Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about how the product is architected. You talked about what other people cannot do. What is it that you do? How do you architect the product that you can do something different and better?

Josh Manion: That really started from the inception. When we looked at solving the problem, the solution that formed in my mind was that we needed to create a platform that was completely simple to implement. It needed to be as easy as saying to a customer, “Just put that one line of code on your page and our application is fully installed.” Once that was there, it would enable our customers to leverage our application to literally drag and drop any of these digital marketing vendors on to their site in a way that would be controllable by the marketer and no longer dependent on the external forces or things like waiting three months for the next release to your website.

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example. Let’s say this tag is in place on your website. What other application are they trying to tie-in to that process?

Josh Manion: Part of what was driving the opportunity for us was the fact that the marketing technology space was growing so fast. If I think way back to when we started the consulting company, most companies had one or two tags on their sites. Now the average company has probably 25 vendors that they’re using – anything from social media, live chat to personalization engine. They’ve got 15 flavors of the ad network version. They’ve got re-targeters. That complexity increases the potential value of the enterprise but it also rapidly escalates the need to be able to manage and bring governance to those as well.

The first application that we launched was designed to say, “Let’s give complete power over all this marketing applications to the marketers themselves.” Any time they want to add a new one or remove an old one, it’s now as simple as clicking a couple of buttons on the interface as opposed to creating an IT request, touching code on thousands of pages manually, and removing it in the old world. The analogy that I’ve used quite a bit to explain what this is like is if you’re a publishing site, you almost certainly use a content management system so that your writers and editors have direct access to adding and removing stories to the site without the need to talk to developers.

The marketing team is actually doing that same type of activity in massive quantities whether it’s acquiring new customers or optimizing the relationship with current customers for using this ever-growing set of technologies. But they had no platform to do that with. They would literally have to wait in line and ask for a developer to help them put the few lines of code.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion
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