Introduction

Digital Fountain offered a ground breaking, patented technology that maximized throughput on digital networks even over lossy networks. It enabled huge databases to follow businesses around the sun over radically smaller pipes; and it was a breakthrough for wireless data transmission, eventually getting bought by Qualcomm.

I joined the team just after the second round of funding, at which time there were about 15 employees. Over the three years I was with them, we grew to a team of 85.

I was hired into the marketing department to head up their digital marketing efforts. In this capacity I helped us reach our customers and explain our value props. But at a startup it never quite ends at your job description. Here’s what I really did.

Samples can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060617044544/http://digitalfountain.com:80/index.cfm

Marketing automation

• Gathered requirements, designed and then built a self-publishing platform (CMS) to enable our marketing efforts, then extended similar capabilities to sales, partner managers, customer support, and engineering teams.
• Built tools that enforced business rules and workflows based on content type: web page, landing page, datasheet, white paper, support FAQ.)
• Hand coded it using Cold Fusion, MySQL and a few other packages.
• Managed customer subscriptions through CRM integration
  • Rules-based lead scoring
  • Integrated website with sales CRM lead nurturing (Goldmine and later Salesforce.com)

Sales enablement

• Web-enabled our sales team through web-based CRM
  • Troubleshoot synchronization issues with sales reps
• Integrated eCRM (GoldMine and later Salesforce.com) so web leads would automatically show up assigned to the right sales rep, and
• Made sales data available through secure web connection (intra/extranet) sales org access contact database easily both in the home office and while travelling.
• Integrated with Salesforce.com using API for advanced view, letting sales see actual web-based activity of any lead
• Implemented lead scoring algorithms -- helped sales define, then programmed them for automated reports
• KPIs and reports including data visualizations

Search engine marketing (SEM)

• Optimized pages for search engine placement based on keywords (SEO)
  • How we did it (“The Matrix”). We needed to identify the best combinations of search terms (keywords), price and conversion rates (CTRs).
    • Output was a keyword report that later was used to drive messaging strategy.
    • Selected search terms (keywords) based on
      • price for PPC and availability for SEO
      • industry,
      • enterprise type/size
      • channel/partner,
      • demographics, and
      • point in sales cycle.
• Managed pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and ad networks like Google AdWords.
• Monitored and reported on results
• Built custom tools including web-based ROI calculator and remote presentation tools.

CX/Product

• Customer support tools -- designed and built web-based tools to support our customers, both developers and end users.
  • Support portal-Enabled support techs to receive support tickets, post FAQs and answer community questions.
  • Documentation: worked with tech writers to create online publishing system to easily push web updates directly from their their authoring system
  • Publish release announcements and notes to the website and email blast.
• Interactive experiences - Designed and built web-based presale tools including ROI calculator, remote slide show presenter, and throughput calculator
• Build web-based self-service demo with streaming video
• Contributed design and user experience expertise to dev team to convert Windows app to web-based UI.

Project management

• Managed several cross-departmental workgroups
  
• Managed relationship with vendors for software development, web and social marketing, graphic and web design, writing and editing, and photo production.
  
• Worked closely with the IT team to manage all technical aspects of:
  
  • Extranet for partners vendors investors media relations
    
  • Intranet for sales, dev, support
    
  • Web hosting - architect, build and maintain our hosting facilities, including web hosting and video streaming, both on-premise and remote.