Last week I had a rare experience of a lifetime: seeing the evolution of an idea I had in my garage 13 years ago fully transformed into a powerful marketing tool used around the world. And for me it was an incredibly humbling experience. Let me explain:
In 2003, one of the leading Advertising Agencies asked for my help in finding a vendor that provided competitive intelligence tool for email. What I discovered was, back then, there were no vendors who were monitoring competitive email campaigns. In fact, information about the effectiveness of email marketing was practically nil. Back then, there was no independent data on how effective Email was as a marketing channel across industries. My “AHA!” moment was when I first overlaid Alexa web traffic data over the days that emails were sent by a brand: What I discovered was that every day and email went out, there was a huge spike in traffic to the domain, and days there wasn’t an email, there wasn’t.
When I couldn’t find them a vendor, I set out and created it myself. The result was a company I originally called Email Data Source, but is now eDataSource, the first competitive intelligence tool for Email Marketers. Of course, since that time there are a number of powerful solutions on the market, but eDataSource was the very first.
In 2010, I left eDataSource to launch a new company, Only Influencers. And when I left, I left completely and over the next 6 years, I lost track of the product’s development and evolution.
All that changed last week when I got a chance to visit the new eDataSource offices and get the lowdown on what I’ve been missing these last 6 years. Needless to say, I was absolutely blown away by the scope and scale of the product’s evolution since all those years ago in my garage. What better way to celebrate then to do one of my Unboxing articles on a my own brainchild.
Read the full article on OnlyInfluencers for a look into the eDataSource tools.
