We ended up spending nine nights at Children's Hospital in

Boston, with teams of different people coming in, trying to figure out, how

to deal with this thing and how to solve it and, that made me step back

and say, all right, Dennis, the heck you doing here, working these 20 hour

days, you got a young family, life is precious and can be short and so

that has impacted my life ever since.

but also at that particular point in time, I got this failed startup.

Hello everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of seek go create.

This is where we challenge traditional notions of success and explore

inspiring stories of transformation.

And we dig down in places like leadership, business, and ministry, definitely

going to be doing a good dive into.

business today, but probably tying all that together.

I'm your host, Tim Winders.

I'm an executive coach and I love getting to do what I do, which is ask questions

and just talk to really cool people.

We've got a great guest today.

Our guest is Dennis Kelly.

He is the CEO of Postalytics, which is a dynamic software company

in a very interesting industry, specializing in direct mail automation.

I'm excited to talk about that.

He's got over 30 years of experience in starting and growing Technology

ventures, it's got a wealth of knowledge to share, real quick.

Postalytics empowers marketers to do more with less time offering streamlined

production, seamless integration in the marketing tech stack and real time

analytics for direct mail campaigns, which I like to say, I consider

direct mail an old school business.

So it looks like they're marrying some old school stuff with

some new tech, which I love it.

Dennis, welcome to Seek Go Create.

Thank you, Tim.

It's a pleasure to be here today.

Excited to speak with the Seek Go Create audience.

Yeah, I'm glad we're, chatting now and going to have fun, but

let's do this before we get started.

We've just bumped into each other and I say, Dennis, what do you do?

What do you tell people when they ask you what you do?

that's an interesting question.

And I think that, when you've lived a long life, like I have,

you wear a lot of different hats.

And, so I would currently say what I do is, I'm I try to be, the best

husband and father and friend I can be.

and at the same time try to get, startup companies off the ground in flourishing.

And sometimes those, goals are, at odds with each other and there's, some, time

constraint challenges in our lives.

I think, by eliminating everything else, I'm not a good golfer.

I used to fish.

I can't fish anymore.

I got to focus on these things.

So that's what I really try to focus on.

I've always said, I think you and I may be in a

similar age bracket, I believe.

And, I've been telling people recently that part of life is just coming to

the realization of the things you're either not good at or don't want

to do or don't want to do again.

And I'm the same way with golf that we may lose a good portion

of the audience right here.

I lived in golf course community for a while, thought, you know, and I'm

semi retired, I'm going to play golf.

I don't, I don't do any golf anymore.

So it sounds like you came to that also.

no, I, unfortunately, I still struggle, and try to squeeze

it around here and there when I can.

and do that very poorly.

the thrill of the chase is still there for me.

The execution and results, not there.

So you're not going to join the senior tour.

Is that what I'm hearing?

You say,

not anytime in the near future, for sure.

it's a tough thing, really, though, the, you mentioned something

I, I've done this pendulum swing to over the past, maybe 10, 15 years as

we've gone through a lot of changes with our businesses and companies.

I, for a while dropped.

All business items from the, what do you do kind of conversation?

I would say I'm a husband, I'm a father, child of God, I would use just things that

would be more, I don't know, sound better.

and I'm starting to creep back in and use things like I have this.

Big umbrella of executive coach.

And so I do think it speaks to the balance that's challenging.

your startup environments, that's a hard charging environment.

That's not a established company.

You work, eight hours a day.

You go home startups, high energy, and it sounds like you're

still in that role, correct?

I am.

and, Postalytics is my sixth startup.

so I've been doing this now for quite a while.

and you're right.

It's not a, just a nine to five kind of job.

that being said, you learn over time that it's also not just the sprint and

a startup is really a marathon, and you need to think about how you pace yourself.

In a marathon and, in a marathon, there are little sprints where, the

best runners are really pushing it and they're trying to, make, a move

against the field for a particular amount of time for various reasons.

But at the end of the day, they got to finish.

and you learn when you do these startup that, you can, if you go through an

all out sprint for a period of time, you end up pretty burnt out and makes

it hard to execute over the long haul.

the metaphor that I try to think of now is.

Is you're a top marathon runner and you're running against other top

marathon runners and there's a lot of strategy involved in how much energy

you exert at any given point in time.

So if someone's been involved with six startups.

Have you always had that mindset you just shared of the marathon or has

this evolved over time, go back a little bit and what have you learned?

What have you gained your wisdom from all these six startups?

And I know that's a big question, but give us a few items that

you've gleaned from that.

Yeah, sure.

certainly I, have not always had this perspective on, on startup life.

I started really in my twenties.

And, did a bunch of startups in my twenties and thirties, and, in those

years, I was much more of a sprinter and, I was pushing, midnight, 2 a.

m.

in the morning, work days on a regular basis, trying to raise a

young family and try to do everything, and, It's just not sustainable.

It's not a sustainable approach.

And I guess when you're really young, you can do that for a little bit.

