OrangeSoda is full of surprises. First off, it’s not a soda company. Second, it’s a technology company with a name you can spell. And third, it gained customers before its technology was even complete. “We’re not your typical company,” says Jay Bean, co-founder of the online advertising business. “We do things a little differently around here.” And they certainly do. In a little less than a year and a half, OrangeSoda has grown its revenue by an astounding 12,000 percent, gone from four employees to 65, and opened additional offices in Las Vegas and Chicago. Not bad for a guy who — surprise, surprise — drinks Mountain Dew.
The idea of OrangeSoda goes back to the marketplace. We were looking at the needs of smaller, local advertisers. They were starting to migrate online, and there were no tools out there to help them manage their marketing. Google, MSN, Yahoo — it can be time consuming and overwhelming for a small business to manage various campaigns, especially if it’s not their specialty, or if they don’t have big marketing budgets. Our goal is take the task off their plate — to give them the home-field advantage.
We built OrangeSoda differently than your standard technology company. Most companies build the technology and hope it’s what the customers need, but we started signing up clients in early 2007, the same time we were building the product. This enabled us to build our technology around the needs of real advertisers.
We intended to grow fast. The local online advertising market is projected to grow to more than $12 billion in 2008. We wanted to ride to the top of the wave rather than play catch-up. We knew we had to grow fast to accomplish our goals.
OrangeSoda is not your typical tech name. We wanted an advertising name — something that would stick with people and be easy to spell. And, actually, it was one of the many domain names I own in the Jay Bean collection. I purchased it several years ago because it was unique — not because I had any intentions of opening an orange soda bottling company. I do like orange soda, but I drink Mountain Dew all day long.
Our name has led the way to cool marketing and a cool brand. Take trade shows, for example. Rather than be one of 500 companies giving away an iPod, we give away orange-colored Schwinn bikes. They’re awesome. If you want to succeed, you have to stand out.
There’s been a trend with the Internet where companies don’t like to talk to customers. They build as many online tools as they can with the attitude of “please just don’t call us.” Some companies won’t even put phone numbers on their Web site. We’ve decided to take a different approach. Every customer has someone they can talk to at OrangeSoda, whether it’s by phone, e-mail or live chat.
We know who our competition is on an ongoing basis. We are a young company, and so it’s important to do competitive analysis. We test their systems, talk to their customers — we do our homework.
The best advice I’ve ever received is to be realistic. People want you to believe that everything will be glorious, but entrepreneurship definitely has its challenges. One thing I like to do when I’m starting a company is cost structures. Whatever you think you’re going to spend, increase that by 50 percent. Whatever you think your revenue is going to be, cut that by 30 or 40 percent. On paper, people are going to flock to your business. But you have to stay grounded in realism.
If you want to succeed, you have to stand out.