Without much struggle, the wildly successful conference calling company Speek has been able to grow and scale its product nationally in just a few years. While co-founders John Bracken and Danny Boice have made it look easy, scaling is often a struggle for small companies after validating their minimum viable product. However, Bracken explained that if founders plan the scaling organically from the beginning with long-term, viral strategies, growth takes care of itself.
"We designed Speek from the get go with kind of a viral marketing strategy where people who use the product have a good experience and then share it with others," he explained. "And that's been a very successful marketing strategy for us and it’s driven basically most of our growth." In addition to creating something special, Bracken attributes Speek's growth to long-term marketing, press and business development strategies.
"There's many facets of marketing such as content marketing – using your blog to get good content on your site that people can share, and in the process of sharing they promote your site and you start to rank higher and higher in SEO for a given subject area," Bracken said. "Once you start ranking high, especially if you can get into the first age of the search results, you start to get into this position where your traffic is a given."
Some things, though, can be done in the short term with really viral content, Bracken said. Take, for example, the massive publicity the company got during SXSW 2011 when co-founder Danny Boice promised during a Tech Cocktail pitch competition that Bracken would get their monkey logo tattooed on his butt if they won. Sure enough, they did, and Bracken, who wasn't even at the competition and knew nothing of the promise, followed through on his end of the deal. That story was picked up by all kinds of media outlets when Speek was just in its infancy.
Bracken also considers the Speek team pretty adept with the workings of the press. "We have relationships with most major tech press, even mass media, so when we have something to talk about, we go directly to the press and pitch the story." Media-savvy people like Bracken are a journalist's dream.
Lastly, Speek uses business development as a huge strategy and will continue to do so moving forward. Earlier this year, they began working on a partnership with Dell, which they fully launched a few weeks ago. With that, Speek has been featured on Dell's Center for Entrepreneurs "as one of three providers including FedEx," Bracken said. That partnership is not only a great work relationship, but it also gives Speek a bigger platform for distribution. "These partners blast our services to many of their users." Speek has several more of these coming in the next 30 to 90 days, Bracken said, which will continue to stoke the company's marketing fire.
The common theme about each of these strategies? They don't really cost anything. "That's the thing – if you're smart and clever about all this stuff, you can build your service and product and get it out there without spending a ton of money," Bracken said. "That's the trick for every startup. You can do all these things; it just takes your hustle and energy. We've been able to get our service out in front of lots and lots and lots of people with not a lot of money."
If you can plan your company with some sort of viral distribution strategy from the get go, Bracken believes that any marketing or business development after that will just be "fueling that engine." In that sense, scaling is not as difficult as it seems, so long as you put some long-term planning and work into it.
