Taking on HootSuite and TweetDeck: Tammy Kahn Fennell, MarketMeSuite

At the time I was living in New York and working in my own small ecommerce business. I majored in strategic communications and always wanted to keep my marketing skills sharp, so I did some freelance marketing work. I met my co-founder, Alan, on a project I consulting on; he was doing the web design. We got talking about his business which was a small web design and development firm in the UK. I told him about this "cool new thing"called "social media marketing". I swore it could bring him in new customers. Unconvinced but willing to humour me, Alan gave me access to his social media world. After generating a few real leads for him using my social media methods, Alan said: "We have to build something to make this easier for other businesses." MarketMeSuite was born!

 

When we entered the space developing for Twitter, it was still very new. We've sinced moved on to including Facebook and Linkedin in the service, but at the beginning developing for Twitter was a rollercoaster. They were still getting a feel for how their API was to be used, and we entered the space a few months before a lot of automation was culled from Twitter. Luckily we were smart enough to go the route of an organic marketing tool instead of an autobot!

 

Another big challenege was the fact that my co-founder and I are from different countries. We started MarketMeSuite as a bi-continental arrangement, but as we grew I realized I needed to be closer to the tech team, and in early 2011 I moved my entire family over to the UK.

 

Up recently, we were basically self funded. We put in a few grand from friends and family to get started, but we were a paid app, and we bootstrapped and reinvested profits back into the company to keep moving forward. We pretty much worked round the clock and ate cheap. I think they call it "sweat equity".

 

We recently raised a seed round with a group of angels. This has enabled us to kickstart our new strategy.

 

Since we did build a marketing dashboard, we obviously used our own tool to get a lot of leads! We have worked very hard to have a very engaged community of users, who have really been the driving force in spreading the word about MarketMeSuite. Alan also ran successful SEO campaigns in another life so that helped as well.

 

We recently announced we have released MarketMeSuite for free. We're a small and gutsy startup with a history of challenging the status quo and this is just the next logical step for us. The most important thing we can do is make sure MarketMeSuite is THE social media dashboard of choice, and that means continuing to innovate.

 

We're working hard on version four, which will be our web based version and promises a lot of absolutely groundbreaking innovations. We are also working on some very cool analytics, which is going to a separate product that will appeal to an important segment of our users. Our analytics will stand out from the pack because it won't just be top level data. It will be data based on app usage and what works and what doesn't. It will be the ultimate ROI too for analysing team collaboration; perfect for certain businesses, agencies and consultants.

 

That's a hard one because of course we wouldn’t be where we are today if we didn’t make the decisions we made, and I like where we are today; but if I had to pick something, I’d probably have opened a seed funding round a little sooner.

 

8. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs based on your business experience so far?
Startups are hard. And much like deciding when to have a child, there will probably never be "the right time" to make the sacrafice. And you will sacrafice a lot – money, time, a life. Our story is still being told, so I'll give more advice when we're being written up in the 10 most successful UK companies of all time, but generally, be prepared for a long and difficult road, and make sure you have that end goal to drive you. If you can see the goal clearly, and know what it takes to get there, you’ll be able to work like crazy and get through the tough stuff.