The BigCommerce Blog

We’re Looking for an ROI-Obsessed Director of Marketing

Published on August 30th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Continuing to build out our management team (we’ve recently hired Chris, our product development manager and our new HR/recruiting manager Steve is starting in a few weeks), we’re currently on the look out for an ROI-obsessed director of marketing to take charge of demand generation and retention for BigCommerce.

You can see the complete job posting (and apply) here. We’re offering a $3,000 referral bonus for this role too, so if you know anyone who you think might be interested, make sure you send them our way! This role is based out of our Austin, TX office.


Director of Marketing for Fast Growing SaaS E-Commerce Platform in Austin, TX

This position is based in: Austin, TX

The area: Marketing

BigCommerce (www.bigcommerce.com) is the fastest growing SaaS e-commerce platform in the world. Launched in September 2009, it is now growing faster than Yahoo’s Small Business platform, Amazon’s Webstores and eBay’s ProStores – and we’re looking for a director of marketing to rapidly accelerate and scale this growth moving forward.

This is a unique opportunity to join a seasoned management team based in our Austin, TX and Sydney, Australia offices. We’re looking for a candidate with a successful marketing track record, outstanding people skills, and technical expertise, who is a creative and innovative thinker.

You’ll work with a wide range of internal departments and external organizations, with direct links to the sales team. You’ll also have several direct reports, budget authority and will be part of the leadership team driving the company towards triple-digit growth for the coming year.

You’ll have responsibility for creating and executing our marketing plan, which will include strategies around search engine optimization (SEO), public relations, event marketing, search marketing, social media marketing, direct mail and advertising.

You’re obsessed with return on investment (ROI) and believe that any and all marketing must be tracked and provide a positive return for it to be considered worthy.

To excel in this role you’ll have:

  • Previous experience creating and implementing a marketing strategy for a similarly-sized software/technology company where your efforts doubled or tripled their revenues in 1-2 years
  • The ability to work with a limited budget while making sure every marketing activity returns a positive ROI
  • Experience running and optimizing concurrent, multi-channel marketing campaigns
  • A proven ability to grow and lead a team full of smart, creative, ROI-obsessed marketers
  • Experience collaborating with sales to reduce prospect-to-customer times
  • The ability to quickly understand our existing marketing campaigns, analyze their effectiveness and decide on a course of action for each – kill/maintain/scale up
  • The foresight to recognize untapped potential marketing channels which can drive high volumes of quality leads for low CPA
  • The ability to monitor and report on budget versus actuals for multiple channels and campaigns simultaneously
  • Hands on experience defining and implementing strategy around online campaigns including SEO, SEM, social media and email marketing
  • Hands on experience defining and implementing strategy around offline campaigns including trade shows, TV, radio and direct mail
  • Proven experience facilitating, closing and growing win-win partnerships
  • The confidence and communication skills to be the face of the brand at trade shows, conferences (key notes), happy hours, partner meet ups, etc
  • An undeniable passion for marketing and the impact it can have on the growth of an organization when implemented and tracked effectively

Perks of the Job:

  • Be part of something BIG: we grew 300% last year
  • Create and nurture your own marketing department from the ground up
  • Define the market position of what will become the standard in e-commerce (“think e-commerce, think BigCommerce”)
  • Work with other smart, energetic people who know how to get things done
  • Work with a rock-solid management team who are passionate about e-commerce
  • Unlimited access to our kitchens, stocked full of sodas, candy and snacks
  • Regular company outings to celebrate both professional and personal accomplishments
  • A fun culture where everyone gets along and is working towards the same goal
  • Get in now and be part of our next huge growth phrase going into 2011

Qualifications:

  • Over 5 years of marketing experience, including 3+ years of building and leading strong teams, bringing new offerings to market, and driving revenue & customer growth.
  • Demonstrated track record of discovering key customer insights into their barrier beliefs/behaviors, creating innovative plans to overcome those barriers to drive purchase/usage and relentless drive for rapidly iterating to continually improve results.
  • Accountability for results: a clear track record of taking ownership for engaging employees, delighting customers and driving dramatic growth through successful marketing strategies and execution, preferably for a company selling SaaS/technology-related solutions to small businesses.
  • Web and social marketing: successful experience and expertise in use of the web to drive marketing and sales including SEO, SEM (PPC), email marketing, webinars, etc.
  • Customer-focused: tenacious about peeling the layers back to understand customer behaviors and passionate about delighting customers at every touch point they have with the company.
  • Strategic thinker: the ideal candidate will combine classic strategic marketing skills with experience in multi-channel marketing/distribution of practical products and services.
  • Partnering: track record of success working and influencing in a fast-paced organization, being persuasive and effective to meet goals even where no direct reporting relationship exists
  • Talent stewardship: able to attract, grow and retain talented employees and lead the team to become a high performing, highly engaged organization.
  • Leader teacher: strong marketing expertise and the proven ability to evangelize it, along with the ability to conceptualize and teach marketing and leadership principles and practices throughout the company.
  • Education: minimum bachelor’s degree with advanced degree preferred (e.g. MBA, MA)

