Joe will share lessons learned in building a company out of his spare bedroom ten years ago to a successful award-winning software company – entirely bootstrapped without any outside capital. Today, Bronto Software employs over 120 people in over 20,000 square feet on the American Tobacco Campus in nearby Durham. Bronto was recently named as NCTA’s Software Company of the Year and as a TBJ Best Place to Work.

I enjoyed giving the talk and especially mingling with the students afterewards. Hopefully they found it insightful … or at the very least entertaining. Personally I always found these type of talks rewarding back in my Harvard and UNC days.

So, without further ado, here’s the YouTube video for your watching enjoyment:

You can also flip through the slides with SlideShare:

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Click to see the expanded cheat sheet.

As part of that continual evolution, we periodically change how we package our products to better align with what our customers are using and what they are looking for. Four years ago, we split our product into the Core and Professional Editions to separate for those looking for basic or advanced functionality. On October 1st, we evolve again to reflect our ever more powerful platform. Here is what’s happening:

1. Bronto Marketing Platform

Next week, we are relabeling our offering as the Bronto Marketing Platform (BMP). This is equivalent to the Professional Edition without the most recent Workflow Automation features. More on that point below. Instead of seeing your old edition name, this new name will be referenced on your invoices, on the account information page within the application, in the help documentation, and in all our marketing collateral.

With the BMP, you will be able to purchase additional modules for more unique functionality.

2. Multi-Brand Module

If you had Groups Edition, you will now have the Multi-Brand Module in addition to the BMP. There should be no pricing or functionality changes for you. Just a name change. This module lets you separately manage the marketing campaigns for different accounts or brands while enjoying the benefit of aggregate email CPM pricing and discounts on additional sub-accounts.

3. Workflow Automation Module

In July, we extended our automation feature set with the workflow canvas – a visual drag-and-drop tool for creating complex automated campaigns through email, mobile, and social. Extremely impressive! This is now an optional module that can be purchased in addition to the BMP. Customers that had the Professional Edition will continue to have access to this module until their contract renewal date. Afterwards, this module will cost $4000/year.

In addition, we are slowly phasing out the Automated Message Rules (AMRs) feature and replacing them with Automators. Automators are a simpler version of AMRs that have most of the functionality of its predecessor. Automators will be released as a standard part of the BMP next week. Customers looking for more advanced automation features should consider purchasing the Workflow Automation Module.

4. SMS Module

With the Spring 2011 Release, we added the ability to send and receive SMS / texts from Bronto. With the new naming conventions, we renamed this as a module.  Everything else is the same here. Just a new name.

Change is a good and necessary step for moving anything forward. But, change can be confusing. Hopefully we’ve made these changes as straightforward and accommodating as possible. If you have specific questions, feel free to contact your account manager. We are here to help. Otherwise, hold on because Bronto has even more exciting new products and services coming down the road.

Onward!

Joe Colopy
CEO/Founder of Bronto

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Of course, if you walk through city streets with your wallet hanging out, a secure bank is not going to help you very much. Here are some thoughts on what you can do to keep your email and customer lists more secure:

• Think about what you are storing. Customers’ contact lists often contain much more than email addresses. Be aware of what data you are storing on whatever email marketing platform you are using — in particular, avoid including very sensitive pieces of data like credit card numbers and social security numbers for your contacts.
• Protect and rotate your password. Most intrusions happen through the first door versus technical back doors. Your password is often the front door key so it is best to have a “strong” password and change it periodically. Strike the balance of it not being so hard to remember that you have to scribble it on a sticky note that sits on your desk. That’s not secure either.
• Control access. Every account at Bronto includes multiple users — use them. And, when some one no longer needs access, delete it. Shared user accounts and passwords are inherently insecure and a cause for break-ins.

This is all common sense that sadly isn’t common enough. Bronto has a full suite of security features to make these type of things easy to do. Read this post on Brontoversity to learn how.

Phishing and Key Logging

Now, here’s the tricky one that you probably didn’t think of but has been the reason behind some recent data thefts. This really happens so read this one carefully.

