The Next Big Step Into The…

“It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” – Napolean Hill

It was an amazing feeling to watch our first white-label partner, MyProEmail.com, go live last month. After so much effort, it was a relief to see both the public site and the email marketing platform functioning as one and available for customers.

Then last week, we took AerodynamicEmail.com live. Next week, we will begin to accept partners into our new Partner Program. This is where things start to get really exciting.

A Recap & A Little History

If you are feeling a little lost, please let me back up…

My company, Aerodynamic Email, Inc., has been in stealth mode while we finished developing our new email marketing platform. Our new platform enables content marketers, franchises, along with media and marketing companies to generate revenue by offering a white-labeled email marketing platform and managed email marketing content to their customers.

In 2014, after running Acclaim Marketing Systems, LLC for a dozen years, I wound down the company and launched Aerodynamic Email, Inc.

It was a convergence of experience, business needs, personal philosophy, and technology that drove me to launch this latest venture.

I spent the first part of my career working with “channel-dependent” companies, as the Internet exploded and began to invade more and more of our lives. The concept of selling direct to consumers was not a new idea, but the Internet made it infinitely easier. Hordes of companies have arisen to take advantage of both the ease of reaching customers and the new reality that technology is now part of everyday life.

Over the last few years, various marketing technologies (aka “MarTech”) have become a mature concept, and at the same time the market is beginning to evolve and desire more and more robust solutions. Email grew from a nascent communication technology to a global revenue powerhouse. Companies and technologies exploded to provide the infrastructure needed to promote every type of product, service, and idea one could dream up.

The Biggest Marketing Lie

My respect for the folks at Constant Contact, Email Chimp, GetResponse, and a host of other companies is huge. I don’t want to take anything away from them, or the amazing technologies that they have developed. But… through the years, there has been an implicit and at times explicit message – “Sign Up & You Too Can Be A Marketer.”

I’ve watched so many people, and small companies, sign up for an email marketing service, and FAIL. I’m sorry, but my butcher is not a marketer, neither is my fitness instructor, neither is the lady that owns the awesome local coffee shop. Of course, some of these business owners actually do have the capability to design and send GREAT emails. However, each minute that they devote to creating content is one less minute that they have for their businesses.

On the flip side of this, there are so many people who are great at content. So great, that they make a living doing it. Those local businesses that fail at making good email content, or simply don’t have the time to create the content, often hire these awesome content writers to run their email marketing. And more often than not, the small business owner chokes when they hear what they are going to pay for having consistent, quality content over time.

A Straightforward Solution

“You can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want in life.” – Zig Zigler

My experience and these two challenges combined to help me develop the concept for Aerodynamic Email. I decided to create an email marketing platform that would:

Enable a content producer to leverage and “reuse” the email content that they were already producing
Allow a content producer to “brand” the entire email marketing solution as their own
Provide small businesses with email marketing and access to quality email marketing content at an affordable price

At its core, I have built a channel-dependent company, but with flexibility and capabilities that we could barely dream of only 20 years ago.

For MyProEmail, we were able to launch four monthly newsletters and four weekly newsletters. The platform allows us to create that high-quality content on a recurring basis, and for loan officers and real estate agents to be able to purchase (and add/edit/delete) that content without having to pay for expensive custom content.

My Next Big Step

As we step out of this long development process and into the next phase of the company, I realize it is more exciting AND more frightening than I ever expected. I am faced with many challenges, knowing that I have only scratched the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my professional life, but this is my first SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company. Some of the immediate challenges that I face include:

Should I continue to bootstrap, or spend more time fundraising?
Can I continue to build on, and hold together, the amazing team that I have?
Will be be able to hit the milestones that I have projected?
What is the appropriate split of effort to commit to Aerodynamic Email versus My Pro Email?
How do I keep my personal life in balance, and not become consumed by my company’s needs?

While I continuing to try to figure out whether I have jumped into an abyss with no bottom, I’ll keep blogging. While much of this blog has been about my pursuits as a photographer, hiker, and sci-fi author, I have decided to expand it to include more parts of my life.

I look forward to sharing this journey with you. If you have any insights, questions, or simply want to say something, please do feel free to contact me. You can use the comments below, any of my social media, or my Contact Page.

And of course, if you are interested in making money by offering an email marketing platform and email marketing content, please come visit AerodynamicEmail.com!