Joe Bell is the CEO of Cultivate, a social media management platform that helps companies plan, organize, and execute social campaigns that reach more customers. Cultivate was featured in South by Southwest’s 2017 Startup Spotlight and won North Carolina Technology Association’s Top Tech Startup to Watch for 2017. In this episode, Joe shares his experience evolving his marketing company into a software company. He talks about bringing on co-founders and raising money from investors. He also gives his advice on how to land those first customers.
In this episode we explore:
- What the Cultivate product does [2:02]
- The origin of the Cultivate platform from a consulting agency [05:23]
- How Cultivate is evolving as a platform focused on musicians into other verticals like the automotive industry
- What makes for good social media marketing [12:42]
- How Cultivate is structured as a company and who are the co-founders [15:30]
- The meme that was seen by 1 out of every 10 Facebook users [16:19]
- How co-founders divided equity [22:46]
- Conversion rates [25:23]
- How Cultivate makes decisions on new features [26:20]
- What it was like to raise equity funding [31:18]
- How a proposed dress-code policy lead to Joe Bell starting his first company. [49:19]
- Cultivate’s technology stack and development [54:15]
- How Cultivate handles customer support [55:28]
- Funniest and hardest part of the job [1:00:37]
- How Cultivate ended up saving thousands of dollars by testing a feature before allocating development resources [1:01:33]