2016 Year End Recap & Updates on Intellifluence

2016 Year End Recap & Updates on Intellifluence

2016 was quite a year for Intellifluence… Perhaps due in part to it being our first year of existence, having launched over the summer. A lot has occurred and a LOT more is going to occur in 2017; Terry, the team, and I are all very excited about what’s to come.

Let’s play a quick game of catch up.

August

Version 0.5 of Intellifluence launches and is the completely wrong model. Small business brands want to discover existing influencers, not recruit new ones.

Version 1 of Intellifluence launches and I begin scrambling to Facebook and Reddit, doing whatever I could to get an initial base of influencers on board. We push very hard, very quickly, because we understand that there is a big opportunity in providing a quality influencer marketing solution for small and medium sized businesses, while simultaneously giving a voice to interested reviewers with smaller audiences.

I don my alter ego, He-Man, to keep the influencer flow coming.

Our first success comes in this first month, getting front paged on Product Hunt. Did we get spoiled? No way — we just kept pushing.

September

I kick off a 14 part series on influencer marketing, to help guide those new to the topic, on how to move from conceptualization through to campaign success. These take up a lot more time than I expect, but are a great experience, leading to opportunities to speak with publications like Small Business Trends.

Andrew’s first post performs better than my first post…I cry silently in a corner. He should definitely write more.

I got over the sting of Andrew’s success and do some deadlifts in kitten socks for one of our customers.

We crack 9,000 influencing reviewers.

October

Some news shakes the influencer world, with Amazon deciding that the only incentivized reviews they will allow on their site being through their own influencer program. Naturally, there are ways to still have success on Amazon, without violating Amazon TOS. We field many concerned support emails and Facebook threads from buyers not knowing how to move forward with the ambiguity and reviewers just wanting to review products. Expect more from Amazon in 2017 as the crackdown goes international.

November

Shopify! Months of hard work culminate in getting approved as a trusted app in Shopify’s app directory. Jon goes all out for this, and our customer base effectively doubles as Shopify cart owners obtain a simpler way of using Intellifluence w/ Shopify billing management.

Tom’s relentlessness pushes us over 13,000 influencing reviewers.

We speak at Ungagged, on how to use influencer marketing as a function of creating a compulsion marketing campaign.

December

The reason I’m writing this post — Terry delivers. Intellifluence now has a lot more features and some new plans.

Early customers, we’re taking care of you; you can thank Eric for convincing everyone it was the right way forward. You are going to receive all the benefits of the Pro plan, so keep reading. We grandfather all plans and intend to keep adding features and raising prices to continually be priced under market while offering more benefits. Locking in has its benefits.

Intro plan: this is the entry level plan we use for Shopify and anyone that just wants to understand how influencer marketing might work for them. The primary selling point of this plan is discovery; every single influencer in our network is actually IN our network…we aren’t showing you someone that you could consider reaching out to with a cold pitch; these are people that want to be pitched and have agreed to be pitched by businesses like yours.

Standard plan: standard plan customers share the same discovery functionality as intro plan customers, but have an expanded feature set. Want to create campaigns so you can contact multiple reviewers at once? Want reporting based on your outreach, engagement, and transaction stats? Message templating? This is for you — this plan is our best value for those that want to focus on social sales as an important acquisition channel.

Pro plan: pro plan customers get everything the standard plan customers get, plus something that every agency and larger business needs: a multi-user team environment. If you’re an agency or larger business that needs multiple people working on campaigns, this is the best way to get it done.

Enterprise plan: enterprise customers get everything pro customers get and my undying love + devotion. White label customization to host on your domain, custom audiences, custom development, a map to Terry’s backyard treasure chest, and Joe’s cell number. If you need a special setup, this is for you.

2017

We already have a full Q1 in store with new partnerships, integrations, and an expanded development list to hit. If things go the way I think they might, you’re going to get several more years of these updates and should make some good money with us. Thank you so much for being a part of our launch and current success; keep growing with us and you will be rewarded.