Meet the Bitnami Team: Tom McCafferty

Tom enjoying one of his favorite hobbies 

Meet one of the newest members of our team, Tom McCafferty, and learn why he choose to join the Bitnami Team as our VP of Marketing. 

Why I joined Bitnami…

I’ve spent the bulk of my career in product marketing which means I’ve spent a lot of time telling stories to customers, prospects, writers, industry analysts and partners (anyone who would listen) about companies, products and technology trends. And most of the time, if done well, the narrative creates a grand perception of whomever/whatever the story is about. I’ve told stories of small startups disrupting industry giants, I’ve told stories of changing infrastructure dynamics, I’ve written extensively on the future of communications and the impact of virtualization, automation and cloud computing. The dirty secret of marketing is that more often than not, the stories are just that….stories. Ok, they are generally rooted in some truth or some future truth (roadmaps) but are rarely representative of the actual state of the product or company.

In the case of a startup, creating a meaningful story can be especially difficult. Most of the time the foundational elements are not fully covered:

1. Do they have proven product(s)?

2. Is there a market for their products? Have they identified it?

3. Do they have customers? Are they meaningful customers?

4. Are they making money? Is it a sustainable business model?

5. Are they innovating? Is there a future opportunity?

When a friend first introduced me to Bitnami, I was absolutely blown away by the story they have to tell. Not only are they the clear leader in application packaging, they’ve applied that expertise to delivering cloud-ready and cloud-native application catalogs for every leading cloud provider (check out the list) in the world driving over 1 million new deployments per month. And they’ve built a profitable and rapidly growing business doing that. They’ve also had the foresight to leverage their internal know-how in building and publishing applications to productize application packaging tools for enterprise developers and system integrators to help businesses on their cloud migration journey. If that weren’t enough, they’re also driving innovations in the container ecosystem with open source kubernetes projects centered on packaging and discovering applications as well. Those are just the things that I can share today, there is so much more to come.

As I complete my second week as VP of Marketing at Bitnami I’m collecting data on products and buyers (there are many), evaluating the landscape of competitors (there are few) and defining ways to hone the story here to continue the momentum and accelerate the success that this team has had to date. I’m used to being in a position where there are gaps in the answers to those 5 questions above, not great answers to all of them. I’m hesitant to say that this makes my job an easy one, but I can confidently say that I am extremely excited about the opportunity to help Bitnami tell their story to the world.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Tom? Apply for one of our open positions!

The hunt for modern marketing automation

Is “marketing automation” a nicer term than “email marketing?” I’m not sure. But one thing I am sure of is that every modern startup is doing it, and if you’re not, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity to help customers learn more about your products and services.
       
The problem for startups like our own is that most marketing automation systems — Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc., — are expensive, feel dated, and have complicated UIs. Cost is relative, but most enterprise startups have only a few hundred to a few thousand users for for them, perhaps, the $2000+ per month on marketing automation is justifiable. But at Bitnami, where our user base is many times that size, the costs of traditional marketing automation vendors go up astronomically. The established marketing automation vendors have been in business for a while, some for as long as twelve years, and their platforms are showing it. Many are over-featured and built on a previous generation of technology. With all those features comes unnecessary complication — many screens, many fields, many rules and hidden costs.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about shopping for marketing automation system is the old-school way of evaluating the choices. In short, you can’t really evaluate them. These vendors follow a traditional enterprise software model that sells you on promises — “ease of use,” “flexibility,” “great support” — that may or may not be true. Even those few that do allow for evals don't really allow you to try everything in real-world production situations.

Fortunately, there are a slew of new startups who are disrupting the market. Two in particular caught our eye: Customer.io and Vero. Spoiler alert: we selected Vero because their UI was a bit better for the marketing side of the house their pricing model better fit our business, but both were really a breath of fresh air. It's not completely fair to compare Customer.io and Vero with other marketing automation systems — and in fact neither company uses the term "marketing automation" on their website — but for our needs Customer.io and Vero had the 80% of the features/functions of a marketing automation system at a quarter of the cost.

Criteria

Some background. Bitnami was founded in 2011 and went through YC in winter 2013. With over a million apps deployed per month and tens of thousands of new users registering every month, we needed a better way to communicate with customers, personalize emails based on triggered events, A/B test our messaging, and measure results. Specifically, our goal is to make our customers successful with the applications they're using. For example, we want to make sure people who deploy WordPress or Magento have the information they need to get up and running, personalize and customize the application, and be productive quickly. We required a system that was flexible and powerful enough to support all the many use cases.

