We wrote recently about our new office, and I wanted to follow up with another bit of news about us: We’ve added a key person to our board.
Denise Franklin will not only be joining the board of BlogMutt, but she’s also agreed to work with us in the office for at least the next few months.
This is huge news for BlogMutt, in part because of how great Denise is.
For those of you not in Boulder, allow me to explain.
Denise has been an informal advisor, mentor and friend to BlogMutt since before we were called BlogMutt. She’s helped us in ways large and small, making key introductions and nudging us toward smart ways of growing.
She’s somewhat legendary in the world of tech companies, especially in Colorado. She’d had a successful career at several high-growth companies, but she really made her mark on a company called SendGrid. Before Denise, SendGrid was made up of all software developers, and while it had a compelling idea (making it easier for computers to deliver email automatically), SendGrid didn’t have much of an identity, or a plan for growing. Denise gave it that identity and that plan, and the management finesse needed for SendGrid to become what it in fact did become—one of the best Colorado tech companies in recent memory. Now, with more than 250 employees and more than $43 million in sales, SendGrid is perhaps the biggest single success to come out of TechStars.
Success, they say, has a million parents and failure is an orphan, so SendGrid has lots of people that get credit for its amazing story, but it would be hard to say that any one person outside of the founders of the company had a bigger impact on that success than Denise.
So, you can imagine why Wade and I are so excited that Denise will be joining us.
And the good news is that the work she’ll be doing will be on top of a solid foundation.
It’s impossible to say for sure, but from what we can tell we are the most productive blogging service in the world. We are a profitable business that’s sold more than 60 million words to thousands of businesses all over the world. For the second year in a row we were named one of the fastest growing companies in Boulder, a town with a lot of fast-growing companies. (Here’s the story from the first year).
The writers who created all those words deserve all the credit in the world, and our staff in our office has worked with tireless enthusiasm and creativity to make sure the machinery of BlogMutt works.
That in-office group, by the way, now is up to 14 people. You can see them all on the “About Us” page.
How will Denise be helping us?
The SBA says that there are 28 million small businesses just in the United States. We may sell blog posts to more of those businesses than any other blogging service, but we are serving an infinitesimally small percent of those businesses and marketing agencies that need to be getting blogging done.
Denise is going to be helping us to figure out how to reach a bigger chunk of all marketing agencies and small businesses who need BlogMutt, and may just not know it yet.
Second is that Wade and I decided that we needed a fresh perspective on how we are managing the company. We share a sense that the things that brought us to this point may not be the same things that help us to get to where we want to go. Denise’s charge from the two of us is to examine the ways that we operate, and help us organize the company so that we can be in the best position to really serve all those folks in the world who need help with blogging.
So, please join me and Wade in welcoming Denise to BlogMutt!
