From $100k to $1 Million: Your Social Media Strategy

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 6)

Jamie Tedford: Acquisition was strategically important for us because it completed what we thought was an important part of our story and what the market was telling us, which is that brands and agencies wanted to work from one platform. There’s this converged media phrase that had taken hold at that time. We really believed it and started to see our customers asking for it. The idea was we wanted to be able to take a piece of content from conception and approval to the analytics around that piece of content and follow back up to the ROI of that piece of content.

Sramana Mitra: What are your assumptions around that? Are you producing that piece of content or is that content being produced and marketed through your platform but the agencies are producing the content? >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge fans of bootstrapping entrepreneurs, so congratulations on doing that. What scale did you reach before you raised the private equity round?

Jamie Tedford: We were almost a hundred people. We were very profitable and had 50% EBITDA margins. When we decided that we were going to talk to the private equity market, we got a lot of raised eyebrows for our P&L. Thankfully, a lot of the private equity firms in Silicon Valley had never seen a balance sheet that had profit. A number of them asked if there was supposed to be a parenthesis around the numbers.

Sramana Mitra: What range are we talking? Are we talking about a $5 million dollar company or a $100 million company? You can give me range, but I just need to understand how far you bootstrapped. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did that chapter end for you?

Jamie Tedford: Around 2002.  I got to work with an ad agency called Arnold Worldwide. I worked with a lot of really big brands. The brand that really got me excited was Volkswagen. I learned a lot of about traditional advertising at that time. I spent six years there. I had progressed in my career there. I was a little bit of an outlier in a very traditional agency that still loved to buy expensive television spots. I was always much more interested in the Internet, and ultimately, I found myself gravitating towards a burgeoning market that was then called word-of-mouth marketing.

There’s an industry now that’s forming around how to make that systematic and how to measure its impact. That really excites me. I was one of the founding board members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association in late 2000. We were creating an industry that built the foundation of what is now the social media industry. Then, it was capturing how physical word of mouth happens. For me, that was pretty quickly followed by an obsession with how word-of-mouth happens and advocacies, specifically, happen online. Social networks piqued my interest. This is the technology required to make word-of-mouth real online. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Jamie bootstrapped Brand Networks to a highly profitable, large business leveraging the disruption in brand marketing caused by social media. He then sold minority stake in the company to a private equity firm. Excellent execution for bombbomb alternatives!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jamie Tedford: I was born in a town north of Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a very typical middle-class story and family. I’m third-generation Jamie Tedford. My grandfather started a family business. He was actually an MIT alumnus. He came out of MIT during the Great Depression. He went to work for a paper company and decided to start a lumber mill. He is the first of the family that I can track back who’s an entrepreneur. The business eventually turned into a commercial lumber yard. The family stayed pretty close to home. My dad went to work for him. >>>

My Blogging Strategy Was Supposedly All Wrong

In the spring of 2005, I started blogging.

During those days, blogs were not as commonplace as they are today. Om Malik, at the time a close friend, and a pioneer in the tech blogging scene, introduced me to the concept. “You are so opinionated, you must blog!” Om declared. Then, he went on to have his own web guy set up my blog.

I started writing.

I wasn’t a journalist, so my writings were largely opinion and analysis pieces. People seemed to like to read them, so I found it encouraging, and started taking it seriously.
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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to raise this $2.4 million, you had customers?

Joshua March: Yes, we had customers. It was still early on. We then sold the agency. In early 2012, we succeeded in selling the agency to a larger agency.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you get for the agency?

Joshua March: We don’t release the actual amount. It was a good number for us at that time. It wasn’t a billion dollar acquisition, but it was a great deal.

Sramana Mitra: I want to touch on the highlights of the Conversocial evolution. In 2011, you had product–market fit. You had $2.4 million in financing. What else happened in 2011 that is a highlight?
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