创业家的意思 连续创业家掘金 带动营销自动化

连续创业家掘金 带动营销自动化  

It didn't take long for Brad O'Neill to get back in the game.
It was late 2007
and StumbleUpon -- the popular content discovery service and his highest-profile investment at the time -- had just a few months earlier been scooped up by eBay (EBAY) for $75 million in cash. O'Neill
an angel investor for the pany
could have easily sat back and enjoyed the return on what one reporter called "your typical dot- Cinderella story." Instead
he started another pany.
"I had just sold StumbleUpon to eBay with Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and was starting to think about a new problem to go solve
" O'Neill says. "My technical co-founder Steve Norall and I were talking. He was working as an industry analyst and overwhelmed with all the writing he had to do. And we were talking about how content automation was being increasingly possible. I was in the British Virgin Islands on vacation and ruining it by Skyping with Steve and brainstorming what would bee TechValidate."
“我和盖瑞特o坎普、杰夫o史密斯将StumbleUpon卖给eBay不久，就开始考虑一个新的、要解决的问题，”奥尼尔说。“我在和懂技术的共同合伙人史蒂夫o诺埃尔谈。他是一位行业分析师，总是为必须要写的东西忙得晕头转向。我们讨论的是内容自动化正在如何变得越来越有可能。当时我在英属维尔京羣岛度假，结果却变成了与诺埃尔在Skype上聊天并酝酿后来成为TechValidate的种种设想。”
O'Neill describes TechValidate's namesake product as a "sofare-as-a-service content automation platform for B2B panies." Custom content has bee a popular approach to marketing
but corporate teams are too busy to create content targeted enough to be effective
O'Neill says. TechValidate's tool imports content it deems relevant for verified customers of B2B panies from its library. Marketers then review it in private and publish it across platforms
whether in a marketing automation platform
in a customer relations management tool
on social media channels
or on the web.
"We invented the space. Nobody was doing it before we showed up
" he says."We built a content robot that is designed to make it simple for a marketing team that is already overstretched to build targeted content -- so targeted that a human couldn't do it."
TechValidate introduced its product in the middle of 2008 and now counts GE (GE)
Hewlett Packard (HP)
IBM (IBM)
Dell
Hitachi
CA Technologies (CA)
SAP (SAP)
and Intel (INTC) as customers. O'Neill says the pany -- which did not accept outside investment -- made $5 million in revenue in 2013 and is on track to make $12 million
profitably
this year.
"Steve and I had a very conscious decision that we weren't going to seek venture money for this
" O'Neill says. "We kept paring ourselves to SurveyMonkey
which also has these very positive feedback loops. If we're charging the right amount of money
we won't need venture money. We turned profitable in our first year and we still are."
Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital
which invested in StumbleUpon
says O'Neill and Norall have the right approach. "I don't believe many teams could have acplished what Brad has without outside investment. We just don't see too many bootstrapped businesses getting to scale in enterprise sofare. It's a viable path
but unmon."
On Tuesday
the pany announced a partnership with Oracle (ORCL) to integrate its service into Eloqua
that pany's marketing automation sofare. O'Neill describes the deal as a way to make it easier for the 35% of his customers who use Eloqua and TechValidate together
but the arrangement also exposes his pany to a larger audience through its presence in the EloquaAppCloud sofare hub.
"The challenge they have is that they don't have all this content to fill these pages
" O'Neill says. "Companies have gone out and spent millions of dollars for marketing automation
and they realize that the deployment doesn't achieve its objectives without content. Eloqua customers were asking for a more streamlined way to pull our assets into that environment. So now any of our joint customers have the ability to build and distribute and syndicate our content in Eloqua -- they don't have to leave it."
Just how big an opportunity is content automation? O'Neill would only say that his pany sits in beeen the "multibillion-dollar" marketing automation industry and the $44 billion content marketing industry -- "the single largest line item in the marketing budget." It's not a bad place to be.
"Because we're one of a kind
it's difficult to talk about a total addressable market
" he says. "When you're a unicorn it's a self-serving thing. But we're sitting beeen o wonderful trends that are both increasing."