If you’ve ever wanted to take complete control of an organization’s marketing and create your ideal strategy and team from the ground up then this role is for you.

Competitive salary plus bonus provided. Salary commensurate with experience.

___

We’re The 44th Fastest Growing Software Company in the US!

Published on August 25th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

According to Inc magazine, we’re the 44th fastest growing software company in the US and the 633rd fastest growing company in the US, period, for 2010. We’ve grown 480% in the last 3 years. Yikes!

To me this really shows what an amazing, incredible, awesome team we have. Without our people we don’t exist, and my hat goes off to our guys and gals who work tirelessly towards our vision of being the number one e-commerce platform in the world. For the last 10 or so years I’d always pick up the yearly Inc 500/5000 issue of the magazine and it’ll be a great feeling to see our name on the list this year.

If you think you’ve got what it takes and want some of the Inc. 5000 glory, why not join our team?

We’ll continue to work hard and who knows, next year we might even crack the top 10!

Chris Iona Joins Us As Product Development Manager

Published on August 22nd, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

The slide from our quarterly company update which introduced Chris to the team

Today is a big day for us as a company. We’ve just brought on the fifth member of our management team, who will be taking charge of our of product development strategy. His name is Chris Iona and he comes from Internode, one of the biggest (and in my opinion, best – I use them) ISPs in Australia. Chris started with Internode when they were just 80 people and grew through various frontline and leadership roles with the company until they reached an impressive 500 staff in just a few short years.

Chris has made the move from Adelaide to Sydney to join our team and one of his main missions will be to get us from being 70% agile (SCRUM) to 100% in the way our team approaches software development. This means better team communication, tighter control over sprints and deadlines, (even) more feedback to clients and a whole bunch of other stuff that probably makes no sense if you’re not a software developer :)

As Chris ramps up over the next few weeks I will be stepping away from the technical side of product management, focusing more on our overall company and product strategies as well as continuing to build out our world-class management team with Eddie. I’ve always been a strong believer in the saying “hire people who are smarter than you to run your company” and that’s what we’ll continue to do moving forward.

Chris will be making a strong contribution to our community as soon as he’s ready, so look out for him.

Welcome aboard Chris!

Our Support By The Numbers: Jan-July 2010

Published on August 21st, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

When it comes to improving the different departments in our company, we live by this quote:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”

This is especially true for customer-facing departments such as sales and support. I’ve always seen support as a function of marketing, meaning that if we can really knock your socks of with fast, accurate support, that will essentially mean (hopefully) you’ll become an advocate for BigCommerce, telling your friends and colleagues not only that we’ve got a good product but also that we’ve got great support.

So instead of putting $1 into a radio advertising campaign, for example, we would (and do) get a better return by investing it in improving our support.

Anyway, what I want to do in this blog post is share exactly how we’ve been doing on the support side of things over the last 6 months. We’ve grown a lot in that time, both in terms of clients (we’ve added over 5,000 new paying clients in 2010), staff (we’re looking at new offices in Austin to keep up with growth in headcount moving into 2011 – no outsourcing here) and features (BigCommerce 6 is doing great guns).

Overall Rating Of Our Support Department By Our Clients

Based on responses to our support survey (shown and explained below), I’d estimate that the average overall rating of our support department by our clients would be a B-. I share my thoughts on this score below and what we’re planning to improve to get this to an A+.

How We Measure Our Support Effectiveness

Getting back to the quote above about not being able to manage what you can’t measure, let me quickly share with you how we actually measure our support effectiveness – and it’s nothing fancy, believe me. But it works.

