Reflection on building something that matters
Hello to all the Yotpo family,
As the end of the year approaches, I had sometime to reflect on our crazy 2015. Our growth and impact over the past year blew me away. We grew the Yotpo network into a word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing platform that helps 150,000 businesses worldwide generate a new review every 2.6 seconds.We got Yotpo reviews in front of more than 500,000,000 people — that’s ~8% of the world’s population.
On a company-level, I’m also really proud of what we’ve accomplishedWe’ve gotten a chance to work with incredible companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, HubSpot, SalesForce and more.
We doubled the headcount in our TLV office and opened our NYC office (which has doubled, tripled and quadrupled). We grew teams within engineering, product, client services, sales and marketing, with more offices and people to come
As we continue our growth we are facing new challenges: we are adding talented but different people in different continents, we took a boring vertical like reviews and completely unlocked ,arguably, one of the most important aspects of marketing.
During the explosive growth this year it is really easy to lose track of why we do what we do and understand the bigger picture. My intention in this letter is to take a step back and explain how it all fits and to connect everyone of us to the bigger picture.
Q: Why do we do what we do?
A: We want to profoundly change the way companies attract and retain customers in an increasingly noisy environment.
For any marketer (or CEO) on the planet, the biggest challenge is how to float above the noise.Consumers are inundated with marketing messaging and ads and it’s expensive and extremely difficult for a company to compete.
If we change the way that most companies market themselves to a more customer-focused, WOM-focused style, we will have a tremendous impact on millions of businesses and customers worldwide. We are trying to build a new solution to a very old problem: “How can I get people to talk about my business?”
There’s a ton of platforms for businesses and customers to navigate — WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc. — with changes happening every day and new platforms cropping up regularly. Businesses are overwhelmed, and customers don’t know where to go.
We’re here to help. We want to enable businesses to compete and market themselves better and help customers find the information they need.
Q: How do we do it?
A: By helping companies build a word of mouth marketing platform that maximizes the power of user-generated content.
Everyone agrees (and studies show) that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing. So why do so many businesses fail to do it successfully?Today businesses live and die by their NPS/Health Score/Yelp or Google reviews etc. They need to get as much feedback as possible so they can fix the things that don’t work and double down on what does.
Trouble is, it’s painfully hard to get your customers to tell you that stuff. That’s where we come in — our cross-platform, beautiful review experience is the first part of the puzzle. The last part is the data which gives us the ability to predict when each customer is ready and willing to give feedback.
After businesses get that info from their customers, they need to use it to quickly identify advocates and then get those people to spread the word. Here’s where we come in again with tools that help those advocates share their experience across platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The idea is, whenever a potential customer encounters a new business, the first thing they should see is relevant experiences from actual customers.
The days of businesses marketing themselves, their products and their services are over! Instead, businesses need to market relevant customer experiences.
The only way businesses will remain relevant is to amplify their customers voices, and this is exactly what we do; we help businesses build the voice of their customers and then transform that voice into a their strongest marketing channel.
Q: What’s next?
A: We are just getting started.
We’ve accomplished a lot, but there is so much more we can do. And we’ll do it as we continue to get better, more focuses and build the WOM movement.
You thought 2015 was crazy? Well, 2016 will be hectic. We’re faced with the task of continuing to get better, while maintaining hyper-growth. And there isn’t room to be anything less than the best. If we don’t have the best customer service, the best product and the best technology, we won’t be able to reach millions of businesses who need to leverage WOM to market themselves. In order to accomplish that, we need to hire the most talented people and maintain focus on our values and culture as we scale.
It is key that every one of you help us define our next stage.
In 2016 our focus will remain on growth, on both a company and personal level — because we’ll need to do both to face bigger challenges. We will continue our revolution and evolution from a small startup into a worldwide movement.
I want to use this opportunity to thank you guys for your hard work, long hours and energy. You’ve gotten us this far and you’ll continue to take us even farther. I feel honored to work with so many talented people who put their heart and soul into accomplishing our mission.
This post was an inspiration from BuzzFeed CEO