After looking at the traditional vendors, we turned our attention to Vero and Customer.io. We liked many of the things we saw in each platform:

• They’re both startups who understand and appreciate the needs of startups and agile organizations
• They focus primarily on email (which we would argue is 80% or more of the value of a marketing automation tool)
• The products are getting updated and improved weekly, continuously increasing the amount of value we get
• They allow for deep integration and triggering custom events through a modern REST API
• Slick UIs and are built with modern standards 
• Fast, reliable support for cases when we run into issues or want to be sure how the tool works
• Transparent, straightforward pricing — you can try before you buy

The level of customization and personalization is important for us because we offer customers nearly 100 applications and developer stacks to choose from in multiple formats (native installers, VMs, and several cloud options like AWS and Azure). We wanted to be able to trigger and personalize emails based on actions users take — or don’t take. Multiply that by running A/B tests on every campaign and newsletter, and it can become a mess quickly. Lastly, we wanted something that our marketing folks could use. Every marketing automation vendor will say they can do all the stuff mentioned above, but it’s harder than it looks.

The first problem we came across with multiple vendors were the APIs that would allow us to export data to the marketing automation tool. Some lacked an API. In the cases where an API was available, they often were incomplete, only allowing access to part of the functionality, or were based on SOAP and convoluted to use.

Refreshingly, both Vero and Customer.io featured a RESTful API and ready-to-use libraries for many languages, which allowed us to get sending information and events to work from scratch in hours.
Another concern we had is with proper handling of users who change their email addresses. People often sign in using their private addresses to try our offerings, but then want to use this account for business reasons and switch emails. For some of the solutions we have evaluated, the primary identifier was the email address which made this use case very hard to handle properly. For Vero and Customer.io this worked fine and we would never run into any issues.

In some of the traditional automation tools we evaluated, small workarounds were required on our side to make things work, and even then, were less than optimal. We asked the companies if the updates could be made on their side, but their engineering roadmap wouldn't allow for it, and we didn't want to pay for professional services for features we felt should already be included in the product. However, Vero and Customer.io were much more responsive and appreciated the feedback. We have also found their support to be much more responsive than other vendors – in terms of response time as well as how helpful the response was for what we needed.

Although both applications are currently geared around email, with a little elbow grease you can build a best of breed marketing automation solution with their technology partners including Segment.io, Zapier, and KISSmetrics.

The winner

The two products were neck and neck, but ultimately we chose Vero because of the UI and also because the way the emails are prepared in their product suited our needs better. From the CEO on down, they eat their own dog food and use their product in very similar ways to how we use it. That makes a big difference because they see the problems and opportunities first hand. They’ve been incredibly receptive to our feedback. Bugs we reported were fixed in 24-hours or less, new features were sometimes added within days of us suggesting them.

They are a startup, and it often feels like it — pro and con. On the one hand, it’s great working with people who “speak the same language” and understand the pressure and agility a software company needs, but on the other, the product can feel rough at times. We have run into a number of issues and downtime. While those were addressed transparently and fairly quickly in most cases, downtime or long delays in sending emails can have a material effect on our campaigns and is definitely disappointing. We are hopeful that those issues will go away over time as the company becomes more established.

All that said, if you’re in the market for a modern marketing automation email marketing service that works the way you work and that you can afford, we’d wholeheartedly recommend you check out the latest crop of tools.

New Bitnami logo from 99 Designs

It’s been a long time in coming, but we have a brand new, something-we-can-be-proud-of logo. As a small and fast-growing startup, there are scores of well-deserving, high priority projects, but designing a spiffy new company logo wasn’t one of them. Until it was.  

Last month, Amazon RE:Invent 2013 was right around the corner and, given the over 100 MM hours of AWS usage we drove this year, we decided to have a booth at the show. It was now or never to have a spanking new look for the 8000+ attendees who would be there. The old logo had its time in the sun, but we wanted something that was modern and could work anywhere (website, tshirt, dog collar, tattoo, etc.).

We did what any self-respecting startup does: waited until the last minute then signed up for 99 Designs. And it was flawless. We received an overwhelming 338 designs to choose from. It wasn’t an easy choice, but we finally selected a winner from GEEDSIGN. After a few more mods, voila! Let us know what you think of the new design! (In case you forget what the old logo looked like, you can see it here)

After the logo was selected, we produced a tradeshow booth, brochure, and lots and lots of t-shirts all with less than two weeks before the event. A big thanks to our own Fred Kelly for churning out the tradeshow collateral lickety-split. 

The logo is part of a larger focus on marketing, which is apropos because I'm happy to announce that I've just joined Bitnami as their first full-time marketing director. Before Bitnami, I worked at Atlassian where I was their first full-time marketing director hired back in 2005. And now I am absolutely stoked to be part of the coolest cloud company around – and I'm secretly in love with the office location in the heart of everything San Francisco. (Ready for your own change of scene or know someone who is? We're hiring, both in San Francisco and Sevilla.)

Made it this far? Lucky you, because the first 10 people to comment on this form or below in the Comments on which Bitnami apps/stacks they're using get a free shirt. :)