Badgy (@Badgy) is a software company based in Hypepotamus that helps social marketers get the absolute best results from Facebook and Twitter. Their tools help to grow sales and audiences by broadening news and blog distribution. Founded in 2011, this startup is intensely focused on using analytics to continuously discover the newest best practices in social media.
We caught up with Rob Kischuk (@rkischuk), Badgy’s founder and CEO, to find out more about how a focus on anayltics and culture has helped him to build a platform that has been named one of the “10 Atlanta Startups to Watch” by Creative Loafing.
Owners:
Rob Kischuk
Location:
Hypepotamus, Midtown, Atlanta
Employees:
5
Founded:
2011
Funded or bootstrapped:
Funded by the Flashpoint Fund, some fantastic local angel investors, and some famous guy who is on Shark Tank and owns the Dallas Mavericks.
Price of Services:
$500 to $1,500 for most plans. Some enterprise features carry additional fees.
What Customers Get:
They get full access to Badgy’s Social Optimization platform. They can schedule an unlimited amount of posts to Facebook and we’ll optimize the timing and formatting to reach the most people possible and maximize clickthrough to commerce. Most Facebook brand pages reach around 20% of their fans every week. Our customers typically reach 70-80% of their fans every single week, without paid ad support. They also get access to our Facebook promotions engine that converts fans into email subscribers. The engine also builds tremendous insight into their audience that can used to target ads more effectively and write audience pleasing content. All put together, they get the best possible results from their Facebook marketing.
How’d You Get The Idea For It:
I spent the 5 years prior to Badgy working on kids games, social games, and a white-label social networking platform for political campaigns and non-profits. I had seen how effective social games leveraged the features of social platforms to gain repeatable, effective fan acquisition, retention, and monetization. I wanted to put the tools to do this in the hands of all marketers. In bringing the product to market, we learned that the most performance-focused marketers had an ecommerce aspect to what they were doing.
Collaboration Tools & Processes Do You Use:
On the tools front, we use Google Docs extensively for collaboration, as well as Trello. Salesforce is a necessity with a sales team, and there are some great tools that integrate with that like Yesware. Process-wise, we have some recurring rhythms to our company that keep is in sync – daily standup meetings and weekly functional team meetings. A new process we’ve been doing is a weekly “show and tell” – we show off the new features and refinements in the product, and tell what feedback we’re hearing from customers and prospects. It’s a product review meeting, but designed to be efficient and market-focused.
Where do you gain your insights from and how do you stay on top of emerging trends:
Mostly Twitter. I’m pretty selective in who I follow so that I can pretty much read nearly every Tweet in my feed. Between the articles people share, and the other people they retweet, I get a great mix of what’s new and what’s next. For specific topics, I’ll seek out specific advisors and mentors in the community for good insight, and there’s always a great supply of local events hatching the latest trends.
What’s Unique About Your Company Culture:
Every company culture is different, and at this early stage, I believe culture is largely an outgrowth of the people involved. One thing that is emerging from our team is that we’re very open when we make a mistake – not so much to apologize, but to actually learn from them. When there’s trust within your team, a shared mistake is a tremendous learning opportunity and often a good chance to laugh together.
What You Need Most Right Now:
We need more great social media marketers who care about achieving repeatable, measurable results to use Badgy – not just growing fans, but converting them to email subscribers, paying customers, and deep social data to feed into ad targeting and content. We thrive on learning from customers.
