Blogiversary, Part II

So it’s now been two years since I launched OnlyOnce.  Last year at this time, I gave a bunch of stats of how my blog was going.

The interesting thing about this year, is that a lot of these stats seem to have leveled off.  I have almost the same number of subscribers (email and RSS) and unique visits as last year.  The number’s not bad — it’s in the thousands — and I’m still happy to be writing the blog for all the reasons I expressed here back in June 2004, but it’s interesting that new subs seem to be harder to come by these days.  I assume that’s a general trend that lots of bloggers are seeing as the world of user-generated content gets more and more crowded.

Not that I’m competitive with my board members, but I believe that Brad and Fred have both continued to see massive subscriber increases in their blogs.  They attribute it to two things — (1) they have lots of money they give to entrepreneurs, and (2) they write a lot more than I do, usually multiple postings per day, as compared to a couple postings per week. 

I don’t see either of those aspects of my blog changing any time soon, so if those are the root causes, then I’ll look forward to continuing this for my existing readers (and a few more here and there) into 2007!

As I finished up my work on the Second Edition of Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business and started working on a new startup, my colleagues and I started envisioning a new book as a sequel or companion to Startup CEO that is going to be published on June 9 with our same publisher, Wiley & Sons.  The book is called Startup CXO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams.

Simply put, the first book left me with the nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough to only help CEOs excel, because starting and scaling a business is a collective effort. What about the other critical leadership functions that are needed to grow a company?  If you’re leading HR, or Finance, or Marketing, or any key function inside a startup, what resources are available to you? What should you be thinking about?  What does ‘great’ look like?  What challenges lurk around the corner as you scale your function that you might not be focused on today?  If you’re a CEO who has never managed all these functions before, what should you be looking for when you hire and manage all these people?  If you’re an aspiring executive, from entry-level to manager to director, what do you need to think about as you grow your career and develop your skills?

Startup CXO is a “book of books,” with one section for each major function inside a company.  Each section is be composed of 15-20 discrete short chapters outlining the key “playbooks” for each functional role in the company – Chief People Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, etc., hence the title Startup CXO – which is a generally accepted label in the startup ecosystem for “Chief ____ Officer.”

Here are the front and back covers of the book, with some great endorsements we’re so proud of on the back.

This is an important topic to write about at this particular time because America’s “startup revolution” continues to gather steam.  There are only increasing numbers of venture capital investors, seed funds, and accelerators supporting increasing numbers of entrepreneurial ventures.  While there are a number of books in the marketplace about CEOs and leadership, and some about individual functional disciplines (lots of books about the topic of Sales, the topic of Product Development), there are very few books that are practical how-to guides for any individual function, and NONE that wrap all these functions into a compendium that can be used by a whole startup executive team.  Very simply, each section of this book serves as a how-to guide for a given executive, and taken together, the book will be a good how-to guide for startup executive teams in general.

Startup CXO has my name on it as principal author, and I’m writing parts of it, but I can’t even pretend to write it on my own, so the book has a large number of contributors who have the experience, credibility, and expertise to share something of value with others in their specific functional disciplines — most of my Bolster co-founders are writing sections, and the others are being written by former Return Path executive colleagues — Jack Sinclair, Cathy Hawley, Ken Takahashi, Anita Absey, George Bilbrey, Dennis Dayman, Nick Badgett, Shawn Nussbaum, and Holly Enneking.

Startup CXO is also pretty closely related to Bolster’s business, since we are in the business of helping assess and place on-demand CXO talent, and as such, the final section of the book has a series of chapters written by Bolster members who are career Fractional Executives about their experience as a Fractional CXO.

The book is available for pre-order now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Oh, and stay tuned for a third book in the series (kind of) due out late this year. More on that over the summer as the project takes shape!

Less is More

I have a challenge for the email marketing community in 2009. Let’s make this the Year of “Less is More.”

Marketers are turning to email more and more in this down economy. There’s no question about that. My great fear is that just means they’re sending more and more and more emails out without being smart about their programs. That will have positive short term effects and drive revenues, but long term it will have a negative long term impact on inboxes everywhere. And these same marketers will find their short term positive results turning into poor deliverability faster than you can say “complaint rate spike.”

I heard a wonderful case study this week from Chip House at ExactTarget at the EEC Conference. One of his clients, a non-profit, took the bold and yet painful step of permissioning an opt-out list. Yikes. That word sends shivers down the spine of marketers everywhere. What are you saying? You want me to reduce the size of my prime asset? The results of a campaign done before and after the permission pass are very telling and should be a lesson to all of us. The list shrank from 34,000 to 4,500. Bounce rate decreased from 9% to under 1%. Spam complaints went from 27 to 0 (ZERO). Open rate spiked from 25% to 53%. Click-through from 7% to 22%. And clicks? 509 before the permissioning, 510 after. This client generated the same results, with better metrics along the way, by sending out 87% LESS EMAIL. Why? Because they only sent it to people who cared to receive it.

