They say originality is concealing your source, so I have to admit, this wasn't my idea. I stole it from Hill Holiday who recently tweeted a link to their blog article called November Roundup. It's basically a one-pager on everything that went down at the agency during November. Cool idea. I want to do the same moving forward.
This month was an exceptionally busy one for us here at SendLabs. Don't expect this much every month. :)
New Platform
In the next few days, SL users will be logging into http://marketer.sendlabs.com or a custom domain if you are an agency partner instead of the old http://sl7.sendlabs.com. We're seamlessly putting all of our customers on a revised architecture that will allow for more scalability and more rapid development of features moving forward. It's been a long time coming and was no easy task, but we're just about there.
Just trust me when I say humbly that I hope we don't do this again. It was a lot of work and the entire team contributed to this upgrade. While seamless to you, you will notice faster response times in your account and again, faster development of new features in the coming months. Specifically thanks go out to John, Tony, Mike and Josh for the assistance here.
New API
With the upgraded platform came an upgrade and industrial strength API revision. A big shout out to John, one of our lead developers, for getting passionate about the API. He was so into it, he started a naming convention after the movie The Matrix (John, that's weird). Along with the new API comes beautiful documentation and samples - also put together by John.
One of the things that makes him so special and unique is as a developer is that he LOVES great layout and design. When he was working on the documentation, he spent the extra time ensuring it was great to look at for developers. You can check out the new API here and if you need assistance, have questions or suggestions, you can always give us a shout out.
Advanced Triggers
This new feature piggybacks off of the revised Salesforce.com integration. Essentially, it is a GUI inside of SendLabs that lets developers interact in a bi-directional fashion with SendLabs and other systems, leveraging the new API. Frankly, I haven't a clue what it does, but our development team needed it for some custom integrations and swear that developers will love it. (OK guys, let's see how well I talk to the developers about SOAP.) Special thanks to John, Erik, Mike and Tony for their hard work on this. John promises me a blog post on this soon.
New Partner Programs
From my perspective, this one is still going to require some tweaking in terms of how it's packaged and positioned and supported operationally, but we're pretty close. Essentially, we have three types of partners we work with and in doing so, we create a really cool win-win setup in the process. Who's this geared for? Referral partners, agency partners and ESP partners. This past month alone, we've seen an increase in all three and are going to invest in the partner program more heavily in 2010.
Our aim is to help partners augment their offerings and make money, even building a network of "preferred" SendLabs partners (coming soon), sending new opportunities for consulting/agency work to those who work closely with us. Thank you to Josh for helping me talk this through and providing guidance.
New Customers
This months, we secured a bunch of new relationships with some really great new customers and new agencies and have a stocked funnel of potential new customers for the traditionally slow business month of December. It's great to be a company that is respected for knowing their stuff. Our confidence is provided by our team and our passion for a great product/service. Speaking of that, I've got some followup to do.
New Pricing & Editions
This isn't completely baked yet, but we're working on revising our pricing approach, along with the insertion of editions. Though I am leery of adding too much complexity, I think this will help us and our potential new customers identify themselves much quicker and will lead to more sales and better choices by our customers. We appeal to the small marketer starting out, as well as the Enterprise level, and creating distinct editions will help package our solution a little better as opposed to a one-size-fits-all.
Micro Features
Over the coming months, we will be releasing a number of what we call "micro-features" - simple improvements and additions that should make you feel warm and fuzzy. Look for interface tweaks and optimizations, as well as some light revamps of user experiences throughout the application. This is the fun stuff and we aim to make the experience of working inside of SendLabs a joy. We like to think of our technology as a beautiful car - not only with the horsepower to drive, but the smooth ride and comfortable feel sitting int the drivers seat. And please, share with us your thoughts on what we can do to make things better.
New Features
Stay tuned as we release revised dynamic content, upgraded social media snippets and a bunch of other features in the coming months. We also are working steadily on our new video library of tutorials. Stay tuned.
New Blog
We're putting the final touches on our new blog, powered by the very cool Posterous. It's dead simple to use and we're pumped to support guys we like. We maintained our own blog and it's source code for some time now, but we've got better things to do. :)
Wow, what a month! Of course, we started on many of these items before November so we had a god jump start. But with such change comes the responsibility for me to secure more customers this month. If you're thinking about joining our customer base, give me a shout! We'd love to show you what we're all about and how our email marketing software, combined with our email brains. can help power the most simple or sophisticated campaigns.
And of course, don't forget to join our Enews list, follow us on the ever cool Twitter and be our Facebook friend.