social media marketing

Sprout Social- Unique platform for brand’s adornment and Social media marketing

Leave a Comment / Tech Story / By Jayshri

Building a brand that is loved by many is a much more difficult task than creating a product or a service. Because it is not limited to how many products are being sold. It is something much broader than marketing, it is a connection between the company/service and the people who trust and adore it. Sprout Social is well known for social management, solution for advocacy, and customer care support which is most important for building the brand in this modern world. In fact, Sprout social enable service for small to big organizations without compromising the quality of service.

How business can be flourish through connecting with customers is shown by Sprout Special in many ways and many times. Presently, twenty thousand plus small to medium to large firms trusts Sprout Social for their brand’s adornment and building the network. A small firm started with the vision of Justyn Howard, G. Lara, P. Soung, and A. Rankin is the best example of teamwork to take the business at the next level.

What is Sprout Special?

If you want to know what is the next level of social and digital marketing, then you can see it on the Sprout Social platform. Starting from the strategic consultation to the full-service execution, it is the right fit for all branding related needs of any firm.

Today, Sprout Social is one of the dominating firms that helping other small to the large organization in brand building. More than 20000 international brands have relied on Sprout Social. As well, it is the number one independent software review site. It is a one-stop solution for building all types of industrial and customer connections.

The backstory of Foundation

Justyn Howard, A. Rankin, G. Lara, and P. Soung are the persons behind the establishment of Sprout Social. It is founded in 2010 with a funding of 1 million dollars only. Launching the product Sprout 2.0 to enabling the Sprout Social Design Refresh, it was not a piece of cake for founders. A path for any successful business is always long and full of hurdles. Same in the case of sprout Social, but what it is today is appreciable and inspiring for any new business.

Exploring the business

In 2014, the firm raised the funding of 18 million dollars as well, more experts were added in the team to explore the business further. Later on, the Sprout social’s Bambu is launched in 2015. The development continued with one more series of funding that raised 42 million dollars. Other important products of Sprout Social is Bot Builder, Sprout 2.0, etc.

The firm purchased the shares of Simply Measured in 2017. Currently, it is headquartered in Chicago and also has an office in Dublin. Recently, last year, Sprout Special went public.

CEO- Justyn Howard

He is the co-founder and current CEO of the Social management platform Sprout Social. The company’s effective management is based on the policies of Justyn. Minimizing the gap between customers and companies is as important as selling the product. And Howard knows it very well. For that, all the policies are designed such that this communication gap will minimize. Being a technology lover, Justyn is extremely dedicated to making a platform more advance and feasible for all types of customers.

Achievements of Justyn Howard

He was honored in Crain’s Tech 25 in 2011. As well, he was one of the leaders in Tech Space in Chicago. In 2013, he was the awardee of Technologist of the year, CitiLights has presented this award.

Apart from that, he has been guiding the Sprout Social since it’s the foundation.

Bottom Line

There are several similar firms like this all over the world. But it has a strong network building strategy with both customers and clients. As well as because of the vast area of service, many prefer Sprout Social. The firm started in 2010, flourish the business very quickly with its trustworthy service and the customer value. One more important factor that added value to the company’s service is core teamwork. It’s a unique team and the up to date policies raising the list of clients. Since it’s the foundation, Sprout Social helping small as well as large businesses to develop and maintain the brand value in this competitive world.

Jayshri

Jayshri is an Electronics Engineer, but her passion towards writing made her to be in this field. Apart from content writing, she loves reading, writing and surfing on various topics. In her free time, she likes to watch TV series and news. Sherlock Holmes is her all time favorite show. Jayshri loves cooking various Indian-western dishes.

How Smartly is Making Millions By Giving Life to Ads

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By Athulya

Almost every company wants to take their business online, and if they aren’t, it is because they already are online! In a heavily digitized world, a business can stay relevant only if it can attract people online. Doing so is becoming more and more difficult due to the sheer volume of competitors online. Social media marketing is a sure-fire marketing method used by most modern companies nowadays. Let us take a look at a company smartly that made full use of this to propel itself forward.