This is a great time for email. But marketers will kill the channel by just dumping more and more and more volume into it. Let’s all make Less Is More our mantra for the year together. Is everyone in? Repeat after me…Less Is More! Less Is More!

Book Short:  Vive La Difference

Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessell, was a fascinating read that I finished recently.  I will caveat this post up front that the book was published in 1989, so one thing I’m not sure of is whether there’s been more recent research that contradicts any of the book’s conclusions.  I will also caveat that this is a complex topic with many different schools of thought based on varying research, and this book short should serve as a starting point for a dialog, not an end point.

That said, the book was a very interesting read about how our brains develop (a lot happens in utero), and about how men’s and women’s brains are hard wired differently as a result.  Here are a few excerpts from the book that pretty much sum it up (more on the applied side than the theoretical):

• Men tend to be preoccupied with things, theories, and power…women tend to be more concerned with people, morality, and relationships
• Women continue to perceive the world in interpersonal terms and personalize the objective world in a way men do not.  Notwithstanding occupational achievements, they tend to esteem themselves only insofar as they are esteemed by those they love and respect.  By contrast, the bias of the adult male brain expresses itself in high motivation, competition, single-mindedness, risk-taking, aggression, preoccupation with dominance, hierarchy, and the politics of power, the constant measurement and competition of success itself, the paramountcy of winning
• Women will be more sensitive than men to sound, smell, taste, and touch.  Women pick up nuances of voice and music more readily, and girls acquire the skills of language, fluency, and memory earlier than boys.  Females are more sensitive to the social and personal context, are more adept at tuning to peripheral information contained in expression and gesture, and process sensory and verbal information faster.  They are less rule-bound than men
• Men are better at the kills that require spatial ability.  They are more aggressive, competitive, and self-assertive.  They need the hierarchy and the rules, for without them they would be unable to tell if they were top or not – and that is of vital importance to most men

As I said up front, this book, and by extension this post, runs the risk of overgeneralizing a complex question.  There are clearly many women who are more competitive than men and outpace them at jobs requiring spatial skills, and men who are language rock stars and quite perceptive.

But what I found most interesting as a conclusion from the book is the notion that there are elements of our brains are hard wired differently, usually along gender lines as a result of hormones developed and present when we are in utero.  The authors’ conclusion — and one that I share as it’s applied to life in general and the workplace in particular — is that people should “celebrate the difference” and learn how to harness its power rather than ignore or fight it.

Thanks to David Sieh, our VP Engineering, for giving me this book.

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!)

One of the things I’ve often thought over the years since starting Return Path in 1999 is that there’s no instruction manual anywhere for how to be a CEO.  While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t…and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.  That became one of the driving forces behind the creation of my blog, OnlyOnce (because “you’re only a first time CEO once”) back in 2004.

Now, over 700 blog posts later, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book based on this blog called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company.  The book is going to be published by Wiley & Sons and is due out next summer.  The book won’t just be a compendium of blog posts, but it will build on a number of the themes and topics I’ve written about over the years and also fill in lots of other topics where I haven’t.

The catalyst for writing this book was Brad Feld.  Brad has been a friend, mentor, investor, and Board member for over a decade.  We’ve had many great times, meals, and conversations together over the years, not the least of which was staggering across the finish line together at the New York City Marathon in 2005.  Brad started writing books a few years ago, and I’ve been peripherally involved with them, first with Do More Faster:  TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (I contributed one of the chapters) and then with Venture Deals:  Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist (I wrote all the “Entrepreneur Perspective” sidebars).

Those are great books, and they’ve been incredibly well received by the global entrepreneurial community.  But then Brad got the bug, and now he’s in the middle of writing FOUR new books with Wiley that will all come out over the next year.  They are:

• Startup Communities:  Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
• Startup Life:  Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur
• Startup Metrics:  Making Sense of the Numbers in Your Startup
• Startup Boards:  Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur

These four books, plus the two earlier ones, plus Startup CEO, are all part of the Startup Revolution series.  While I’ll continue to do most of my blogging and posting here on OnlyOnce, I’d also encourage you to check out the Startup Revolution site and sign up to be a member of that community.  I’ll be doing some things on that site as well in connection with Startup CEO, and it’s a more concentrated place to post and comment on all things Startup.  In addition, we’ll be putting a bunch of add-ons to the book on that site closer to publication time.

