My first week as interim VP marketing at Xobni was incredible. In earlier startups we had to work a lot harder to get the customer acquisition engine cranking.
Naturally, I did a lot of due diligence on Xobni before deciding to join. I discovered that Xobni has all the elements of a startup with enormous potential for marketing success. Specifically, it resolves real pain in a mission critical part of the daily work flow for a huge addressable market. And early users are thrilled with the solution. They love how Xobni helps them manage the flood of email hitting their Outlook inbox. After installing Xobni, it’s much easier to find contacts, attachments, conversations and more.
The PR opportunity for Xobni is also enormous. The press is enamored with the visionary way Xobni addresses the email overload problem. Xobni’s solution leverages the rich relationship data that already exists in the inbox. In a sense Xobni turns email into your biggest and most important social network. While this is a bit esoteric for mainstream users, it’s great for generating press. In recent months Xobni has landed coverage in the Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc Magazine, Business 2.0, Webware, and BNET. Additionally, there are already over 5,000 blogs and websites that link to Xobni. All this with no PR agency.
So I consider myself extremely fortunate to be the first marketing head at Xobni. While a lot has already been achieved, there are still many dials to turn to accelerate Xobni’s momentum. For confidentiality reasons I won’t go into the details of how I plan to market Xobni, but I will be trying to make frequent blog updates on my general startup marketing thoughts. These thoughts are becoming crystallized as I spend more time executing the early stage marketing for Xobni.
By the way if you are curious why it’s an “Interim” role, this post explains the reasoning.
Andrew Chen
Brant Cooper
Dave McClure
Eric Ries
Jamie Siminoff
Steve Blank
“In recent months Xobni has landed coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc Magazine, Business 2.0, Webware, BNET”None of this is discoverable from Xobni’s website. I worry you guys are hiding your light under a bushel basket.
Good catch Sean. I should definitely make the press coverage much more prominent. In the couple weeks I’ve been here I’ve mostly focused on drilling down into existing user motivations, segment differences, solution perceptions… I’ve also defined the tracking and reporting needs to ensure that my changes don’t screw things up. Soon I’ll be ready to A/B test variations of the website messaging and design. But you are right, there are some no brainer changes I should make right away. Thanks!
Hi Sean, Thanks for your comments at my blog. Interestingly enough, you are the marketing head of Xobni. Xobni is a cool company and I always use it to remind me to focus on implementing an idea since I had very much the same idea in early 2007 but didn’t move on. Anyway, good luck at Xobni and looking forward to reading more posts here, -Li
Li, great to hear that you are a Xobni user. We’ve all been there: “I had a similar idea but didn’t move on it”… It takes a lot of guts to pull the trigger on a good idea. I look forward to reading more posts on your blog as well. I know Babson has an awesome program, so I’m sure I’ll pick up some nuggets from you.