About the Founder

Ovaska grew up in Helsinki, studying Economics and Finance with Statistics and Mathematics on the side. He began his career as a researcher working on how Russian’s economy impacted Finland’s economic growth. He soon got restless and left to start Aaltoes.com at his university in 2008. That company became a leading university-level startup association for entrepreneurs.

It was through this initiative that he met his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki. When Tuomo’s startup ran out of funding, the duo got together to build a company. They began with FunRank before moving on to Metrify and finally settled on Smartly.io.

Past Efforts

Prior to Smartly.io, Kristo Ovaska and his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki, started Metrify, which made value predictions for gaming companies. The company began in 2012, a year that marked the beginning of the big data analytics bubble. Around that time, most gaming companies acquired customers using outdated methods and hence was not visible.

Metrify used their analytics to predict where to invest their acquisition money. Around this time, Facebook went public and so needed to make money. Facebook knew that mobile-gaming companies had the money they needed and would be good buyers. They also had the data that such companies needed, and so the gaming companies moved to Facebook.

Early Struggles

Slowly these gaming companies began to pump in money, and their advertising helped attract people to Facebook’s News Feed. This huge shift into social media advertising became Smartly’s stepping stone into the industry. The duo opened in Germany, coding and rapidly scaling their features. The company began as an eight-member team partnering with Rocket Internet. The company scaled rapidly and doubled its size every month for the next ones.

In six months, the company became profitable going international thanks to Rocket Internet. Facebook trusted the small team from Helsinki so much that they recommended them to several big customers abroad! So much so that they now have customers such as Ubisoft, Uber, and eBay, helping manage over $1.8 billion in ads.

Growth and Future Plans

The company doubled its headcount from 150 to 400 within a span of 18 months. Similarly, they expanded their office chain from seven to seventeen. The rise of Facebook Stories has also helped the company improve its visibility and reach. The company raised €100,000 in 2013, following it up with another €1 million a year later.

The company became profitable in 2015 and raised an additional €20 million, two years before. Almost 25 percent of Smartly.io is in the hands of the employees themselves. Recently, Smartly.io, raised $20 million through secondary funding thanks to Highland Europe. The company recently announced hitting a $1 billion run rate with over 500 happy customers.

With a headquarters in Helsinki, the startup has a very Nordic working culture, which celebrates communication and freedom. The workforce hierarchy is very flat and straightforward regardless of position and seniority. Currently, the company has employees in several cities from around the world like New York, Helsinki, Dubai, and Sydney.

The team plans on expanding their creative side by offering the tools to ad teams. They have launched in alpha phase with Pinterest recently. They are also in talks with the likes of Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.

Athulya

Being a cinephile with a love for all things outdoorsy, Athulya never misses a chance to chase inspiring stories or poke fun at things, even when the subject is herself. Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, she is someone innately interested in technical and scientific research. Music reviews and op-eds define her as they allow her to explore different perspectives. Though sometimes she thinks she makes more sense playing the guitar than she does while writing.

Bring in the Traffic : Success Story of Ahrefs

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, Product, SEO, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Athulya

Today, the internet has become more accessible than ever. This has led to the formation of a whole new kind of marketing, i.e. digital marketing. Digital marketing has become an essential part of every business’s strategy and accounts for the highest conversion rates among the different types of marketing. Whether it be in the form of long blogs, short posts, drip email marketing or Social Media Marketing, having the right online presence makes a whole lot of difference in today’s world.

With so much content available for consumption online, businesses are finding it challenging to stay relevant. That is where SEO, the Search Engine Optimisation, plays an essential role, as it helps in raising your website’s visibility. Tools like Ahrefs allows you to leave your SEO woes behind, and in turn, raise your website’s visibility. Having grown their ARR by over 65% within just two years, it goes without saying that Ahrefs is one of the most preferred SEO tools in the industry.

About the Founders

Dmitry Gerasimenko is a Ukrainian by birth, having been born in Nizhyn, but now lives in Singapore to manage Ahrefs. Dmitry’s father handed him a computer when he was six, and ever since, he has been fascinated by computing ad programming. After school, he went on to pursue a degree in computing from the Kyiv Polytechnic University. He relocated to Singapore in 2012 to grow and expand Ahrefs, after having fallen in love with the place when he visited Singapore during one of his visits to Asia.

