1. What is your company's unique, sustainable position in the market?
2. How do you define innovation and how does that definition apply specifically to your field?
3. Please explain the development of your product/service.
4. What obstacles have you faced, or do you continue to face with developing the product/service?
5. What aspects of Raleigh do you feel help to foster the growth of innovative companies like yours?
6. What have you done to foster more innovation within your own company?
7. What are ways that you can strategically plan for innovation, in terms of organizational structure, compensation and resource management?
8. Where do you see the next groundbreaking innovation in your industry coming from?
9. Can you give us your predictions on where you see your industry, or where you would like to see your industry, in 5 years?
10. Anything else you would like to share about how your company innovates?
1. What is your company's unique, sustainable position in the market?
Aaron: The web marketing industry is supported by a wide variety of software tools that are installed by technical experts and that are analyzed and used to create actionable plans for improvement by marketing experts. Most small business owners lack the budget or expertise to properly take advantage of these software tools. Our product, Eden Platform, is a website marketing platform that allows anyone to market their website online. Eden takes traditional website analytics data and turns it into actionable, prioritized suggestions that anyone can implement.
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2. How do you define innovation and how does that definition apply specifically to your field?
Aaron: We define innovation as the process of finding better solutions to common problems. This starts with identifying problems first. Through many years working for small and mid-sized businesses as marketing consultants we realized that many of them were not able to take advantage of any of the results that our industry could provide. We built Eden to automate many of the common tasks we completed for our clients and thus reduce the barrier to entry for web marketing customers.
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3. Please explain the development of your product/service.
Aaron: Our software product was created over the last 2 and 1/2 years by our internal software development team. In order to provide a complete website marketing solution for small businesses we felt that we had to start with a website content management system. This would allow us to both give actionable suggestions and facilitate the implementation of the suggested changes. Our first customer went live on the platform in March of 2009, 15 months into development.
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4. What obstacles have you faced, or do you continue to face with developing the product/service?
Aaron: Building a software platform that businesses rely on to power their online marketing presence is a large responsibility. Our customers demand reliability and this is particularly difficult with a new software product but we offer a very aggressive service level agreement to show our commitment to meeting their needs. Additionally, our customers look to us to take complex technical and marketing concepts and make them accessible to them through easy-to-use interfaces. This requires us to complete a lot of brainstorming and user testing before we make a new feature available to our entire customer base.
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5. What aspects of Raleigh do you feel help to foster the growth of innovative companies like yours?
Aaron: The Raleigh/Durham area provides us with a fantastic competitive advantage over other software companies in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. We experience lower office space, energy, and labor costs while enjoying moderate housing costs, great weather, and a large pool of creative knowledge workers. When it comes to innovation the people make the biggest difference and this doesn't just include employees and contractors. We work with local peer software companies to brainstorm the future of online software and customers in our industry.
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6. What have you done to foster more innovation within your own company?
Aaron: We've taken the time to think and have kept ourselves open to new ideas. We engage our customers and partners in honest conversations about our goals and our product today. We also look at similar industries like offline marketing or paid search marketing to look for trends that have yet to affect our industry so that we can understand what is next.
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7. What are ways that you can strategically plan for innovation, in terms of organizational structure, compensation and resource management?
Aaron: Innovation comes from creativity and we hire creative people and try to foster an environment that lets creativity thrive. This comes down to company culture, management style, and working environment. Compensation doesn't correlate well with creativity so we engage everyone on our team to make creative contributions that will help us meet our goals. As management our top priority is making sure our people understand our customers and our goals so that they can focus their creative energy in the right direction.
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8. Where do you see the next groundbreaking innovation in your industry coming from?
Aaron: Many small companies will continue to innovate around the fringes of the web marketing industry because the barrier to entry in the web software industry is so low. Two guys/gals with laptops can create the next billion dollar company just as easily as a herd of Harvard grads with $50M. When it comes to game-changing innovation much of this in the next few years is still likely to come from Google and we've seen hints at this with Google Buzz, Google Wave, and even Google Gears recently.
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9. Can you give us your predictions on where you see your industry, or where you would like to see your industry, in 5 years?
Aaron: I think our industry will take a path similar to paid search marketing in which smart companies will continue to do more with marketing data. Graphs and tables aren't enough. Online marketing companies need to draw circles around the myriad custom solutions currently used to achieve results and begin condensing these services down to a core set of actions that can be easily identified, explained, and implemented. We see this is a democratization of online marketing tools and this will happen in website marketing just as it has happed is email marketing and paid search marketing. In a few years we also we expect this will happen in social marketing as well and there are a couple of great Raleigh/Durham companies working on this right now.
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10. Anything else you would like to share about how your company innovates?
Aaron: In a startup the rule is innovate or die. I can't stress enough how important having honest conversations with customers is to success at this stage. Right now I'm on my way to spend an hour talking with a client that pays us $20/month. If I buy his cup of coffee at Starbucks I'll reduce my gross margin from his account by 10%. This is not the typical large software industry model where salesmen spend their time with clients in proportion to the revenue they deliver. As CEO I need to understand our clients and I invest my time in getting the best feedback so I can make the best decisions for the future of our company.
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