But, I think time has taught that, that, there will always

be work tomorrow in a startup.

You will never, ever get to the bottom of your list of things to do.

Not once.

And so by accepting that and realizing that it's a daily process of prioritizing

and reprioritizing and focusing on a few things that we can get done that are going

to move the needle, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to manage through this

roller coaster of emotions that happen.

when you and a group of highly committed people are, 100% focused on, on

goals, it, it's, it, there are things that happen and the, they come outta

left field and you think, why did, couldn't I foreseen that happening?

and it takes you down a rattle hole.

and then there are days when amazing things happen and, and modulating

the emotions of those ups and downs and thinking of this over a longer

horizon, really helps to create a mindset of continual growth, that,

that doesn't allow you to necessarily get caught up in, in such a.

A deep sprint that you end up getting burnt out or such a deep

hole, emotionally that you're having a hard time breaking out of it.

I'm curious, and this is a, anyway, it's just an interesting question.

I've dealt with a lot of business.

I've been around for a lot of them worked with some myself, but were most

of yours, I'll use the term bootstrap.

I think you know what I mean.

What was it just like, you know, you used your funding or some

close funding around it, or were there outside investors, there's a.

Follow up question I've got to this.

You think you might know where I'm headed with this, but, just give in

general, what were some or all of your startups as they came along?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they've really been a variety of different, types of startups.

and so post lytic is much more of a bootstrap startup, that, we really

haven't done, really anything from an outside funding standpoint.

But I've had others that were, for example, right in the

midst of the dot com, boom.

and it was about raising a ton of venture capital money and sprinting as

fast as you could for a period of time.

and so I've done, angel invested startup, venture invested

startup, self invested startup.

and I've got a wide variety of perspectives and.

I think generally, you have to think a lot about your financing strategy, and

that, I think you can make mistakes, particularly early, earlier in your

career by getting seduced by, the ability to go get a great big check.

and different businesses require different types of capital.

and so I think you need to be really thoughtful about the funding mechanisms

that will work for a specific business.

Yeah.

So this is a real loaded question because I've had to investigate this with myself.

I'm going to ask Dennis of all the models you've worked with and

all that you have been a part of.

What works best for Dennis, for his personality, for the way he functions,

for the way he lives his life, which model I'm assuming is hopefully probably

the one you're with now, but I guess as a layer to the question, give

some pros and cons and why you pick one over some of the others, because

people listening in need to hear this.

This is very important.

I think.

yes.

for me, at my stage of life and where I'm at, this bootstrap model works very well.

at least in terms of scaling up a business to a certain point and, and, but, that

being said, I'm at a point in my life where, you know, the, the short term

need for cashflow is less important.

and I've had resources personally to invest in this thing in order

to help get it off the ground.

and my situation is a little bit different.

Then other people, potentially, right?

And so I feel very fortunate to be at this position in my life where I've, raised

money in different environments, seeing a lot of different types of businesses,

worked with, very, highly, decorated board of directors, members, in startups.

and I think.

A lot of the scars in learning that I've accumulated over the years eliminate

the need for, some of the oversight and, and structure that, that a different

financing mechanism, would enforce, on a startup, at least to a certain point.

You can scale these things on a bootstrap way and get them to a

certain point, but at some point they probably have to evolve, right?

So they're either going to be a nice business that you run, and enjoy

running, but if you really want to scale something, the bootstrap model can

take you so far, but at some point it's going to convert into something else.

How important is it for you?

To be in a, I guess the question is a control situation because that's a bigger

money question also, because obviously if you bring in other people, and the

reason I bring it up is that I'm, I, we had a lot of investors with some

real estate companies heading into 08.

And a lot of that did not turn out well.

And so it, it did shift a little bit of my thinking.

I was also involved.

I was doing some consulting and coaching for businesses during that.

com boom.

And there was some things I was just scratching my head going, wow.

And I think some people, this kind of goes back to knowing yourself and have

some self awareness, what is someone's comfort level need to be with, I'm

in charge, I'm running things versus.

I'm running things, but there's a lot of other people or other people

that are having some input, which goes into that funding mechanism.

And I'll tell you where we're headed with this.

We're going into the ability to be able to pivot and make a big change if you

need to, but yet you've got handcuffs that may or may not keep you from doing that.

So this is the direction we're going, just so you know.

So how important is that control or the ability to make those decisions?

again, at this point of my life, I enjoy

having a lot of autonomy, right?

And myself and my partner and a few key people here can sit down and think

through things and have a lot of different perspectives and choose the direction.

without.

Having to go through a lot of process.

I'm not spending a week every quarter preparing for the board meeting,

and we're moving quickly, right?

and making decisions on a daily basis, but again, with that being said, I

think there are other stages of the business, that really, Would be just

due to the scope of the business and the scale of the opportunity.

It probably does, it will require more structure, right?

and quarterly board meetings and, and then board calls.