I hope Startup CEO becomes a standard for all new CEOs.  I don’t think I have all the answers, but at least others can benefit by learning from my 13 years of successes and mistakes!  Now all I have to do is go write the darned thing.

Reboot – The Fountainhead

Happy New Year!  Every few years or so, especially after a challenging stretch at work, I’ve needed to reboot myself.  This is one of those times, and I will try to write a handful of blog posts on different aspects of that.

The first one is about a great book.  I just read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for (I think) the 5^th time.  It’s far and away my favorite book and has been extremely influential on my life.  I think of it (and any of my favorite books) as an old friend that I can turn to in order to help center myself when needed as an entrepreneur and as a human.  The last time I read it was over 10 years ago, which is too long to go without seeing one of your oldest friends, isn’t it?  While the characters in the book by definition are somewhat extreme, the book’s guiding principles are great.  I’ve always enjoyed this book far more than Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s more popular novel, which I think is too heavy-handed, and her much shorter works, Anthem and We The Living, which are both good but clearly not as evolved in her thinking.

As an entrepreneur, how does The Fountainhead influence me?  Here are a few examples.

• When I think about The Fountainhead, the first phrase that pops into my head is “the courage of your convictions.”  Well, there’s no such thing as being a successful entrepreneur without having the courage of your convictions.  If entrepreneurs took “no” for an answer the first 25 times they heard it, there would be no Apple, no Facebook, no Google, but there’d also be no Ford, no GE, and no AT&T
• One great line from the book is that “the essence of man is his creative capacity.”  Our whole culture at Return Path, and one that I’m intensely proud of, is founded on trust and transparency.  We believe that if we trust employees with their time and resources, and they know everything going on in the company, that they will unleash their immense creative capacity on the problems to be solved for the business and for customers
• Another central point of influence for me from the book is that while learning from others is important, conventional wisdom only gets you far in entrepreneurship.  A poignant moment in the book is when the main character, Howard Roark, responds to a question from another character along the lines of “What do you think of me?”  The response is “I don’t think of you.”  Leading a values-driven life, and running a values-driven existence, where the objective isn’t to pander to the opinion of others but to fill my life (and hopefully the company’s life) with things that make me/us happy and successful is more important to me than simply following conventional wisdom at every turn.  Simply put, we like to do our work, our way, noting that there are many basics where reinventing the wheel is just dumb
• Related, the book talks about the struggle between first-handers and second-handers.  “First-handers use their own minds.  They do not copy or obey, although they do learn from others.”  All innovators, inventors, and discoverers of new knowledge are first-handers.  Roark’s speech at the Cortland Homes trial is a pivotal moment in the book, when he says, “Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.  The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time.  Every great new thought was opposed.”  In other words, first-handers, critical thinkers, are responsible for human progress.  Second-handers abdicate the responsibility of independent judgment, allowing the thinking of others to dominate their lives.  They are not thinkers, they are not focused on reality, they cannot and do not build
• The “virtue of selfishness” is probably the essence of Rand’s philosophy.  And it sounds horrible.  Who likes to be around selfish people?  The definition of selfish is key, though.  It doesn’t inherently mean that one is self-centered or lacks empathy for others.  It just means one stays true to one’s values and purpose and potentially that one’s actions start with oneself.  I’d argue that selfishness on its own has nothing to do with whether someone is a good person or a good friend.  For example, most of us like to receive gifts.  But people give gifts for many different reasons – some people like to give gifts because they like to curry favor with others, other people like to give gifts because it makes them feel good.  That’s inherently selfish.  But it’s not a bad thing at all
• Finally, I’d say another area where The Fountainhead inspires me as a CEO is in making me want to be closer to the action.  Howard Roark isn’t an ivory tower designer of an architect.  He’s an architect who wants to create structures that suit their purpose, their location, and their materials.  He only achieves that purpose by having as much primary data on all three of those things as possible.  He has skills in many of the basic construction trades that are involved in the realization of his designs – that makes him a better designer.  Similarly, the more time I spend on the front lines of our business and closer to customers, the better job I can do steering the ship

One area where I struggle a little bit to reconcile the brilliance of The Fountainhead with the practice of running a company is around collaboration.  It’s one thing to talk about artistic design being the product of one man’s creativity, and that such creativity can’t come from collaboration or compromise.  It’s another thing to talk about that in the context of work that inherently requires many people working on the same thing at the same time in a generalized way.  Someday, I hope to really understand how to apply this point not to entrepreneurship, but to the collaborative work of a larger organization.  I know firsthand and have also read that many, many entrepreneurs have cited Ayn Rand as a major influence on them over the years, so I’m happy to have other entrepreneurs comment here and let me know how they think about this particular point.

