The Joeism Blog » Bronto

The Captain, The Cruise, and The Stretch Goal

Joe Colopy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:00:12 +0000

Every year at Bronto we strive to accomplish great things. This year is no different except that we put together a compelling prize if we hit our annual stretch goal — the entire company will go on a cruise together. Exciting indeed!

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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Bronto Summit 2010 Video Recap

Joe Colopy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:30:36 +0000

Last May we hosted our first user conference. We hosted about 30 email marketers from online retailers and other e-commerce focused customers and enjoyed a couple days of discussing email marketing, e-commerce and Bronto at UNC’s Executive Education Center in lovely Chapel Hill, NC.

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:

Bronto, Zappos and the Pursuit of E-Commerce Happiness

Joe Colopy — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:45:54 +0000

Today Bronto is sponsoring a webcast with Tony Hsieh of Zappos. I will be speaking for about 10 minutes at the end about the importance of an exceptional company culture and the leveraging e-commerce technologies for ensuring superior customer satisfaction and business growth.

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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Joeism back online with Slicehost

Joe Colopy — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:45:38 +0000

About a year ago I mentioned that the Joeism blog was back on the original bronto server. Well that marriage ended a couple weeks ago when the hard drive in the server died after eight years of successful spinning.

All is well though. Through the magic of the Internet and my credit card, Joeism is back online through Slicehost — a hosted website provider that is a step above most of the stuff out there. Slicehost is geared more for developers so I had to brush off some rusty Linux and MySQL admin skills to get it going. Still got it and so far so good.

I will now resume my previous schedule of posting an entry every couple months. Stay tuned!

Bronto Hearts BabyLegs!

Joe Colopy — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:19:57 +0000

Thanks to Amy over at BabyLegs for the leg warmers and socks. Fortunately I have many willing models to try them on. Yesterday afternoon we did a photo shoot and amazingly everyone stayed still enough for the shot. No small task!

BabyLegs are probably not intended for 90-degree Carolina days but we enjoyed them anyway. Very cool.

Now if we could just get you on an equally cool email marketing platform ….

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Free Emails for Haiti. Innovative Way for ESPs to Give Back.

Joe Colopy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:06:50 +0000

Last week the American Red Cross approached us with an innovative and creative idea — launch a promotion where our customers could send Haiti Relief requests to their lists free of charge. We loved it.

Throughout the year, we donate our time volunteering at Habitat of Humanity, Urban Ministries, and other local organizations. We donate money to causes as well, including last week matching donations for Haiti Relief. But, this was a unique opportunity to contribute with exactly what we do. Today this idea became a reality and we kicked off the “Free Emails for Haiti” campaign. See bronto.com/haiti for more information.

My hope that other email marketing service providers (ESPs) adopt these type of campaigns to help with Haiti’s relief efforts and other future humanitarian crises that inevitably and sadly will happen. It’s a great idea and one that only an ESP can do.

If you are interested in learning more about this idea, please let me know. I would be happy to share our experience with it.

Fall 2008 Release: 18 days away

How We Look at Strategy @ Bronto

Joe Colopy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:00:12 +0000

Bronto's Strategy Framework

Communicating strategy is hard. As the company grows and there are more moving pieces, it becomes difficult to keep everyone on the same page. We’re over 50 people now and with this size, we have to use a good framework to describe how we look at our company, our goals, and our strategy.

We base our strategy framework on one from Jim Collins’ Beyond Entrepreneurship. It’s a great book from the same author as Good to Great. Unlike Good to Great, it is a practitioners guide. So if you are running a startup and transitioning into becoming a real business, I highly recommend it.

As for the framework, we focus on four pieces:

Purpose. Why are we in business beyond a paycheck? At Bronto, we are here “to make our customers better marketers through intuitive software and helpful people.” It’s simple. It’s true. It’s a rallying cry that inspires our day to day actions.
Values. What do we stand for? This is newer to the framework and we’re going to spend our Quo Vadimus sessions (internal mixed team who we are / where are we going sessions) in February crystallizing this. We have them. Just a matter of articulating them very clearly. Not always so easy.
Mission. This is what we are shooting for. Multi-year goal. Our mission is “to become the leading ESP around the shopping cart in 2010 with $10mm in revenue.” We’re almost there — at the least on the revenue side. The leading part is unrealistic at $10mm but we have been consistently building toward that direction so I’m happy with that.
Strategy. This is what lets you accomplish the mission. Good strategy says what you are going to do and not do. When you zig and when you zag. We determine this on an annual basis. I just finished presenting this to the company and will explain that process in some future post.

Great strategies win markets. Great strategy frameworks get everyone on the same page, rowing in the same direction at the same cadence so that’s possible. This one has worked for us.

Bronto Server Back Like Seabiscuit

Video Tour of Bronto’s Email Marketing Application

Joe Colopy — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:42:08 +0000

Fridays are great days and at most companies folks can expect to spend their Friday afternoons winding down and visualizing a cold beer in their hand. Not at Bronto and not this Friday. This Friday afternoon, I recruited a couple Brontos to put together a video tour of our flagship email marketing application.

Big thanks go to Brandon (the demo guru) and John (the video maestro) for putting together this Friday afternoon special. Also, thanks to Justin for his wizardry in getting this on the ‘net for the rest of the world to enjoy. So without further adieu, I present a “Tour of Bronto”:

You can also watch this on blip.tv or download the video (74MB MPEG)

Interviewed at the Bronto Tweetup

Joe Colopy — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:57:31 +0000

Last Thursday night Bronto hosted a Tweetup at its offices. Tweetup is a gathering of Twitter fans and enthusiasts. The event was a big success with over 200 attendees. And, as you can imagine it was very well covered in the the twitter-sphere.

Special thanks to Brontos Adam Covati and Caroline Smith for organizing the event. It as a herculean effort and they pulled it off without a hitch. You can find some more information about the event on BrontoNation.

While there, I was interviewed by one of our guests Tim Ladd. I spoke about Bronto, its success in tough economic times, the state of social media, and the parallels between email marketing and Twitter. You can see the video on YouTube or embedded below:

Bronto Celebrates Its New Digs

Joe Colopy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:14:48 +0000

Three years ago Bronto moved into a 4500 square foot office space on the American Tobacco Campus of Durham, North Carolina. We had 15 people and it seemed like we would never fill up the space. 30 people later at 45 people it was a very different story. So, over a year ago, we started looking for new space. Ultimately, we liked where we were and orchestrated a grand plan to expand, which entailed having three other smaller companies relocate to other offices nearby. The grand plan worked and we moved into our new 12500 square foot space at the beginning of February.

Last Thursday we celebrated by having an open house and invited the local business community, customers, press, social media gurus et al … even Bill Bell, the mayor of Durham, showed up. It was a fun evening and a great opportunity to share our new space and our long-term vision for Bronto.

Here are some blog posts covering the event:

Wayne Sutton’s post and video interview: Email Marketing Booming In the Recession
Laurie Ruettimann’s post: Networking Sucks Do It Anyway
Lenore Ramm’s post: Bronto Open House

Thank you to everyone who visited us. A special thanks goes out to Stacy and Caroline of Bronto for ensuring the evening went off without a hitch. Hopefully, in a few years, this space will feel too small and we’ll be able to have another one.