And then dealing with the analysts of the investors.

the junior folks that are looking for regular updates on stuff.

there's a whole nother layer of management that goes into having professional

investors involved in your business.

and, at other points in my life and other businesses, that really is what

was necessary right from the beginning.

and so you've got to calibrate your expectations around, your ability to just

Make decisions and move, without, selling this to a broader audience and, moving

all the stakeholders along with you, and, I'm not, it's not like my approach to

business is that of a dictator where, I decide everything and I tell everybody

what they're going to be doing every day.

I prefer a much more collaborative.

Environment, but I'd rather, do that, at least in the early stages of business

with folks are very close to it and, rely on some third parties for some

thought leadership and assistance and looking at it from another angle, but

really be able to, to manage those interactions as I see fit, as opposed

to More of a external structure.

yeah, that makes a lot of sense because the thing that I really

love about having a conversation with someone who is, I'll use the term mature,

we don't use the word older here, but we'll use the word mature is that I think

maturity is when you start realizing the environments, the areas, the businesses,

the situations that you thrive in that they, I'll use the term nourish your soul

versus, things like, I love where you Talked about early on in your career where

you were probably working 20 hour days.

I did similar.

I always joke with people during the nineties.

I think I slept about four hours a night Maybe and I was proud of it was

the problem, I like boasted about it and now i'm going You know, I wish I

had a few of those sleep hours back I think part of is just the journey that

we go on which I don't want to, I don't want to spend a ton of time on this,

but I'd love to go over a little bit of your journey to get up to where we are

with Postalytics here, because anytime someone says they've been through, six,

six startups and I've read through, they Are varying, they have a wide scope.

So, uh, as, as succinct, but I may slow you down along the way, walk through,

Dennis's journey, coming out of school, sounds like you jumped right into

startup world and just went from there.

Correct.

pretty quickly.

I get out of college, moved to New York, for my first job, which was

actually with Prudential insurance.

And I was in a wonderful training program, at Prudential insurance.

there's six months in a classroom and moving around to different.

segment of their, what they call their group insurance business, which

is, health insurance that, that they were selling in there at the time.

Prince was the largest insurance company in the world.

and it was a major player in the healthcare phase and, really rolling

out HMOs for the very first time in the 1980s, at least on the East Coast.

and so I was a part of that and was trained on underwriting

and marketing and sales.

Ended up in a sales office, reported to a wonderful leader there, former,

Air Force Colonel, who had built a great sales office in New York

and and then I learned how to sell, I was selling health insurance,

knocking on doors, trying to build relationships, and, So great lessons.

I would tell anybody if you want to learn how to sell, go to New York and

start knocking on doors and you'll learn how to sell and you'll learn

that rejection is not personal, right?

it's just a part of the game and it may come with a little extra flair

when you're in New York every day.

so great experience there, but big company.

lots of layers of everything.

and after a couple of years, I really felt like, Hey, I want to gain a

little more control over my destiny.

And a buddy from college and his brother were starting up a computer

company, up here in the Boston area.

and so they needed a sales guy.

So I quit my job, took a huge pay cut, and jumped into this, really

early stage company, that ended up.

Shifting a hundred times before we figured out what to do with it.

And this was a computer company in what year?

this is, 1989.

Yes.

And right before the explosion of PCs, and which ended up being something very

important for us, there was a general shift in computing, in the computing

platform that occurred, from these, what were called mini computers, to

these, I call them ironically named minicomputers because they're the size

of my desk, and, to, to the PC world.

and when that happened, the cost footprint of selling the solution

that we had at this company plummeted, and our potential market exploded.

And so, by taking advantage of that shift in computing platform,

this business was able to take off.

and it became a fundamental reason why it had explosive growth and we had a great

outcome for that first startup that I was involved in, just right place, right time.

and we were able to take advantage of that major shift that occurred.

I was just curious about the years there because some people listening

in, I'll go, okay, computer business, not realizing what really the eighties

were for computers and the shifts and the change, I mean, that's, when pretty much

Apple and other places even came to be.

in the early eighties, we did not have computers on our desk

by the end of the eighties.

We all did.

And Back in the stone age, we'll go ahead and say, back there.

Yeah, we didn't even have cell phones back then.

exactly.

that,

did that go from there then Dennis?

where, what was the transition after that?

we sold that business, made a little bit of dough and then

right at the very beginning of the dot com era, I was, I had left the company

that acquired, the, Genesis, which is the first startup after running sales

for a while, took some time out of the home, passing around, looking for

the next thing and connected up with a guy that had some similar thoughts.

And we launched a company called anyday.

com, which is one of the very first web based calendar and scheduling system.

And, and so if you use Google Calendar today, it's essentially a knockoff

of what we built, back in 1997, 1998.

Really early internet.