The intruder sends you a phishing email trying to lure you into downloading a computer virus. The virus is a key logger. The key logger runs in the background and secretly logs and sends every key to the intruder. Then the intruder simply listens for your username and password and then tries the combination themselves. Https and other secure connections won’t help you here because your typing is captured before your information is encrypted and sent along to connected website. Then the intruder goes in through the “front door” by signing into your account with your username and password and takes what they would like.

In addition to the suggestions above, I recommend the following to mitigate the risk from phishing / key logging break-ins:

1. Be aware of phishing emails and what you download from them.
2. Install and maintain current anti-virus software. Anti-virus software will monitor your system for common key loggers.
3. Limit the IP addresses that can access your account to your office’s IP address. Will this be inconvenient when you try to sign into your account from home or on the road? Yes but a secure office would have a VPN to let you securely access the Internet through your work network. Read the Network Access section of this post to learn about how to do this in Bronto.

Ultimately secure data is a journey and not a destination — you are never a 100% there and the effort to keep your data secure never ends. But, there is a lot in your control to make your data more secure and exponentially more difficult to steal.

Related posts:

• Email Service Providers are the New Banks

Today this reality became thrust into the forefront with Epsilon reporting that they had a major security breach that resulted in stolen email lists from many top brands including Best Buy, Capital One and Disney. Read more from the article in Security Week.

This is an unfortunate issue and reinforces why we take security and privacy very seriously at Bronto. We’ve invested much effort in the past 15 months into improving not only our own technology and internal security stance, but also providing many features to customers to allow them configure their own security controls according to their preferences. Among the areas we’ve improved during this time are our network, our internal management applications, and our internal policies and training. Additionally we’ve also improved our ability to detect and monitor activities going on inside our application and network, so appropriate staff are alerted to investigate, 24×7.  On the customer side, we have added new features in the areas of account management, password security, user permissions, & API security. The security of your data is of the utmost importance to Bronto, and we never forget that.

We understand that we are a twenty-first century bank and the vault of your data is extremely valuable and needs to be kept very secure.

Unfortunately, with incidents like this, no one wins and the only redeeming value is that it sends a strong message to everyone in the industry that their security, whatever it is, could be better and forces them to re-assess and improve. We will certainly be re-assessing ours and looking for improvements. And we welcome conversation with anyone in the industry regarding how all of us can tighten security and provide a more secure world for all.

Related posts:

• Video Tour of Bronto’s Email Marketing Application

Sometime ago one of our prospects emailed me the same question. To settle some of the curiosity out there, I thought that it would be helpful to share my email response below.

Fortunately, the situation for bronto named dinosaurs has improved since my email response. Making up for the Brontosaurus being discredited, a palentologist discovered a new dinosaur and, earlier this year, applied the bronto moniker to it. Brontomerus. The name means “Thunder Thigh” in Greek. Hilarious! Also love how the Brontomerus is kicking butt in its wikipedia pictures. Awesome!

Paleontologist Mike Taylor, we salute you!

Hi Eliana -

I am the founder and CEO of Bronto Software so can provide some insight
into the name Bronto. I named the company after my childhood love for
dinosaurs while bootstrapping the company out of my spare bedroom many
years ago. As a 7 year old, I loved dinosaurs, in particular the
Brontosaurus, so when given the chance to name my own company, I
couldn’t resist.

Yes … it is true that in many ways bronto is not the ideal name for a
technology company. Brontosaurus is an extinct, plant eating, and
supposedly had a brain the size of a pea creature. And, in most
drawings, it is often on the verge of being eaten by a t-rex. Also, the
brontosaurus is mislabeled. It didn’t exist and was later
re-categorized as a different dinosaur. In the race for discovery,
paleontologist had the wrong head on it and erroneously labeled it as a
brontosaurus … which my 9 year old niece told me about (to my
surprise) a couple years after starting the company. Read this article.

Despite all this, Bronto is really a great name and embodies our
humility in humanizing technology and software. We are committed to
making our customers better marketers and have embraced this simple
principle in our product and service. Because of the paradoxes in
having a name like Bronto, it keeps us approachable and real. So,
hopefully you’ll have a chance to see what Bronto makes different and
why we embrace its name and ideals. Plus, the name gives us the
opportunity to take lots of brontosaurus pictures in interesting
places.

