An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 5)

Sramana: You are in a very competitive landscape. How are you navigating the competitive pressures?

Curt Keller: We are expanding our product mix. We are coming up with creative solutions around our software as a service offering. In some ways we are following the lead of competitors such as Constant Contact.

Our product tends to be used globally, so we have taken the path of translating our software into seven different languages. We are getting really good traction in the Spanish and Chinese markets. The product mix we have slated will be a bit different from that of our competitors. We differentiate ourselves by providing the best value in the marketplace, and our customer service is fantastic. It is a very crowded marketplace.

Sramana: What does the landscape look like right now? You are heading toward $7.5 million this year. How big are your competitors?

Curt Keller: Their revenue levels are much higher than ours. I think Constant Contact is around $200 million to $225 million, and iContact is around $60 million. Vertical Response is probably doing around $40 million in revenue. There are other players that are closer to us in size. Campaigner is probably doing around $20 million in revenue, and I am not sure what MadMimi is doing.

This is a crowded space, and that is why we have decided to make a decisive and conscious decision to focus on branding. We are really focusing on the brand name, Benchmark. We are focusing on the design aspect of our offering so that businesses have the warm fuzzy [feeling] they should have when they use our tools. We are not trying to be as corporate as we have in the past. I believe that when people use online tools, they want to feel good about what they are using.

Sramana: Who constitutes your customer base? Is there a particular segmentation among your customer base? Where do your customers come from, what sizes of businesses are they?

Curt Keller: Our customers are all small businesses. On the international side they tend to be medium businesses. We have people who are selling insurance, investment advisers, restaurants, dentists, and a lot of people who run online businesses. We have also had nonprofits as well as some governments sign up for our service. We have a very wide mixture of entities that use us.

This segment is part 5 in the series : An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller
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