And, raised a bunch of dough, got some great venture capitalists on

board and key executives and we built this thing, and we're able to

sell it before the window collapsed.

at the end of the dot com era, and, had a great experience there being

a completely different model, right?

where it's raise a bunch of money, spend it hard, fast, grow this

thing as fast as possible, ended up selling it to a company called Palm.

and if you remember the Palm pilot, they bought any day,

worked at Palm for a while.

spent a ton of time in Silicon Valley where they were based and, watch that

whole thing disintegrate, ended up becoming a disaster, and, there's,

I think books have been, or will be written about what happened at Palm,

but, tremendous learnings, right?

Amazing learnings watching what was happening inside of this newly

public, fast growing, company in Silicon Valley at that time.

I loved my Palm Pilot.

Gosh, I was, coming along in the, late 80s, early 90s.

I was, doing leadership training and had our own business.

And man, when that Palm came along, man, that was like the greatest thing ever.

And boy, had they had their act together, they could have moved into

what, jobs ended up doing, which is, the, but then, we can also talk

BlackBerry and other companies like that too, that had, there was a lot

of them that had the opportunity, but I also think it's good to learn.

From what some would call failure.

we talk about redefining success here, give me, give a learning point or two,

you mentioned books can be written, but give a learning point or two, not

let's don't go back to the success.

The two exits, let's go to the city.

Cause you obviously were part of the buyout at the other acquisition.

They wanted you around and you had to be around when this was going on.

What's something you took from that, that you kept using time and time again.

I think that, there were so many things that happened at Palm, that

were, were great lessons to be taken.

so number one, Palm IPO ed in 2000, acquired Anyday.

com, right at the same time.

and at the time, raised a billion dollars and a billion dollars in

the bank, which was a massive IPO in the tech world in the year 2000

and a billion dollars in the bank.

The first thing that the CEO did was go and drop.

400 million of it on a new campus.

So, so, you know, we're in this beautiful building in Santa Clara.

It was fine.

It was great.

but we had to have the signature campus, right?

That, that everybody in Silicon Valley, all the big players

have a signature campus.

We had to have one.

So there goes more than half of the money goes right out the door immediately.

not anticipating, maybe it'll be a downturn, at any point in time, when

that little cushion, but, so that was one, right, like, my goodness, don't

get caught up in all of the symbols of success, in, but, I think more, even

more fundamentally, the management at Palm was not able to get out of its own

way, there was too much kind of fighting about the soul of Palm and, whether or

not the existing world that was Palm, the developer community, the ecosystem

around it could ever transition into something other than what it was, other

than making incremental changes, they were afraid to kill the golden goose

that they had with real innovation and the original founders of Palm ended up

getting out and started, handspring.

which used the Palm operating system, but turned it into a phone, right?

But it was underfunded and, it was a bad time to be starting this thing.

And it was really that inability to make a call on your core product.

and try to build something that would eventually, make that thing die.

that, that was Palm's real, family as an organization.

and really taking that and absorbing that, that knowledge was so important for me.

and, so then I left Palm, ended up jumping into a, Palm ecosystem startup

that had built some software in the Palm environment and was selling to big

corporations, to the enterprise, selling mobile software for managing, work.

Courses that were out in the field doing work.

and so the most painful lesson of my career, came, at, as

a result of this company.

this was the one company that completely failed that I had started, or I didn't

start, but I was c e o of this company.

Failed, went out of business.

Everybody lost their money.

and, so I was hired to come in.

I'm coming from Palm and so I know the environment.

I know mobile computing at least as it was at that time.

And I worked with the CFO, we put together a business model, they called

for, we'll say, 2 million of investment.

It would take us about five years.

And, so I showed up at a great big venture firm.

I had deep relationships with, grant success committee day in the back pocket.

and I sat down in the conference room with an associate who said to me, Hey, Dennis.

I looked at your deck, I looked at your presentation, you can walk

out of here today with financing.

Except for one thing, we need you to not take two million dollars, we need

you to take eight million dollars.

And because we don't want to write a small check, we don't write a big check.

And if you can massage your numbers and make that work, you'll get a

commitment today and you're done.

You can get off the road, you can get back to work, you can get back to

your heads down building this company.

young CEO, sales guy by training.

I'm sitting in the conference room.

I have a few minutes to make a decision.

I said, yes, close the deal, figure it out later, get the deal done.

So I took our spreadsheets and projections, changed everything to

take eight million dollars to spend all of that and then have sales numbers

that are spiking quickly as important to support this entire model, sold

it, got the eight million dollars.

And then the business was not ready to spend money that quickly by any

means, sales were not nearly enough to support the model that we had created.

And, so that decision to let easy money or let a financing strategy

dictate my business strategy.

Was the single most painful lesson that I've learned along the way

Yeah, the, and money, what a temptation to, what a, because

isn't that, this is where we pick apart what success isn't more money.

Always the answer.

See, I'm disagreeing with myself right now.

So you're really saying more money is not always the answer, right?

it is not it was not the right money for that business at that

time and this is think about this.

This is at the very beginning of the mobile computing market

and we had software that made it super easy to create mobile apps.

how many mobile apps do we think of can we think of now?

there's untold millions of mobile apps.

