#177 - Dennis Kelly, CEO of Postalytics - On the power of unifying digital marketing with direct mail

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give marketers the freedom to leverage the combined power of direct and digital marketing while removing the compromises. And my guest is Dennis Kelly, CEO of Postalytics

Dennis is a serial entrepreneur. He started off as a sales guy, spent time building products, and running data centers. Late 90's he co-founded Anyday.com, which was sold to Palm in 2000. This immersed him into the world of wireless.

After leaving Palm, he co-founded Adjoin to tackle some challenging Webservice management problems.

In 2006, he became the co-owner of Wireless City - a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores. He sold this company to Go Wireless in October 2011.

From there, he switched his focus to researching startup ideas, angel investing, and helping local startups with strategy & advice. This led him to become the CEO of Boingnet, a software platform helping direct mailers generate personalized, multi-channel campaigns across mail, web, and email channels.

This is where he saw a big disconnect in the market between direct and digital marketing, and that sparked the idea behind Postalytics, of which he's now the CEO

As digital marketing channels get more crowded, and marketers are all using the same playbook, they’re increasingly looking for new ways to put their messages directly into the hands of their audiences. That's why they are giving direct mail another look. The problem is that the direct mail industry hasn’t kept up with changes in technology. It feels very… 1990s - it's slow, costly, disconnected from the marketing technology stack, and impossible to track. That's what Postalytics solves.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Dennis to my podcast. We explore the opportunity for value creation by blending the online- with the offline marketing world, and how this can create a 1+1=3 concept because you're combining unique strengths into one. We also address the lessons Dennis learned to create growth and momentum in B2B technology, and what it takes to build a great software business that customers just keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

We started having some brands come to us and say, "Hey, I just invested in Salesforce, you guys are living in this kind of a hybrid between digital and direct. Can you help us deploy direct mail more efficiently, more quickly, as a part of our Salesforce as a part of our HubSpot?"

And it took a few of those conversations, let's realize there's a bigger opportunity out here to take some of this measurement and analytic work that we've done and to solve a problem that is far more pervasive and has a much bigger scope.

That was happening in 2015, and 2016, and we spent about a year just heads down building Postalytics. And now Postalytics is our primary focus.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why limiting your focus on a highly specific audience is essential to maximize buzz and fuel the growth and momentum of your software business
2. The positive things that happen when you decide sales is actually part of your onboarding process
3. Why killing something early is often the best move - and what early signs you should be highly sensitive to
4. Why the goal of a startup should be to create a great business instead of focusing on a great exit

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dennis Kelly
• Website Postalytics