He began his career as a C# and PHP developer for a website design studio in Kyiv. Following this, he freelanced for an American company before turning entrepreneur. Dmitry’s love for the search engine’s started in school wherein he built a documentation search engine and even started making money selling books until he lost the project due to server issues. This love led to launch a web crawler almost ten years after graduating from University.

Founding Ahrefs

When starting Ahrefs, Dmitry had no partners, and hence bore all the risks alone. He invested his savings in the company and hired freelancers when he could afford to do so. The first $400,000 went into product development and was the amount he had saved while working as a freelancer. As the company grew, he went from handling simple projects to more advanced ones and built a team along the way.

In 2010, he recruited Igor Pikovets, who was a friend from university. A year later, the duo launched a link-index paid service. The tool started as a small fish in an ocean of other such tools, and slowly built their way up to becoming one of the most used SEO building tools available on the market now. That company grew into Ahrefs, which now has over 300 billion pages in the index, and updates over 8 billion every day, averaging at 100,000 every second.

Ahrefs acquired its first customers via ads on SEO forums and focused on building a quality product. One of the primary reasons that led to this exponential growth is that they provide a product that triumphs all comparison tests. The SEO growth market is one that is overcrowded with a lot of players; hence, standing out isn’t always an easy task. This is precisely where the company has been able to do so well because they provide a superior offering that consumers find to be the best in the market.

The company markets its product as its most important marketing tool and uses its existing customers as their company’s vocal advocates. When Ahrefs was just developing, Dmitry spent all his time, improving the quality of the application and accumulating data. That was what he focused on because he felt he could do that better than anyone else and that later became the company’s backbone. All that data which was built up, grew as the company grew, and soon, Ahrefs started gaining a reputation for having the best SEO related data.

The downside of this concentrated effort was that the tool’s design and usability weren’t that great because they weren’t areas Dmitry focused on. With the customers they had gained because of their extensive data, Dmitry built a team of web developers who over the years bettered the UI of the engine, and fixed user issues, making Ahrefs an all-in-one package.

A Resounding Success

As the business grew, Dmitry took in more employees. Hence, a team that had less than six members grew to become a close-knit family of over 30 employees. Ahrefs has always had stringent hiring policies, and they hired only when it was absolutely necessary. This is one of the main reasons why Ahrefs does with 30, what most companies do with over a hundred employees!

For instance, most employees at Ahrefs wear more hat than one, with the CMO also being in charge of the blog. Having let go of the freelance bloggers who handled the Ahrefs blog, Tim Soulo took over the blog and in doing so gained more control over the marketing strategy of the company.

Another interesting point is that Ahrefs does not have a dedicated HR team for hiring new recruits. Everything from looking for new employees to finalising the paperwork is done by the core team itself, with the person in the driver’s seat change according to the position being filled. As Dmitry has a background in programming, handles the technical hiring side and was the one who recruited Ahrefs’ present CTO, Igor.

Such a dedicated team of employees who are well-versed in their respective fields has helped the company achieve a YoY growth rate of over 65% and an 8-figure revenue. Ahrefs current has over $50M ARR and employs more than 45 people, with the team having kept 50 people limit for the company. They are still growing over 60% a year with predictions putting them at $64 million by November 2019 and $102 million by September 2020.

When Soulo joined Ahrefs, their blog attracted 15,000 visitors a month, and now over 250,000 go through their website every month. They have 8 to 10 employees handling marketing, and market-related research, around 7 taking care of customer support and the rest of the employees working on web development.

Ahrefs now has plans to create a search engine of its own. Dmitry has announced that the engine will work on principles similar to that used by DuckDuckGo. This means that it will not engage in the collection and sharing of personal user data. The fact that DuckDuckGo recently hit over 1 billion monthly searches goes to show that there is potential in this market, and Ahrefs is trying to be one of the first few to harness that potential. Ahrefs search engine strategy will also enable it to share profits with publishers, helping to foster more innovation.