We had software that you could drag and drop and create a

mobile app quickly and easily.

And it could work whether you had a cell phone connection or not have a

cell phone connection, like crazy.

And, but it was early, right?

And so the use cases were, they're not as broad early.

and yet I was tempted by that big number.

And by working with people that, this already preexisting

relationship with, and it was easy.

and, we always figured out we'd make it work.

not really when you take money, you are laying a foundation for your business.

There are expectations around that money.

There are, legal, responsibilities of people that are sitting on the board.

and those people have their own dynamics, their own drivers.

of behavior and outcomes that they're looking for.

And it is so important to find the right financing for your business at the

particular point in time that you are in, as opposed to allowing your thinking

about the business to be structured by capital that's easily available.

Hey, Dennis, at what point, and I don't think it was

just now here on the podcast.

At what point did you realize you may have made a mistake and what

did that do for you internally?

What were you like going?

What do we do now?

Or, did you realize that?

some, sometimes we have this optimism and really startup

and business people really do.

We sometimes are overly optimistic and think, okay, we could sell our

way out of it, or we can grind our way out of something like that.

But at what point there was a time that you went, Oh, when was that?

And tell me more about that time.

yeah.

So within six months, we had hired some really good people, really good

salespeople, sales management, marketing people, and when it became clear that the

pipeline was not developing as quickly as it would need to in order to support the

revenue that we were expecting to come in the next year, it, it became clear

that we had, Overextended ourselves.

and, but at that point, I had sold this thing, I bought into it, I brought all

these people on board, to support this vision and having that conversation at

the board level about, Hey, this is not.

The short term thing, that no change the people, right?

if the results aren't there, change the people, right?

It didn't work.

It was a fundamental issue, not a people issue.

so it crept in fairly early.

and.

We did our best to make something of it, but ultimately it was a failure.

And, so scars and lessons, but, but you learn more from difficult times

than from easy times, in my belief.

so a quick recap.

I love what you brought up with, handspring.

I, what I heard there was that they got to a point where they had something good,

but they were protecting what they had instead of looking at new opportunities.

And then I love the example that you just brought up.

It's like more money's not always the answer.

And it goes back to the conversation we had earlier, where it's okay, there's.

I don't want to say there's strings attached, but there's stipulations

when you do things like that.

And, and that was a great lesson.

all right, so now let's, we're getting closer to this business that you've

got now, which is fascinating me.

I look forward to it, but is there a step or two we're missing in between?

Are we getting close to getting this one started?

We're getting close.

I'll just quickly touch it.

So from there, took some time off.

and then jumped into a retail startup, believe it or not, and, so I was involved

in building out, retail stores in the mobile space, it been living in mobile

there for quite some time, had a lot of thoughts, a lot of ideas, had a partner,

we built that company, and we had about 50 stores in three states, ended up

selling that and had a nice outcome there.

and then, back in 2013, I reconnected with this brilliant software architect who I

had known through any day and some of the other, subsequent startups and, he, it

turns out he moved a couple of towns away.

and he said, Hey, pick up this bag gig I got going.

I had, he had a business, and he wanted to do a direct mail

campaign to promote an event.

so he was working on that direct mail campaign and saw, huh, there's

not a lot of tools to help me.

capture, interest when somebody responds, there's not an easy way to, to do that

and and then talk to the printer and they're, they seem really old school, so

he built the software that, that he could, be a part of the direct mail process.

And surround it with landing pages and, and then, email

marketing and some other things.

And, he had some really customers and say, Hey, you got to take a look at it.

So I thought at this point, 2013, like direct mail, isn't that,

on the way out, isn't it dead?

and, but then you dig a little more and yeah, it's certainly not the primary

step marketing channel for a lot of companies anymore, but it's still a

40 billion a year industry in the U.

S.

So great big old legacy marketing channel and nobody in Silicon

Valley is paying any attention.

So very, underinvested in from a technology standpoint.

And sounds like an opportunity and that's really what led to the launch of BoingNet.

Yeah, let me pause you one second.

I want to, you and I are of the generation where, when we start hearing,

a lot of things that are popular in the world today about being vulnerable

and things like that, we'd like, yeah, we don't like to share that.

But I would like to know, is there anything you could share

about your mental state going from the, what we'll call a failure?

We'll call it a failure.

I've really come to.

Really say that they're learning experiences, but were you gun shy at all?

Did you lose a little bit of your, as Austin Powers was saying of your mojo?

Were you wondering if you still had it?

talk to me a little bit about that.

You don't have to, we don't have to have a therapy session here.

I'm not saying we're going to go into, I don't have any tissues or

anything, Dennis, but I do, because I realized I had to really do some

reflection on, I lost a little swagger, but I needed to lose a little bit.

But I didn't need to lose it entirely.

So what was going on with you mentally as you were going through that time off

and then this next thing came along.

I think there's a, there's an important thing that

happened in that failed startup as well.

my wife and I had our second, child.

