We don’t hide the gratitude we have for TechStars. Katie, Reed, and David took a huge chance on Promoboxx, and we’re forever indebted. In fact, if they ever asked me to join a Lord of Rings style war for Accelerator Earth, I’d be like that crazy old dude leading the battle of Helm’s Deep. And while they haven’t asked, nor will they ever, I think we’d kick Y Combinators butt.
Clearly we’re fans, and we’ll do whatever we can to support TechStars. So, you might think we’d blindly partner with any TechStars company, but that’s not always the case. When it comes to Promoboxx, we’re the most overprotective-organic-Whole-Foods-shopping new mothers. We want only the best for our baby. With that said, I’m happy to report that the companies we do partner with are the best. They rock, and many of them just so happen to be TechStars companies.
Send Grid – Probably the most well-established of the TechStars services players. They power every one of our dealer engagement emails, and have since our first breath. So, when we send an email to Chevy’s 3,000 dealers, it’s SendGrid all the way. And the service doesn’t blink. We’ve saved countless hours of cost and hassle with these guys, and for that, we thank them.
HelpScout – My buddies from the Boston 2011 class. We sat right across from them for the three months of the program, so you’d think this would be an easy one. It wasn’t. We kept using Zen Desk until Nick, Denny, and Jared proved that not only was HelpScout the best, but that it was the easiest and most intuitive customer service management platform out there. These guys crush customer service, and it shows, just demo their product to see for yourself.
Contently – Despite the amazingly insightful prose you see before you, we sometimes struggle to create professional-level content. Ideas and concepts are easy to generate, but as difficult as it may be to believe, professional writters we are not. I discovered Contently completely outside of TechStars, and only learned that they were part of Tisch’s NYC class later on in the process. Contently basically connect us with a supply of wonderfully talented writers, and package it up with some pretty slick software.
Precog – We’re just rolling this out. But apparently, they tap into three psychic people floating in pool of fluid to predict future crime… Sorry, wrong precogs. In reality, it’s a way to power all of the data we have on our brand-to-retailer campaigns, combined with some serious sounding metal like “machine learning.” Its been nerdvana for our dev team and we’re just tapping into its potential. Stay tuned.
Full Contact – This one is for our sales data-minded folks, which Promoboxx is heavy with. It’s like the CIA of sales leads. They take emails and complete it with data from across the web, deepening our customer understanding. Like Precog, we’re also rolling this out into our product to give our brands a better understanding of their retail contacts.
We try to use best of breed services. In addition to our TechStars loyalties, we also love these non-TechStars players: YesWare for email tracking, Pipedrive for sales CRM, Right Scale for EC2 opps, and YouEarnedIt for employee rewards management.
Who am I missing? Any other good pieces to puzzle out there? Lastly, this is for my friends at Y Combinator:
Thanks,
Ben // ben at promoboxx (dot) com