When you send in a support ticket or call in, you’ll automatically receive a follow up email when your ticket is closed (either by one of our support ninjas or automatically by our system after 30 days if it’s placed on hold). We run our support department using Kayako but being a PHP shop we’ve hacked and modded it quite a bit to get it to work how we need it to. Oh, we also use SugarCRM for accounts, and they’re linked in the background by our development warriors.

The automatic follow up email links you to a simple survey we’ve setup using Survey Gizmo. It asks you a few multi-choice questions about your experience on that particular support ticket and gives you the option to leave your email for follow up. Nothing that’s rocket science here.

Every quarter we export and collate the feedback and use it to measure the performance of our support department. Internally we of course have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for management and each of our support ninjas, and the survey feedback is also a great way for us to make sure we’re actually setting the right KPIs for our team and that they’re making a difference.

How We’ve Done In The First Half Of 2010

Let’s jump right into the numbers. The question is shown in the dropdown of each screenshot and the answers are broken down as both a chart and percentages. Note that questions are asked about the response of the support ninja. For example if you see “communication skills” in the dropdown, the question in the survey was “How would you rate the communication skills of the person who assisted you with your issue?”.

Also note that responses in the right hand column are sorted from most selected to least selected.

My Interpretation Of The Survey Results

For all but one question, around 90% of responses were average, good or excellent, with every question we asked having the most popular response as excellent. The one set of responses that jumps out at us is the question around time to resolve issues:

The feedback here is crystal clear: one in five clients surveyed said we’re doing a poor job of resolving issues in a timely manner. Although 71% of clients rated our time to resolve their issue as average, good or excellent, our goal as a company is to get 100% of clients answering this question with “Excellent”.

The good news is that we’re well on our way to doing just that. Here’s how:

  • About 2 months ago we started opening our office for support on Saturdays from 9am to 2pm
  • Shortly we will add Sundays into the mix as well
  • We’ll then continue to work towards our goal of 24/7 support

Implementing a 24/7 support system isn’t easy, but it’s the next logical step in our march towards a 100% satisfaction rate for our support department and I believe it’s an absolute necessity for a software company like us.

We’re currently ramping our roster of support ninjas (if you’re in Austin and love the idea of being called a ninja, see our careers page) and systems in preparation, and I’m confident we’ll get there sooner rather than later. We’re a company on a mission, and that mission is to wow the hell out of you with not just our software but also with our pre and post-sales communication via phone and email.

Finally, transparency is king to us. Sure the results from our support survey weren’t perfect, but I believe you have a right to see them anyway and I believe it’s out duty to honestly inform you of how we’re doing as a company and the steps we’re taking to improve, so that’s why I’ve spent the last two or so hours putting together this blog post.

“To infinity and beyond!” – Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

Existing Clients: The BigCommerce 2010 Internet Retailer Survey Is Here!

Published on August 12th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

It’s time for our 2010 BigCommerce Internet retailer survey! Last year we had a huge response and we think this year’s will be even better.

This survey is one of the bigger data points we use as a software company to try and figure out where we should take BigCommerce over the next 12 months, so if you want your opinion and goals to be factored into our development decisions then the survey is a great way to be heard.

If you’re an existing client, make sure you check your inbox for the link to the survey!

Amazon Testing New Inline “View Cart” Page

Published on August 8th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

As I was buying a book on Amazon.com as a present for one of our support ninjas, I noticed that when I clicked the “Add to Cart” button I was presented with an inline confirmation page instead of being taken to Amazon’s usual cart page. You can see the inline page in the screenshot I took above (click on it for a larger version).

In my opinion they may see a short term decline in sales because it breaks the typical buying process, but then again Amazon is Amazon – they run everything by the numbers so obviously they think this will increase their conversion rate.

Also, my guess is that 90%+ of people on Amazon buy just one item per order, so this is their attempt to get you through their virtual checkout as quickly as they can.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen this before? Like it? Hate it? Want it added to your store?

Let me know in the comments below.

[Photos] Celebrating BigCommerce 6 With Steak, A Hummer and BigCommerce-Branded Beer!

Published on July 30th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Yesterday our engineers and network operations team (as well as myself and co-CEO Eddie) took the day off in our Sydney office to celebrate the huge release of BigCommerce 6, which we’d been working on together since February. In true Aussie style, we dined on steak, cruised around in a stretch Hummer and made our own beer at The Beer Factory in Seven Hills.

