Posted by Ross Hill | 5 September 2007

David Greiner

Freshview

568 Comments

Tags: web design

David Greiner and Ben Richardson were running a web design business out of Ben’s house in 1998 when they realised that there wasn’t a good email newsletter tool for web designers. They needed it for their clients so they decided to start making one - Campaign Monitor. They have now signed up over 30,000 customers and expect to have ten staff by the end of 2007, up from three in 2006. Today we’re talking to David about some of the challenges they encountered and how they approached marketing with a tiny budget.

Where do you go for inspiration? Who do you listen to?

There are so many great resources available online these days that it can be hard to know where to look, but there are certainly a few standouts that have helped me along the way.

Eric Sink’s essays on marketing software had a huge impact on me in the early days and I owe a lot of the direction we took with Campaign Monitor to him. While it isn’t being updated any more, Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users continues to be a huge inspiration on how to treat your customers. Jason Fried and the team at 37signals also continue to inspire us and I have really been enjoying Feedburner’s Dick “the Wizard” Costolo’s blog of late.

You were working from home when you were running a web design business and then you moved to a business incubator in 2001 - the Sutherland Shire Hub for Economic Development. What changed in your business after moving to the new environment?

We left the incubator in mid-2006 with a completely different business to the one we went in with. One of the biggest benefits of that environment was being surrounded by other like-minded entrepreneurs. Originally we were a web design firm, but soon realised that model didn’t really scale well.

In 2004 we slimmed our consulting schedule down and started working on our first commercial application called Campaign Monitor. We launched it at the end of that year and as it grew we starting cutting back on the consulting gigs. By the time we left, the service side was split into a separate business so we could dedicate all our energy to Campaign Monitor and its newly launched follow up called MailBuild.

You obviously value word of mouth marketing since you have a blog and newsletter, and a website that features customer testimonials and case studies. You’ve spoken before about the idea of promotion through education. When you launched Campaign Monitor in 2004 it spread quickly, what was the plan behind it all?

I’d say the biggest reason we’ve been so successful with word of mouth is because we’ve never tried to please everybody. Instead of building another bloated email newsletter tool aimed at everybody, we had a very explicit target market we were developing for – web designers. While it may sound trivial, this decision meant we could focus on a feature set our target market would love. In other words, it meant we could create something that was actually worth talking about if you’re a web designer.

Once we felt we had that right, we launched the product and sent around a few emails to key people in the industry asking for their feedback. We were fortunate enough to get some great reviews on some popular blogs and things took off pretty quickly from there. Since then we’ve put a lot of effort into helping our customers get the most out of our products through free articles, design galleries and other resources. This promotion through education approach continues to be one of the most effective ways of spreading the word about our software.

 Freshview is based in Sydney, Australia while most of your customers are in America. How do you deal with that? And are there any interesting projects that you’ve seen coming from down under?

To be honest this has never been much of an issue for us. Both our products are 100% self service tools and we’ve done lots of work to keep them as easy to use as possible. We’ve also got a comprehensive help system build into both apps and lively customer forums. Around 65% of our customers are based in the US, but there are thousands of others spread across more than 100 other countries and time zones. Also, in the scope of how we deal with customers, there are actually very few language and cultural difference between Australia and the US.

As far as interesting stuff coming out of Australia, the web app development scene really seems to be coming alive in the last year or so. There’s a great community forming and some really interesting ideas like Tangler andOmnidrive. The guys from Atlassian also seem to be going from strength to strength and it will be interesting watch them grow over the next 12 months.

You’ve said that 37Signals are one of your sources of inspiration, and they have a whole book called Getting Real which details their design principles. What are the key elements of the Freshview development philosophy?

Because of our small team size and transition from a service to a product company, we have a lot in common with the way 37Signals operates and have certainly found lots of inspiration in their success. Of course, their Getting Real book (which I was lucky enough to contribute to) is what worked for them and not a roadmap to success for everyone.

The development philosophy at Freshview is actually very simple and ties back to the reason I think we’ve been successful in the first place. We try not to please everybody, but pour everything into making the guys we are targeting happy. As long as we keep that focus and continually listen to these customers, everything else should take care of itself.

Spam is a pretty big deal for a company that makes a living sending email. Is it hard to educate people on what is and isn’t spam? What should people do to make sure their email isn’t being filtered as spam?

 As you’d imagine we put a lot of work into this area. We have very strict rules on permission that go well beyond the spam laws of any country. To enforce this we also have a human approval process that all customers go through to ensure they’re doing the right thing.

The traditional definition of spam – sending email to anyone without their confirmed permission – doesn’t really cut in any more. As well as getting permission, you need to make sure every email you send is relevant to all your subscribers. Even if they originally opted-in, if what you’re sending is not interesting or relevant to them you’ll get marked as spam in no time.

Avoiding the dreaded spam filter is really all about common sense. Make it clear what your subscribers are signing up for, get their permission and then keep your emails relevant, timely and interesting. Get all that right and you should never have a problem with deliverability.

What advice or wisdom do you have for young entrepreneurs who have a business idea but haven’t started yet?

From the outset I’d recommend making sure you identify your target market before you do anything else. If that market is everybody online, then you need a new idea. Once you’ve narrowed your market, set about building their dream tool and forget everyone else. When you’re not making the product better, tell everyone in that market all about it. If it’s truly useful, they’ll listen and maybe even start spreading the word for you.

If you’re a reasonably conservative person and worried about any risks, don’t be afraid to build a prototype on the side in your spare time. Lots of amazing companies started out as small side projects – you don’t need a lot of time or money, so start coding and see where you end up.

What is happening for Freshview going forward? Can we expect to see more updates to Campaign Monitor and Mailbuild, or is there a new product in the pipeline?

Right now we’ve got our heads down and are working hard on some big new features for both products. If you follow our blog you’ll see we’re constantly making improvements and launching updates each week, sometimes every day. Both products will be keeping us busy for the foreseeable future, but we do have a few ideas up our sleeve that we’d love to focus on down the track.