Our daughter was, nine years old, at that time.

And, and I'm hard charging, trying to, make this startup a success, despite

all the things that became apparent that it was not going to be successful.

I was trying to prop it up, working my tail off, and my daughter ended up

with a massive infection in her brain.

and, an abscess, actually, the size of a, like a golf ball, on her brain.

and We ended up spending nine nights at Children's Hospital in Boston, with

teams of different people coming in, trying to figure out, how to deal with

this thing and how to solve it and, that made me step back and say, all

right, Dennis, the heck you doing here, working these 20 hour days, you got a

young family, life is precious and could be can be short and so that certainly

impact has impacted my life ever since.

but also at that particular point in time, I got this failed startup.

I got this thing going on in my life.

I fortunately had some success and had some, money in my pocket.

And my next thing I thought, you know what, I'm done with tech for a while.

I don't want to deal with tech.

I want to do something out in the real world and, just leave

this environment for a while.

and the demand, because in my mind, I only knew one way to work, and that was.

All in all day, every day.

And so I did this other, this retail startup, which, it didn't

require nearly the energy and work.

And I was able to spend time with my family and my kids through

middle school and high school.

and, it was a wonderful experience.

I learned a ton in the retail world.

and that really set the stage for me to come back to tech and

to say, you know what I missed, I miss working with brilliant.

Software engineers and there's so many amazing people in the tech world that if

I structure this the way the right way, I can have a little bit more balance

between the old Dennis and then, a more sustainable way to think about a long term

growth model for a tech based startup.

Yeah, that's a, that's that redefining success

that we like to drill down on here.

you're still, you know, used to have the skills and all that, but

the mindset shift is different.

and I do want to say this, we always look for little clips and

sound bites to pull from this.

We've got Dennis Kelly saying that the tech world is not the real world that

you're going to go work out in the real world on that little blip there.

Hopefully we won't have to flip that out.

so you were in this fake world, you went to the real world and then

you went back to the tech world.

so we're where I really want to be because this is like a cool story and I love the.

The merging of this legacy business, what I would, I sometimes word it old school.

I hope that's not a bad thing.

Legacy sounds better, direct mail.

I've spent some time doing quite a bit of direct mail myself, but I

love kind of the progression here.

So bring us up to speed.

Tell us what was going on there early on and then how that, pivoted or

transitioned or whatever went on there.

yeah.

so my business partner started this, little app, called BoingNet, that you

could sell to people that, that are in the direct mail production world.

So we're selling to printers, selling to agencies, and the

software which surround a direct mail campaign with digital elements.

Landing pages, microsites, email marketing, text messaging, and hey,

I'm helping people do the direct mail, but I can sell all these

other things along with it, right?

We thought this is a no brainer, great way to bridge the direct mail

world, bring it into the 21st century.

And so we built some great software, sales were low, longer sales cycles than

I guess what I had, we had anticipated, required a lot of professional services,

and it was going okay, but it wasn't really matching our expectations or

certainly the pace of growth going on in the marketing tech world, right?

And so after a couple of years, and having gone through the experience before, we

said, you know what, the fundamental problem we're selling to the wrong people.

We're trying to sell a technology solution to people that

don't want to buy technology.

and what we were able to learn, though, is that by taking some of

that software we built that analyzed who was going on a website in

response to a direct mail campaign.

And learning from the email marketing workflow, we thought, you know what,

if we go solve the bigger problem is that direct mail is too hard to do,

that direct mail is not connected to the marketing tech stack, and.

we already have some analytics, so if we go solve these other problems and

start selling directly to marketing teams, a solution that will help them

deploy direct mail in minutes instead of weeks and make direct mail sit right

alongside their email marketing and their digital marketing right inside of

their CRM, their marketing automation tools, and then have those detailed

analytics about what's happening in a direct mail campaign that are new and

unique, then that's a much bigger market.

And so that really formed the basis of our pivot from Boynet to Postalytics in 2017.

And then, Postalytics has been a great growth story ever since,

where we've been growing between 60 and 80 percent annually.

from year one.

And one of the things that I think we have to do this for

some folks that are listening in.

There's a whole generation that they don't even know what we're talking

about when we talk about direct mail.

I just went, we had to go clean out, we had to go to Atlanta and clean out my,

mother in law's apartment, she was going into a facility, and she had like two

months of mail that was sitting there.

And so I was, we're nomads, so I don't get a lot of mail anymore, which is fine, but

it was so interesting for me to go through all the direct mail that she has received.

And she's made a couple purchases.

So once that happens, there's triggers that come even more.

And I do want to say this, that I, Love direct mail, because that was what

helped us launch when we were doing our real estate companies in the early two

thousands, one of the first things that we did for growth was a cheesy, horrible,

I'm almost embarrassed to say what they called a yellow letter that looked

handwritten that I wish we could have automated at the time, but we had a team

that wrote all that, you know, we copied and wrote out names and stuff, and we

bought a boatload of single family homes.