All 62 photos are up on our Facebook page, but here are a few I liked the most. Let’s start with…

Activity #1: Cooking and Eating Our Own Steak

From left to right: Chris, Rod, Eddie, Mitch, Brendan, Gaston, Dave

Cooking our steaks up on the BBQ at Phillip’s Foote in The Rocks

Activity #2: Stretch Hummer Out to Seven Hills

Our transportation from The Rocks to Seven Hills – A stretch hummer

Hummerific – from left to right: Chris, Gaston, Gwilym, Eddie, Rodney, Ray, Rayn, Mitch, Brendan, Dave

On our way – from left to right: Rayn, Rod, Gaston, Gwilym, Ray, Brendan, Dave, Chris

Activity #3: Making Our Own Beer

The Beer Factory at Seven Hills – heaven for most Aussies

The HUGE selection of beers you can brew yourself

A few grains of barley – one of beer’s key ingredients

Cleaning bottles before filling

Bottling our custom BigCommerce brews: a German-style and a bitter English style

BigCommerce – the easiest way to drink online?

Eddie and I getting the job done

Ten cases of our custom brew – which we stashed in the hummer for the trip home

3 hours later and we’re on our way home…

You can view all 62 photos from the day on our Facebook page. On a side note, if you like steak, beer, hummers and e-commerce software then why not come and join our team here in Sydney or Austin?

[Video] Our New Sydney Office – Renovated!

Published on July 28th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Note: On July 7th I posted a “before” video of our new Sydney office which we’re currently renovating so you might want to check that out before watching the video above.

As you may know, we have an office in Austin, TX and one in Sydney, Australia where our engineering team and co-founders reside.

As our Sydney team continues to grow, we’ve been on the lookout for a new office. We’ve now found that office and over the last few weeks have been renovating it (or “funkifying” it, as we like to say) with beautiful wooden floors, down lights, a new paint job and a new fit out.

The video above is the “almost after” state of our new Sydney office – we still have to build a few glass walls for offices and a meeting room, and of course get our furniture in!

We’re aiming to move in at the end of August 2010.

Final Round of Beta Feedback Before BigCommerce 6 is Rolled Out to New Stores

Published on July 27th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

A sample store running on the iPhone using BigCommerce 6

A sample store running on the iPhone using BigCommerce 6

We’re counting down the hours until BigCommerce 6 (along with our new website!) starts deploying on all new stores. Until then, here’s some feedback from our customers who helped with the final round of beta testing (a BIG thank you to all of you for your help!):

“This is absoulty Brilliant, the interface has been tweaked, the ability to run feeds to the shopping networks is a great add to a platform that is already very good. We belive this Ecommerce platform is the best money can buy in the UK” – Luke Hill, www.britanniainks.co.uk

“Just finished beta testing BigCommerce 6. The two most important components for us are the integration with ShipWorks for processing all of our FedEx shipments, and Mailchimp for our email marketing. Setting up both components couldn’t have been easier. MailChimp is a great partner and there are a ton of data that BigCommerce can pass through to MailChimp which make it an invaluable tool. The Shipworks integration took less than 10 minutes, but will save us hours of shipping processing time over the course of a year. Congrats to BigCommerce for choosing great partners to work with, and for making the whole process so easy. It’s becoming more and more obvious why BigCommerce is truly the leader in ecommerce hosted shopping carts. Great job lads.” – Iain Bluett, www.ticketprinting.biz

“I’m testing every new feature of BigCommerce 6 and so far I am loving it! BigCommerce seriously is at the top of the game and ahead of every single e-commerce platform I’ve known. The multi-channel retailing is easy and fast to implement. Ebay, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, NextTag…all within a few minutes. This will not only raise my sales greatly but also provides more valuable organic links to boost my ranking on search engines, which in turn increases my sales too! I was thrilled to see most of the customers ideas and problems are addressed in this release. It proves that BigCommerce listens and does care about the user community. You can’t find this in any other e-commerce platform! Thank you BigCommerce, you guys rock and I believe you can deliver more great things in the future.” – Arielle Phan, www.e-panda.com

