STARTUP
BOOKS
Just how much time
can CoSchedule save
you on social media and
content marketing?
CoSchedule Cofounder
Garrett Moon:
NEXT
“We surveyed our users
and asked them: per
post that you publish,
how much time are
you saving that you
were spending doing
this marketing before?
And 30 minutes was
the smallest amount
of time. Some of our
marketing team said
they were savings
upwards of two hours
for a blog post they
were writing.”
CoSchedule UI/UX Design Lead
Shannon Wiedman at the company's
recently opened Fargo office.
“We had five or six tabs open on
our browser window in order to
get that (marketing) work done,”
he says. “Things were stored
in Excel spreadsheets or these
very plain-type calendars – like
Google Calendar or Outlook –
that aren’t connected to any of
the services that we were using.
“We knew we weren’t the only
people who were publishing
blog content and using social
media to share it on the web.
CoSchedule Cofounder Garrett Moon
says one of the reasons they decided
to open an office in Fargo was to gain
better access to the talent pool the
FM area offers.
And the original concept was
really about connecting content
creation and blogging and social
media together more tightly.
Because they’re usually handled
by two or three companies’
separate tools.”
They didn’t just assume their
hypothetical solution would be a
hit, though.
They mocked up and stitched
together some screenshots in
Photoshop and, along with a
single landing page that included
a short description, emailed
their idea out to four or five
Wordpress and social media
blogs to gauge interest. Within
a day, they had an email list of
a few hundred people, which
soon turned into 10,000 – all
before they’d launched an actual
product.
“We started to use that audience
to get feedback on the product,”
Moon says. “We walked them
through and got their feedback
on, ‘Would you use this? Is this
something you’d pay for? What
are the frustrations within your
company that this might help
you solve?’ We already knew
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FEBRUARY 2016
what our customers wanted
before we started writing code
at all.”
Fast forward to 2016, and
CoSchedule now has more than
5,000 customers in more than
90 countries around the world.
You might recognize a few of
the names – Adidas, Zulilly and
Rosetta Stone – and while Moon
says that while every new client
is always exciting, he concedes
that seeing Microsoft’s name
pop up was a “pretty nice
moment.”
They’re expecting to grow their
team from 25 to 30 by the
middle of the year, and they
anticipate at least 50 percent
of future hires to join their
10-person Fargo office, which
they opened about six months
ago in the Meadowlark Building
downtown.
Moon says that even though a
fraction of a percentage of their
clients are based in the tri-state
area, they’re committed to
keeping the company in North
Dakota.
“We liked North Dakota,” he