It feels a little shallow to try to apply a brilliant 700 page book to my life’s work in 1,000 words.  But if I have to pick one small point to illustrate the connection at the end, it’s this.  I realize I haven’t blogged much of late, and part of my current reboot is that I want to start back on a steady diet of blogging weekly.  Why?  I get a lot out of writing blog posts, and I do them much more for myself than for those who reads them.  That’s a small example of the virtue of selfishness at work.

Why I joined the DMA Board, and what you can expect of me in that role

I don’t normally think of myself as a rebel. But one outcome of the DMA’s recent proxy fight with Board member Gerry Pike is that I’ve been appointed to the DMA’s Board and its Executive Committee and have been labeled “part of the reform movement” in the trade press. While I wasn’t actively leading the charge on DMA reform with Gerry, I am very enthusiastic about taking up my new role.

I gave Gerry my proxy and support for a number of reasons, and those reasons will form the basis of my agenda as a DMA Board member. As a DMA member, and one who used to be fairly active, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the DMA over the past few years.

1. The DMA could be stronger in fighting for consumers’ interests. Why? Because what’s good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge. The DMA needs to more emphatically embrace that and lead change among its membership to do the same. The DMA’s ethics operation seems to work well, but the DMA can’t and shouldn’t become a police state and catch every violation of every member company. Its best practices and guidelines take too long to produce and usually end up too watered down to be meaningful in a world where the organization is promoting industry self-regulation. By aggressively fighting for consumers, the DMA can show the world that a real direct marketer is an honest marketer that consumers want to hear from and buy from.

2. Despite a number of very good ideas, the DMA’s execution around interactive marketing has been lacking. The DMA needs to accept that interactive marketing IS direct marketing – not a subset, not a weird little niche. It’s the heart and soul of the direct marketing industry. It’s our future. The acquisition of the EEC has been one bright spot, but the DMA could do much more to make the EEC more impactful, grow its membership, and replicate it to extend the DMA’s reach into other areas of interactive marketing, from search to display advertising to lead generation. The DMA’s staff still has extremely limited experience in interactive marketing, they haven’t had a thought leader around interactive on staff for several years, and their own interactive marketing efforts are far from best practice. Finally, the DMA’s government affairs group, perhaps its greatest strength, still seems disproportionately focused on direct mail issues. The DMA should maintain its staunch support of traditional direct marketers while investing in the future, making interactive marketing an equal or larger priority than traditional direct marketing. We have to invest in the future.

3. Finally, I think the DMA suffers from a lack of transparency that doesn’t serve it well in the hyper-connected world we live in here in 2009 – that’s a nice way of saying the organization has a big PR problem. The organization does a lot of great work that never gets adequately publicized. This whole proxy fight episode is another example, both in the weak response from the DMA and also in a lot of the complaints Gerry lodged against the organization, many of which the organization says are untrue or misleading. Senior DMA execs or Board members should be blogging. They should be active thought leaders in the community. They should be much more engaged with their members to both understand member needs and requirements and more aggressively promote their agenda.

In short, I will be an independent voice who advocates for progress and change in the areas that I consider to be most important, and I will be transparent and open about expressing my views. I’ve already been clear with the existing DMA Board and management that I do have this agenda, and that I hope the organization will embrace it. If they do, even if only in part, I think it will be to the DMA’s benefit as well as the benefit of its members. If they reject it wholesale, my interest in long-term involvement will be fairly low.

That’s the story. As I said up front, I am taking up this new role with enthusiasm and with the belief that the DMA is open to change and progress. We’ll see how it goes, and I will blog about it as often as I can.

Do you have thoughts on the future of the DMA? I’d love to hear from you. You can leave a comment below or email me directly at matt at returnpath dot net.

How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective

One of my colleagues at Return Path  saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me.  Don’t read anything into this post, team!  There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.

In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley.  Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday.  It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record.  While it was a hard message,  I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.

After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out  how to wrap things up there.  Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it.  He thanked me.

Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company.  A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all.  So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week.  The next day we set it up.  I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later. 

That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010.  Layoffs are hard,  but it is not a time to burn bridges.   In fact  one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.

We were excited to close the sale of our Consumer Insights business last week to Edison, as I blogged about last week on the Return Path blog.  But it brought back to mind the great Yogi Berra quote that “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

We’ve done lots of deals over our 18 year existence.  Something like 12 or 13 acquisitions and 5 spin-offs or divestitures.  And a very large number of equity and debt financings.

