I’ve hit the three month mark at the new gig and, really, the news is all good, and not just that the bosses got me a MacBook the week before last. My timing on that, as always, was terrible, in a darkly funny way, with a modest but decent update within a week of mine arriving. Good thing I hadn’t asked for a MacBook Pro, eh?
The biggest news is that we came out of beta this week and beat the CEO’s forecast of customers under contract by more than a third; some of those easily recognizable big company names too. Several of the accounts I shepherded through the beta and in the last two days two of our customer champions (that is, the key user at each company) were extremely effusive about our application and how well we supported them, that Marketo will make a real difference in how well they do their own jobs.
Everyone’s worked hard to get us to this point. For me that’s meant staying later, sometimes coming in early to connect with customers in Europe and the East Coast and picking up my boss’s responsibility for office furniture (hello, Ikea?). All in all, leaving most of my energy at the office and what’s left went in to the resurgent Jewish High Tech Community.
After I was brought on the company turned off hiring for awhile but in the last few weeks we’ve added three new people (and are hiring two more, feel free to send me your resume and a cover letter if you’re a good fit!). One of our new team members is a very capable technical sales manager–who came over from Salesforce.com–and he’s gradually assuming responsibility for all the support Glen and I’ve been doing. Do I really mind?
The second biggest news is that I launched our Success platform. Besides doing about half the support (along with our outstanding, and recently promoted, Director of User Experience and Product Management) and being the office pingpong patsy, I’ve been building the software platform and writing the content for our community site.
The underlying tech we chose is Simple Machines Forum. SMF is a good open source PHP/MySQL package with a decent development and support team though I have to say learning the ins and outs of their template/source system has been a bit of a challenge, made more difficult by our decision to use the so far mostly undocumented 2.0 beta.
Our requirements mean that, if not for the copyright statement in the footer, you might have a tough time recognizing this as a forum package. We’re gradually removing just about all the table structures from the various views; given the number of them this is a long way from finished. We’re also removing large chunks of functionality we don’t want, like the whole private messaging system, avatars and signatures and the open registration pages–the site is world-readable but only our customers and partners can have accounts to post.
There’s still some serious work to go on the platform. The main pieces to be added are message/topic tagging and rating; the former especially is key since we want to provide concept-based access to material rather than the basic forum slicing the core software enables. The rating I hope to have running within the week, the tagging soon after.
Content-wise, everything is from me so far but I’m hopeful that our customers and other Marketoteers will liven up the site very soon. After all, as my boss said yesterday, my key responsibility is making this community successful and that means active participation from lots of other people.
Having shipped Marketo 2.0 is great but since we’re a software as a service company (that is, you access it using your favorite web browser) that doesn’t have the same meaning it does for products like, say, OS X and Microsoft Office. When we add a feature or patch a bug the only servers the software has to be installed on are ours. Consequently Engineering and Product Management are already into their next execution cycle, with 2.1 perhaps 90-120 days away.
Cool, very cool!
BillSaysThis 