iContact added: “Our philosophy is to invest in innovative product development ahead of the market to ensure that iContact leads the world of online communication. With partners like Updata and IDEA Fund Partners, we will be able to solidify iContact’s standing as the world’s leading all-in-one online communications platform.”

There will be a celebration of the new funding at the iContact offices in Durham, NC. on July 20, 2007 from 5-7 p.m. RSVP here

About Updata Partners

Based in Reston, Virginia and Edison, New Jersey, Updata Partners is a leading venture capital firm that invests in growth stage information technology companies with innovative intellectual property enabling market-leading products and services. Led by an investment team averaging more than 20 years of operational and private equity experience in the technology industry, we seek investments where the combination of our financial backing and operating expertise will accelerate growth. With over $400 million under management, the firm also selectively provides recapitalization and management buyout financing. For more information, please visit www.updatapartners.com.

About iContact

With more than 11,500 customers, iContact is the first on-demand application in the world to allow businesses to manage all their online communications in one central platform. iContact allows for easy creation of email newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, surveys, and autoresponders. Market leaders like Bank of America, Ford, Intuit, Vonage, Symantec, International Paper, LG Electronics, ReMax, United Colors of Benetton, and Centex Homes, use iContact to build stronger relationships with their customers and prospects at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods. iContact, designed for the SMB market and iContact Enterprise, designed for mid-sized to large organizations, are both available at www.icontact.com.

For media inquiries, including free software reviews, contact Chuck Hester, APR, Director of Corporate Communications, chuck@icontact.com or (919) 459-1451.

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.

Mercury News reports that Google has set up an online marketplace allowing employees who have vested options to sell them online. Interesting consideration for employee retention.

"According to recent research conducted by the University of Illinois
and Michigan State University, it’s common for options’ holders to
discount their value. Bill Briggs, chief executive of Net Worth
Strategies, a compensation consulting firm based in Bend, Ore., that
worked with the researchers, said people can underestimate an option’s
value by as much as 60 percent, making them more likely to consider
competing job offers that might seem more lucrative."

Ryan Carson is a busy guy with projects like Carson Workshops, Vitamin, and DropSend. Well, he’s about to launch another. Ryan has been
working on this one for a while and on June 21st he broke the news that Amigo is
an application that connects email newsletter publishers with advertisers and
vice versa. This seems like a great concept and it will be interesting to see if publishers and advertisers are willing to give it a try. I can certainly
see how this would be advantageous for smaller site owners who publish an email
newsletter and looking for an additional source of revenue. I’ve experimented
with banner advertising here and there and unless you’re doing it on a grand
scale (ie: investing large amounts into CPM with companies who display your ads
on high quality sites within their network) returns are typically mediocre at
best. With that said, advertising in a highly targeted email newsletter could
turn out to be the perfect “partnership” between the right publisher and
advertiser.

Also, Ryan has done a wonderful job with BareNakedApp, which
is a blog chronicling the development and launch of Amigo. Be sure to check it
out.

Warren Buffett is donating his
fortune to five charities. Buffett will begin donating the bulk of his $42
billion beginning next month to the following charities (click each link to
read his letter to the foundation):

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation
• Howard G. Buffett Foundation
• The Susan A. Buffett Foundation
• NoVo Foundation

I’m happy to see a large portion going to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They’re doing a lot of great things from reducing poverty to bringing technology to those who may otherwise never have access. Awesome.

We’ve been re-designing our user interface since January and
we’ve tried some new things with this project, notably our development process.
In the past we had meetings, decided what we wanted to build and how it should
work and an in-depth requirements document was written. While it sounded good
in theory and looked quite nice on paper, it was never that easy and efficient
getting from point A to point B. The who, what, where, and when was
challenging. It was challenging as there was no understanding of who could
provide feedback when, who made the decision of what was implemented, and it
was tough to know where the developers were in the development process. I am in marketing and looked at the process
from the outside. It was very tough to see how far along development had gotten
on a feature that I was following. So with the design of the new interface our
development team decided to implement a different development process called Scrum.

I had never heard of it, but I’m loving it. Scrum changed
things quite a bit, but all for the better. Using Scrum our development process
now works like this:

• Anyone in the organization can submit feature requests via user stories.

• These user stories are then placed into a product backlog that is prioritized by a product manager.

• A meeting is then held where items (user stories) on the list are brought up for discussion, clarification, and finalization of rank based on what the team feels is of the greatest and least priority. Anyone within the organization can attend these meetings and contribute.

• Once this meeting is adjourned (typically a 4-5 hour meeting) the development team is prepared to begin work on these items.

• The development team works in 30 day sprints. So all items on the list must be completed in the 30 day sprint.

• Each morning the development team has their daily scrum meeting where they discuss what was accomplished the day before and what they plan to complete for that day. Anyone outside of development can attend these daily meetings to stay up to date on what is currently under development, however no outside input can be given as all topics, decisions, and priorities were agreed upon in the meeting prior to the sprint, known as the Sprint Planning Meeting.

• The day in which the sprint ends is a set day and does not change. What changes as the last day of the sprint approaches is how certain items are implemented. For instance, if it will take an extra three days add a feature that is more “cool” than necessary the “cool” feature must wait until the next sprint if the sprint deadline is not met.
      
• At the conclusion of the sprint there is a Sprint Review Meeting in which each developer presents their work completed during the last sprint. This meeting, like the Sprint Planning Meeting, is open to anyone within the organization.
      

Here’s a diagram of the process:

As far as quality assurance, we have integrated into the
system and the QA Engineer works closely with the development team throughout
the process.

It has been an interesting transition for the entire company
as it has allowed everyone to be involved in the development process while
maintaining order and keeping a clear goal in mind.

Do you currently use Scrum?
If so, share your experience with us.

If you’d like to learn more about Scrum, check out the
following links:

• Control Chaos
• Mountain Goat Software
• Wikipedia

This past week we closed on an initial round of funding
($500,000) from NC IDEA (North Carolina Innovative Development for Economic
Advancement). It has been an exciting journey the last few years as we’ve grown
quickly and profitably. In three short years Broadwick Corporation has grown
from 2 employees to 25 and from 0 clients to over 4,700. Our goal is to
continue this growth and redefine the one-to-many emarketing communications industry and this investment
will certainly assist us in achieving our goal.

About NC IDEA

NC IDEA provides traditional venture capital as well as grants to seed early stage technology companies in North Carolina. NC IDEA further supports
these companies by leveraging its strong, strategic partnerships and alliances
to help the companies through research phases, business challenges and growth
goals. NC IDEA is committed to supporting North Carolina’s
economic development by ensuring young, innovative companies grow, create jobs
and become contributing business leaders.

Press
You can find additional media coverage from the following sources:

• Triangle Business Journal
• Local Tech Wire
• Tech Journal South
• Carolina Newswire

Tomorrow morning we’re heading to Pinehurst for the 23^rd
Annual Venture 06 Conference hosted by Council for Entrepreneurial Development
(CED). We will be presenting and exhibiting IntelliContact to the venture
capitalists in attendance. We were selected as one of twenty seven companies to
present and exhibit so we’re honored and very excited! You can learn more about CED and
Venture 06 here.