From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very nice story. What are you up to now?

Janine Popick: I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m a marketer but I am also into product management and technology to grow small businesses. Maybe, something along those lines in a consultative fashion. It’s been 14 years so I want to chill for a little bit.

Sramana Mitra: You need some rest.

Janine Popick: Unfortunately, my husband just started a new tech startup, which is probably going to take some of my time but all of his.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome. I’m very glad that it all worked out. It sounds like a perfect story.

Janine Popick: It’s not without its highs and lows.

Sramana Mitra: It never is and it shouldn’t be. It’s not a good story if it doesn’t have highs and lows.

Janine Popick: I know. I tell people I’m going to write a book on what not to do.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the things that you would advise people not to do?

Janine Popick: There’s the whole working with friends bit. It sounds really glorious but there’s not a lot of give and take. You end up, potentially, losing a friend. It happened to me over the course of 14 years. I tread lightly on that subject. If I am going to start another company, I’d really be careful about who I want to work with. I think there’s also that whole aspect of hiring people. There are certain companies that don’t hire fast enough for certain positions or they hire too fast before they really need them. I certainly have done both.

I had this one guy who was amazing. He worked for me for a while. He would never make a decision without one thousand points of analysis. I was like, “Do you have a gut?” At some point, you have to look inside yourself and go, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Do a little bit of that. I think that not firing a bad employee is a poison in your company. It’s not good for any of your employees. It’s sucks the morale out of your team. It makes you look like you’re a weak leader. That certainly happened over and over again.

Sramana Mitra: People are complicated. I think some of what’s going on in the industry is because you can do so much automation, people are building companies that have much fewer people and much more automation. Things are scaling well in that level, which takes that people complexity out to some extent. While it’s not good for the job numbers, it makes businesses simpler to manage, I think.

Janine Popick: I give you 50% on that. It struck me when you said that. We use a technology called Marketo, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. We wanted someone who had experience with Marketo. What we got was someone who had experience with Marketo but didn’t have experience with marketing. You get a robot. You don’t get somebody who’s thinking about the colors of the email, font, or marketing principles. You get a robot who knows how to blitz test something, whatever it is.

Just looking at what my husband is doing, I do think that there are amazing technologies out there to automate these stuff, but I’m looking at it from a marketing point of view. There are a lot of people that are just, “I’m going to get certified in something.” They’re not looking at it as how this is going to move the business needle. How are emotions going to play with this? How am I going to get people to do something at the end of the day?

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. Let me give you a counter example to that. There is this technology called Hootsuite. If you’re doing social media market, you need to learn to use Hootsuite. Otherwise, you would be spending your life on doing things manually. There are levels of automation that has made it possible for us to do things that would, otherwise, need people to sit there and do things.

Janine Popick: I agree.

Sramana Mitra: That is happening at a very large scale. There is a lot of outsourcing going on. You can hire somebody from the Philippines to do your books at a very reasonable rate. Starting companies these days are, at some level, a lot cheaper than they used to be and don’t require as many people.

Janine Popick: There’s way less friction to start a company.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to share as part of this story?

Janine Popick: No, it was great talking to you. I look forward to seeing more of this on your blog.

Sramana Mitra: You should look at the Entrepreneur Journeys series of books. They’re very well curated and interesting. Nice to meet you, Janine.

This segment is part 7 in the series : From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick
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