Hope that helps clarify your question.

Cheers,
Joe

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You can download the article or read it here:

Joe Colopy tells his secrets to keeping employees informed.

As CEO of one of the fastest growing private companies, Bronto Software’s Joe Colopy says, “It’s hard to understand what it means to be a leader until you’re in a situation where it really matters.”

For Colopy, whose company has grown 200% the past three years, the journey from entrepreneur to CEO of an 80- employee company has meant completely changing his game.

Among other things, he says, he’s had to sharpen his skills when it comes to articulating top- level messages.

EL: How often do you get in front of your employees to com- municate?

Colopy: I might have the same conversation 10 times a day, but with different people at different levels. It’s easy to assume, “Oh, everyone’s already heard this, so I don’t need to say it again.” But it never ceases to surprise me how I need to overcom- municate the same story again and again, to tell everyone to pull their oars in the same direction, and let them know that what they’re doing matters, in terms of what we’re try- ing to accomplish.

EL: What cues let you know it’s time for a CEO message?

Colopy: I’ve definitely had “aha moments” when I hear people’s questions or I hear about a decision they’ve made, and I think, “Why would you do that? That makes no sense.” Then I realize, they’re not on the highway. I don’t blame them. It’s just a sign that I haven’t done a good job of articulating the message, or haven’t communicated frequently

enough. If I do a good job, I won’t have to address specific cases like that, because these are smart people.

EL: What sort of communication tools do you lean on?

Colopy: One thing I’ve found valuable is posting videos of my past presentations on an internal instrument called Brontopedia, and using them as part of the formal orientation process. It’s a very scalable way to get in front of every new employee for a couple of hours. The videos are a mechanism for communicating exactly what we’re doing and getting everyone on the same page. And it’s very valuable to have that come directly from me. Otherwise, it’s kind of like a game of Telephone, where you lose data every time a message passes through someone’s filter.

EL: Why is this part of the job so hard for so many CEOs?

Colopy: The hard part is taking a complex idea and breaking it down until it’s so simple that anyone can get it. I spend a lot of time boiling down concepts.

Before I started the company, I was a teacher for several years. I taught overseas, where English wasn’t the first language of my students. When you’re a teacher, you can tell when your students aren’t paying attention—and, unlike being a leader, you’re not even paying them to pay attention. So you have to be very good at being clear and straightforward and engaging. And that’s exactly the same skill set you need to be a leader who communi- cates well.

Doing that every day for years was the best training I could have had.

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One of the perks of being CEO is that I get to be the front man for the acceptance videos. In the video below, I describe what we do, how we started as well as briefly demonstrate my mad foosball skillz. You can also watch the video on blip.tv.

Enjoy!

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Of course, it won’t be easy and we’ll have to hustle above and beyond to make it. But, if we do, we will have close to 60% revenue growth for the year. Not too shabby in a supposed down year. In order to keep the stretch goal in front of everyone’s mind throughout the year, we have periodic video-taped messages from “The Captain” of our future cruise ship to track our progress, recognize everyone’s contributions, and encourage the whole team to push forward. Very funny! Very Bronto!

Here is most recent video message:

Some of the more interesting bits of the video were edited out for “outside of Bronto” consumption, but you’ll get the idea. You can also view it directly from blip.tv and YouTube.

Great job Caroline and “The Captain” in putting together the video.

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As the inaugural year we kept the conference fairly small and focused. Mark your calendars now for an even larger and more compelling Bronto Summit in April 2011.

See the video:

Related posts:

• Video Tour of Bronto’s Email Marketing Application
• Kicking Off the Email Evolution Conference
• Just Released. Short Video Starring Joe and Karalyn

Like Zappos, we have had a deep commitment to an engaging and creative company culture since the very beginning. Early in Bronto’s history we scribbled down some guiding principles that still influence today. One of the most memorable was “Happy Brontos equals Happy Customers.” It’s simple but very true.

Hear the Zappos and Bronto story for yourself.  Register for the webcast:

• Conversation with Tony Hsieh of Zappos.
• Hosted by DM News. Sponsored by Bronto.
• Monday, June 28 @ 1pm EST
• $99 to attend
• Register online

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