From that.

And I was involved with, I was involved with some masterminds

that were transitioning from direct mail to electronic.

I think the thing people do, Dennis, though, is they're always

looking for the easy button.

And when email came along, everyone thought, Oh, I could wash my

hands of this and move along.

But I always say that some things don't go away.

We just build layers upon it.

And it sounds like that's what y'all have done with Postalytics.

Correct.

That is correct.

Yes.

Yes.

So the reality is that it's a very effective marketing channel.

and, and what Postolitics has done is built a lot of software around it to make

it faster, easier and really to work in conjunction with those other channels.

And so that's really the message.

It's not don't do email, don't do digital, just do direct mail.

It's, do all And, and direct mail should work together in concert with

your other marketing channels so that you've got continuity, you have a

physical touch, a physical presence that is backing up what people are seeing

online and through their email and having a physical thing that you hold in

your hand, that you read, that you set aside, that you show to somebody, that.

Adds a significant amount to the way your brain processes a marketing

message, the way that your brain can recall a brand, recall an offer when

you hold something, it is different than when you're just looking at a screen.

And so brain science is backing this up.

And so really the story is direct mail should be in software.

It should be living inside of software and it happens to print.

And that software needs to be coordinating with all of your other marketing channels.

And so that's really the primary story that we're telling today.

Yeah, and I guess one of the things too, and maybe you can

address this, one of the things that I used to struggle with the right

mail was You know, doing split test.

I love doing split tests and also loved, getting information back

so that I can make decisions.

When email came along, I think people realize that it, it

made that process quicker.

It became a quicker process, but it sounds to me like what you've

done is you've set some tools up that are merging those together.

Would that be correct?

that's right.

So we've created, tools that enable a marketer to understand exactly where

their mail is in the creation and the delivery process by tapping into

some little known tools that the U.

S.

Postal Service offers on the back end.

We're actually Able to track each piece of mail through the entire

delivery process, and so we're able to see exactly where your mail is.

And then we've embedded tools that came from the original Boeing that product.

That allow you to create unique URLs for each recipient.

And those URLs may be printed as full URLs, or they may

be represented as QR codes.

And as we know what's happened with the use of QR codes, since the

pandemic, everything's exploded.

And so that's become a very acceptable way for marketers to, to help people leap from

the physical world to the digital world.

and so now 70 percent of our campaigns have these personalized QR codes on them,

and people hit that QR code, and all of a sudden, hey, I know this is Tim Winders

from this particular piece of mail from this campaign, and here's when his mail

was delivered, here's when he hit this QR code, here's where he went online.

And then we're able to package all that up and communicate back to the CRM to

say, Hey, CRM, Tim is online right now.

Here's what he's looking at.

Here's where it came from.

And you may want to trigger an email to go out, right away.

You may want to trigger a sales rep to pick up the phone.

so making that data surrounding the direct mail delivery and response actionable

and able to easily analyze to see what's working from a testing standpoint.

has been a huge innovation.

Yeah, that's good.

I want to ask in just a moment about the type of people that are utilizing

Postalytics and the type people that should be, but there's one

more decision type question I want to ask you that we went over fairly

quickly and that was the transition from the BoingNet to Postalytics.

Thank you.

To Postalytics, I think a lot of people need to have the awareness to make

business pivots, decisions, and things like that, because what you did, if

I'm getting this correctly, you had a business, a tool that you had made some

adjustments to the tool, but you were, you thought there was one customer group.

people that did the printing and all that, I think is what I heard

you say instead of the people that consumed the printing and used it.

And I don't know that people really recognize what a big pivot that was.

How hard was it to do that?

Did you just wake up one morning and you talked to the partners and said,

Hey, listen, we need to do this.

what was just a little bit of that process, because at some point

you started getting some clues.

It's not working.

What do we do?

you're 100 percent right.

and, so while we're struggling through why isn't this taking off the way we

thought, we started actually hearing from, potential customers of Postalytics

knocking on our door and say, hey guys, you appear to be living in this

space between digital and direct mail.

we just implemented Salesforce, we want to try direct mail.

It's just painful, right?

It's these people that they didn't have the background in direct mail.

They didn't know like what the whole process look like.

And they're looking at it from the outside.

are you kidding me?

It's going to take all that just to get a campaign out.

And so we heard this a few times.

They're like, we want to talk to HubSpot.

We want to talk to Salesforce.

We don't want it to be so hard to do.

and that's really what, gave us the confidence.

That, hey, if we shifted our ideal customer profile from this print service

provider to the small to midsize business who is investing heavily in their

marketing tech stack, then that is a group of people that A, are, have already shown

they want to spend money in technology.

B, they want to leverage the investment they've already made in their CRM, and

then C, are running into the lower email open rates that everybody's seeing,

the higher cost in all the auctions in the pay per click world, so the cost of

acquisition in digital is getting higher and higher, if this alternative can

plug in and be easy to use, then we'll get a lot of those people and that's,

so we heard rumblings from the market.

