This past weekend on the way to Florida to visit my brothers, I read about Squarespace’s advertising history. (Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/business/how-did-squarespace-know-podcasts-would-get-this-big.html). In 2009, Anthony Casalena, the founder of Squarespace, paid $20,000 to advertise on a tech podcast. While that was a lot for a small, young company (Casalena had started his business just six years earlier in a dorm room in 2003), Casalena said the podcast ad paid big dividends: he got back his investment in new customers many times over. He parlayed that into other podcasts and, at one point, was advertising on over 400 podcasts.
Today, he’s come a long way from advertising on podcasts for $20k. This past Sunday, he ran a commercial in the Super Bowl ($6.5m per ad). The route he took to reach the national advertising level was built on acquiring customers via podcasts and other advertising that offered high ROI and low customer acquisition cost. Early in the company’s history, a source cites paying $500 to advertise on a podcast that brought in 20 sign-ups.
I think Casalena would highly encourage Bridge and other businesses to look at customer acquisition methods. Businesses have to consider podcasts, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. Squarespace and Bridge both offer websites to businesses. Yet, Casalena has likely used more efficient ways to bring in customers since 2009—a year before Bridge Store launched and 13 years before today. They have quite a head start.
Not only has Casalena beat many software companies to success, so has Shopfiy. Shopify was founded in 2007 (3 years before we launched Bridge Store) and is now worth $100b+ (...We’re worth something less than that ha ha). Now, we’re different in that Shopify almost instantly went and got investors and pumped the well with money. Today, Shopify (and Squarespace) is worth billions of dollars. Bridge, like many other smaller, indie software companies, is in a figurative last place.
So what do we do? Well, thankfully, we have smarts and grit. We have built parts of Bridge that are superior to these two giants’ platforms, and we’ll leverage these features. We’ll use our ingenuity to outwit and move ahead at a speedier pace than one would think. For those of you that have seen the movie Ready Player One (or read the book), the scene of the protagonist beating the course by driving backwards is inspiring. (You are invited to watch the scene here (starts at minute 1:10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjYBVSvBvcM). While others drive forward, we may very well drive backward. We have to look at e-commerce problems in novel ways. We’ll ‘drive’ in new directions that help us win the game.
Sometimes, today’s last place is tomorrow’s first place—it’s just that no one else knows that yet. We are often the ones to see new trends and 'roads.'
To all our members--and my team, I'm cheering you on: Let’s keep up the great driving!