Update December 2017: This post was written when the company was founded and a lot has changed since then. Check out how we’ve grown here:
CloudKettle: Year 1 By The Numbers
CloudKettle: Year 2 By The Numbers
If you’re interested to learn more about who we are today, check out our About Us section.
CloudKettle = SaaS Marketing and Sales
I have had a rollercoaster of a year since January 2015. Going out on my own and beginning to attract my own clients was a pretty big leap for someone who had always worked in-house. I always paid for sales and marketing services or run internal teams, I’d never sold them before.
I’m fortunate that I’ve had years of experience working at startups and with fantastic salespeople; so I knew how to quickly scale a business and how much work making sales would take. In the past though, I’d never had to do it alone – without a team. I’ve been spoiled over the past decade and a half. I’ve gotten to work with people like Susan Oland and Jon McGinley who had years of agency experience. I’ve learned about digital marketing from the likes of Rob Begg and Lauren Vaccarello. I’ve gotten to go through restructurings and acquisitions with Dean Leland, Milan Vrekic, and Dan Stratton. I got to further hone my content marketing skills with people like David Alston, David Thomas, and Amanda Nelson. Perhaps most importantly, I learned about Sales from a list of distinguished Radian6’ers too long to list here.
Going out on my own meant not having the on-hand support net of that brain trust any longer (in particular Jon McGinley, who has been my partner in crime on and off for ten years). But I did have the daily support of a wife, who for some unfathomable reason agreed it was a good idea that I stop working a real job and instead lurk in our basement for a living. It feels appropriate that I do this the day after our five-year anniversary (and a decade after we first started dating).
Far from the lonely existence I feared it might be, I’ve loved almost every minute of it. From those cold days in January, when I was crafting the value proposition and planning pricing, to February when I was hammering out 8+ coffee meetings a day to try and build pipeline and then to March when I started getting cheques and knew concretely this would work – it was all fun. But, then came April. And May. And June. And I knew I had a problem.
Growth is Hard
Growth, scaleable growth is hard. My clients had greater needs all the time. I have a deep network of developers, graphic designers, ad buyers, content creators and a whole gamut of people with marketing, sales and startup experience that I can draw on to help serve customers. But starting in April it became evident that the needs of my clients were growing beyond what I “Greg Poirier” as a sole proprietor could offer. That was the impetus to graduate the business to a new entity, CloudKettle.
What does the Name Mean?
Clearly, we’re selling a kettle that is powered by the cloud. We plan to have Marc acquire us any day now and install us in every Salesforce lunchroom. Already have a fluffy cloud in the logo – assuming that will be a time saver.
Ok, maybe not. In reality, most of my clients are cloud companies, which I love. And even for those that aren’t, the work I do with them is often centered around cloud services like Salesforce, Hubspot and Google Analytics. Implementing those tools, helping companies update their culture to take full advantage of them and overall improve their lead and sales funnel is the core of the work I do. So the “Cloud” part makes sense.
In addition, I am a compulsive tea drinker and I probably spent more time choosing my last kettle than my office furniture. Also, as I envisioned the brand (logo and other items by the fabulous Nadine at IdeaNest), I thought about how we would grow cloud companies. It was a little too cute for a tagline, but the concepts like “we’re adding more steam to your cloud” or ” adding steam power to your cloud company” kept coming to mind.
What does this Mean for Clients?
Well in the short term very little is changing for clients; emails just come with a new name and fancy logo. For existing clients, it is a recognition that they need more help than I can provide as an individual and for future clients, it is about offering a wider range of services. The focus and area of specialty haven’t changed, but it has become much more robust. The ability to offer deeper advertising, SEO, website development, Salesforce and Hubspot services are what this change is all about.
I have Questions
Get in touch. You can contact me by clicking here, or use the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you.
And if you could – I’d love some help growing our followers @cloudkettle and on CloudKettle’s LinkedIn Profile.