We did some testing and it became clear that this was really the problem to solve

What was the time frame from the Oh, we've got a problem to we've

turned this ship and we're now moving in this direction all, full steam ahead.

What was the giving me a much years, days, minutes?

How long, what was the timeframe?

it.

It was really a four to six month process.

We looked at a few different ways to take what we had already built

and repackage it in, in, in a smart way and, expand the audience.

And have a faster sales cycle.

So we looked at a few alternatives.

Within six months, we settled on this.

And then it was about a nine month build process from there.

So it required sticking the fork in a previous effort.

We had to lay some great people off, unfortunately.

to conserve cash.

and then, rebuild and come back out as portfolio.

the growth sounds awesome.

And I love burgeoning.

I love when someone can take a, what we'll call legacy, not

an old school, but a legacy.

And bring it up to modern day because I think that, it's not nostalgia, but I just

think there's still some things out there.

I think I heard you talking to a guy that they do billboards.

see, I worked in a billboard company when I was in high school and people

go on billboards or radio or, Oh no, I only want to be on podcasts.

No, I think sometimes the answer is and not or.

You know this and this.

All right, Dennis, a couple quick questions here as we wrap.

Give me, I'm not looking for specific businesses, but tell me the type

industries that are really hitting some home runs with Postalytics that

You know, you could say these are some and then i'm also going to ask you who

should be looking at you That might be listening in and then we'll do

some wrap up here before we finish up.

sure.

So at a high level, we look at Postalytics as really a horizontal

software tool, that could be used by every business in the world.

And you can make an argument, anybody who's sending email, anybody who's doing

email marketing should be doing direct mail to complement their email marketing.

And I'll tell people, hey, think of us as sort of MailChimp.

For direct mail, right?

Like just about anybody ought to be using this.

That being said, there are certain verticals that have, use cases

that, that really need direct mail.

And so obviously real estate, and it's very broad, footprint of residential

and commercial, the investment side.

and then more recently.

Property tech.

Real estate tech is a booming business.

And so direct mail is becoming a part of those solutions that are out

there in the property tech world.

and so that's been a big area for us.

another one is nonprofit, right?

We're investing very heavily in the nonprofit space.

60% of all donations to US nonprofits still happen by check.

and that represents a tremendous opportunity for us.

And then, the other one that has really taken off in the

last year is our agency channel.

And so we built a version of post politics designed, to be used by marketing agencies

and, marketing agencies control a lot of direct mail you get at home, the.

postcards from the landscaper, and the restaurateur, and those type of things

are often being built by a local marketing agency that has a direct mail practice.

And so we've built a tool that empowers those agencies to be very efficient

and to, have an ability to scale their business without adding a lot of staff.

and so some of those verticals are really areas of concentration.

but we view the opportunity is very horizontal.

Yeah, I mean i'm sitting here thinking about Somebody

who owns a pizza restaurant, someone who owns a local business.

I'm assuming that, the way the pricing structures are still makes

sense for them to do some work with you guys all the way up.

I think y'all said small to medium.

that's, I think there's so much opportunity.

And I do think that if there's a business owner listening

in, they've listened this far.

I think they at least need to check it out.

If they've never done some things or they've done some

things and they just didn't like.

The way it worked in direct mail.

So where can people go if they're just intrigued, they want to get more

information, they want to connect with you, they want to ask you more, whatever.

Where do you want to send people?

And then I've got one more question here that we'll wrap up with Dennis.

So where can people go if they just say, you know what?

I need some more info.

Sure.

Sure.

So probably two places.

First would be our website.

Postalytics.

com.

and we invest very heavily in the website.

Tons of great content, thought leadership, how to do direct mail,

how to do it with automation.

Tremendous amount of content there that we've developed.

And so that's P O S T A L Y T I C S.

dot com, postpolitics.

com.

And then secondly is LinkedIn.

both, the company Postalytics and myself on LinkedIn.

and from other, another channel standpoint, if you're a LinkedIn

person, Hook up with us there, follow the company, connect with me.

And I'm super happy to interact and work together with folks through LinkedIn.

Excellent.

for those that are checking out the notes, we'll attempt to put

those links down in the notes.

So Dennis may not love this conversation.

We are seek, go create.

That's our title.

I'm gonna let you pick one of those words over the other two is my

last question and why seek, go or create, which one do you choose?

I'm probably a create guy.

I like to build businesses from scratch.

I like to be involved in the very beginning of them.

and so I think that create is the word that resonates most with me.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Dennis Kelly.

Thank you.

Postalytics.

Y'all go check them out.

I think that's valuable for a lot of leaders and business owners just

to know more about direct mail.

this conversation has been awesome.

I've loved going from the transition and, and all the, Evolution

that I think Dennis has had.

I think it's been valuable for us to listen and learn with that.

We have new episodes here every Monday at seek, go create until next time.

Continue being all that you were created to be.