“This platform just gets better and better… I love the new features in Version 6… Returns Management System, Email Marketing with Mailchimp Integration, Selling on eBay, Facebook, Shopping Comparison Site & Google Product Feed Uploads, Shipping Manager, a multitude of payment gateways, Coupons, Gift Certificates, Wish Lists, Discount Rules, Simple WYSIWYG system with the option of modifying the code, and so much more… I think I’m running out of room to write them all down!… Seriously… what more can someone ask for? I’ve tried plenty of other carts, from the hosted ones, to the ones you host your self, and I can tell you, by far this has to be the best eCommerce Platform I’ve used… Finally I think I can see my business expanding… All thanks to BigCommerce! I’m already looking forward to Version 6.5 / 7… Can’t wait to see what they’ll think of next!” – Ray Frangie, www.rmftechnologies.com.au

“Mitch and company, WOW, WOW, WOW!!! So I’ve been playing around with the BC6 Beta and I am absolutely blown away with the product you have put together here! BC6 is the most exciting thing that has happened around our office in years. Everyone is so jazzed about the eBay integration and the multi-channel sales tools. I added it up and so far, BC6 will get rid of four different software packages, two backend website services and a clunky order processing operation. Bravo guys, BRAV-FREAKING-O!!!!! It’s like a bunch of kids on Christmas eve around this place!…… The anticipation is killing us!!!!” – Clint Wilder, www.buyairbrushes.com

“Not even 5 minutes into testing I wanted to say how GREAT the new tax code set up is, the development of this and the detail is a 500% improvement and is exactly what our store needs, as well as the options on what tax info to include in orders thank you! Been playing around with the mailchimp integration which allows for very targeted marketing if you set it up right. Not planning to sell on Ebay with our Softbots website, but will with another one of our stores, so will look forward to using the option towards the end of the year. Instructions so far, look very easy to follow to set this up.” – Sabina Borthwick, www.softbots.co.uk

BigCommerce 6 will be made available to existing customers shortly after it’s made available on new stores. We will of course email you with details when it’s ready to go.

Gorilla Sacks Wins Our E-Commerce Makeover Contest!

Published on July 15th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Over the last two months we’ve been running a huge e-commerce makeover contest in which the first place winner will receive over $22,000 in prizes, including migration of their existing ecommerce store to BigCommerce, a professional store design, Google AdWords coaching, marketing advice, free email marketing services from our friends at Mailchimp and a whole lot more.

Well, the votes are in and our judges have made a decision from the 5 finalists. The first place winner of our $35,000 e-commerce makeover contest is Lisa Zawacki from GorillaSacks.com!

So why did our judges choose Lisa? Well, let me quote from our press release:

“Founded by Lisa Zawacki, grand prize winner Gorilla Sacks converts retired billboards into one-of-a-kind messenger, market, tote and sling bags.  The company also donates 10% of its profits to Gorilla Haven, whose mission is to help make every captive gorilla’s life as enriched and natural as possible.  Zawacki entered the contest due to her frustration with the limited functionality of her existing OS Commerce website; she was also eager to build a more professional looking site that would support her efforts to partner with large corporations on their recycling efforts.  In her video entry, Zawacki detailed her struggle with the company’s current ecommerce platform and her desire to take Gorilla Sacks to the next level in terms of online presence and growth.”

Long story short: Lisa was extremely popular with voters and judges, her products are awesome and she helps gorillas with proceeds from her business. To us, she was the ideal enterpreneur and a wonderful person also. Plus her entry video was hilarious:

So what has Lisa won? Over $22,000 in prizes which are shown below:

  • BigCommerce diamond store ($7,198 value – 2 year subscription)
  • Professionally crafted store design ($5,000 value)
  • Migration of existing store to BigCommerce ($2,000 value)
  • MailChimp 25,000 subscriber plan ($3,600 value – 2 year subscription)
  • ROI Revolution Google AdWords audit ($975 value)
  • Sales Rescue Team 4 hour consult ($500 value)
  • FanAppz Pro license ($600 value – 1 year subscription)
  • Various PR opportunities (approx $2,000 value)
  • Case study posted on BigCommerce.com (approx $1,000 value)

In addition to announcing the grand prize winner, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to our four runner-ups who will each receive a BigCommerce gold store and further PR opportunities valued at a total of over $4,000 each!

The four runners-up are:

We really loved everyone’s videos and were overwhelmed with your positive comments about BigCommerce and how it has had (or would have) a huge impact on growing your business. We’re all about small business and it made us really happy to hear your stories.

As our team of e-commerce experts get to work on Lisa’s BigCommerce store we’ll keep you updated with their progress, including screenshots of design mockups, marketing advice shared with Lisa and of course how her sales (hopefully!) improve when her new BigCommerce-powered store goes live!

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