#Marketing: Lessons From The High Volume Business – Scaling Hootsuite, Vidyard & Constant Contact with Steve Johnson

Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel

Molly Sloan

Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2018

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this #Marketing edition of Seeking Wisdom, DG syncs up with legendary marketing operator, Steve Johnson. Together they discuss his time at Constant Contact, Hootsuite, Vidyard and more. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @davegerhardt @seekingwisdomio. In This Episode: 0:33 - Intro with Steve Johnson 1:29 - The rise of social media 2:31 - Hootsuite and social media 3:51 - Lessons from the high-volume business 4:16 - Lessons from Constant Contact 4:34 - Fremium 5:43 - How did Hootsuite grow? 6:33 - Community marketing 7:25 - Ambassadors to reach area influencers 8:16 - Hoot-ups 10:52 - South by Southwest and an owl bus 12:02 - All a matter of marketing and public relations 12:34 - The move to enterprise 14:46 - The proliferation of free/enterprise combinations 15:44 - A lesson from Survey Monkey: switch to annual subscription 17:12 - A lesson from Survey Money: use an agency 17:28 - The most recent parts of Steve’s journey 17:40 - Lessons from Hootsuite: purpose and model 18:26 - On the need for an international move 19:24 - Things learned from Vidyard 20:45 - GoVideo success 21:30 - Fremium is good for horizontal markets. 22:25 - The attitude needed to build a big company

Transcript

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0:00.0	So hey everybody, we're back.
0:12.3	Steve Johnson is here in town.
0:15.0	And we said, you know what, while you're here, why don't you come by and let's talk
0:17.5	about marketing and SaaS and whatever else you've done.
0:20.5	And so I'm super excited to talk to you because I've known of you and then we worked at the same company together but didn't really know each other then. I've just through osmosis have learned a bunch of things from you over the years. So I want to try to unpack a couple of those lessons. Absolutely. How do you describe who you are and what you do? That's a good question. You're always kind of an operating guy, right? An operating guy, you know, I look at solving real problems, so I love that kind of stuff to something that's real. I also am purpose-driven, so I like to have something that's gotten meaning to me. Yep. Let's rewind, like back from Constant Contact, Hoot Suite, Vidyard, Nat, what's your, give me the last, like, 10 years.
0:55.0	Sure, sure. So we ran across each other. Constant contact. Then I came in at Hoot Suite,
1:01.4	employee 27, just when we started monetizing it. Okay. So Vancouver. And so did that five years.
1:06.8	We went from 27 to 1,000 people, grew all around the world and some great revenue.
1:11.6	Now it's 150 million.
1:13.6	What was it when you joined?
1:14.6	So it was 300,000 revenue.
1:17.6	I turned it down a couple of times because I wanted to wait and see if somebody wanted to pay for this.
1:23.6	So Ryan, great guy, but he pinged me and said, you know, got this free product. We're going to start monetizing. That was a super interesting era. So, like, you, wait, how long were your constant contact? So I was there two years, two years from, to learn the volume business basically. What, 2009 to 2011? Yeah, because I was there 2011. Yeah, 2009 to 2011. And so at that time was, I think, the rise of social media, right?
1:45.4	Because there was a lot of stuff happening at that time.
1:47.7	It was like Facebook was blowing up.
1:50.0	Instagram was just blowing up.
1:51.1	It had just been acquired by Facebook.
1:53.2	Twitter was just starting to take off.
1:54.7	You know, LinkedIn obviously was a platform.
1:56.3	Google Plus was the thing back then.
1:58.2	Oh, man.
1:58.6	All these social channels.
	...

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