We’ve also had four deals that didn’t get done.  One was an acquisition we were going to make that we pulled away from during due diligence because we found some things in due diligence that proved our acquisition thesis incorrect.  We pulled the plug on that one relatively early.  I’m sure it was painful for the target company, but the timing was mid-process, and that is what due diligence is for.  One was a financing that we had pretty much ready to go right around the time the markets melted down in late 2008.

But the other two were deals that fell apart when they were literally at the goal line – all legal work done, Boards either approved or lined up to approve, press releases written.  One was an acquisition we were planning to make, and the other was a divestiture.  Both were horrible experiences.  No one likes being left at the altar.  The feeling in the moment is terrible, but the clean-up afterwards is tough, too.  As one of my board members said at the time of one of these two incidents – “what do you do with all the guests and the food?”

What I learned from these two experiences, and they were very different from each other and also a while back now, is a few things:

• If you’re pulling out of a deal, give the bad news as early as possible, but absolutely give the news.  We actually had one of the “fall apart at the goal line” deals where the other party literally didn’t show up for the closing and never returned a phone call after that.  Amateur hour at its worst
• When you’re giving the bad news, do it as directly as possible – and offer as much constructive feedback as possible.  Life is long, and there’s no reason to completely burn a relationship if you don’t have to
• Use the due diligence and documentation period to regularly pull up and ask if things are still on track.  It’s easy in the heat and rapid pace of a deal to lose sight of the original thesis, economic justification, or some internal commitments.  The time to remember those is not at the finish line
• Sellers should consider asking for a breakup fee in some situations.  This is tough and of course cuts both ways – I wouldn’t want to agree to one as a buyer.  But if you get into a process that’s likely to cause damage to your company if it doesn’t go through by virtue of the process itself, it’s a reasonable ask

But mostly, my general rule now is to be skeptical right up until the very last minute.

Because deals are not done until they are done.

Welcome to the new Return Path.

For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business.  

 Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again.  Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our marketplace. We’re establishing ourselves as the global market leaders in email intelligence. Read on and I’ll explain what that means and why it’s important.

What Return Path Released Today

We launched three new products today to improve inbox placement rate (the new Inbox Monitor,  now including subscriber-level data), identify phishing attacks (Email Brand Monitor), and make it easier to understand subscriber engagement and benchmark your program against your competition (Inbox Insight, a groundbreaking new solution). We’ve also released an important research study conducted by David Daniels at The Relevancy Group.

The report’s findings parallel what we’ve been hearing more and more recently. Email marketers are struggling with two core problems that complicate their decision making: They have access to so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it fast enough or thoroughly enough to benefit from it; and too often they don’t have access to the data they really need.

Meanwhile they face new challenges in addition to the ones email marketers have been battling for years. It’s still hard to get to the inbox, and even to monitor how much mail isn’t getting there. It’s still hard to protect brands and their customers from phishing and spoofing, and even to see when mail streams are under attack. And it’s still hard to see engagement measurements, even as they become more important to marketing performance.

Email Intelligence is the Answer

Our solution to these problems is Email Intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs.  In fact, we have redefined our company’s mission statement to align with our shift from being the global leader in Email Deliverability to being the global leader in Email Intelligence:

We analyze email data and build solutions that generate insights for senders, mailbox providers, and users to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want

The products we are launching today, in combination with the rest of our Email Intelligence Solution for Marketers that’s been serving clients for a decade, will help meet these market needs, but we continue to look ahead to find solutions to bigger problems. I see our evolution into an Email Intelligence company as an opportunity to change the entire ecosystem, to make email better, more welcome, more effective, and more secure.

David’s researchoffers a unique view of marketers’ place in the ecosystem, where they want to get to, how much progress they’ve made, and how big a lead the top competitors have opened up against the rest. (It can also give you a sense of where your efforts stack up vs. the rest of the industry.) There are definitely some surprises, but for me the biggest takeaway was no surprise at all: The factors that separate the leaders are essentially the core components of what we define as Email Intelligence.

More Good Inc.

Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies.  At that time I wrote that “Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!”  Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list.  (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t make the second part of our goal to up our rank.  But, we did up our growth – our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year.  This is a testament to the hard work of our team (now 150 strong!) and wouldn’t be possible without the support of our many great clients (now 1,500 strong!).  Most importantly, we see no end in sight.  In fact, 2008 promises to be an even bigger year for us as we poise for continued growth.  By the way, would you like to be part of a team that has now ranked as one of America’s fastest growing companies two years in a row?  Check out our Careers page and join the team that is advancing email marketing, one company at a time.