One Million User Profiles

On February 14th, we hit a pretty amazing milestone at Embarke!  We processed our 1-millionth behavioral profile for our customers!

The even more amazing thing?  We hit 1.5-million just 7 days later!

We’re humbled and honored to be growing at this rate and have our customers, partners, mentors, advisors, peers, and team to thank.  It’s a huge accomplishment for us as entrepreneurs, but a small step of many to come for Embarke.  That’s not going to stop us from celebrating though!

We’re heading to do some go-carting this week!  …anyone up to join us?  Wed 27th, 8pm, Miramar Speed Circuit.   Post in the comments and we’ll coordinate.

Embarke is going Go-Carting

This is Acceleration

As you know, we’ve been in Seattle for the past 3 months at the Microsoft Accelerator powered by TechStars.  At times it’s felt like an eternity, and others it feels like we just started.  Suddenly, it’s 2013 and we’re about to pitch on stage to hundreds of investors in 13 days!

Twice.            (more on that later)

Bryan and I have gone from extreme highs to extreme lows to everything in between during the program.  Actually, many times we’ve repeated that cycle within a single day!  I’d like to someday write a post that discusses the inner workings, the mental challenges, the difficulties leaving family 1,236 miles away, and everything that goes along with an accelerator program like this.  This post, however, is more focused on what we’ve become as a company…and why.

We came to the program smiling, and after a few grueling months, we’ll be leaving smiling!
…and much better off because of the accelerator.

What is Embarke?

The beauty of an accelerator powered by TechStars is that you may come in with an idea…and it might even be a good one…but that doesn’t mean that’s the business you’re going to leave with.

We’ve managed to cram about 6-9 months of normal effort into a 3 month period…and a lot has happened.  Here’s the “Cliff’s Notes”:

Embarke increases engagement and revenue for marketers by automatically improving how they message with their customers.  We move the needle using data, science, intelligence, and hyper-personalization.

See, the big dogs like Facebook, Bing, Google, and Amazon have built ridiculously detailed profiles about every one of us.  They do this because this data helps them increase engagement, and revenue.  They obviously know what they’re doing.

Turns out, 40% of marketers don’t have the human resources, know-how, or time to manage their own customer data.  50% of Marketers say this is their biggest problem.

Embarke solves this problem for marketers, and brings them capabilities that rival the likes of the big dogs.  Here’s a good page that visually describes what we’re doing.

What’s up?

• You may have noticed our website has been updated.
• Companies of all sizes are very excited about our hyper-personalized analytics, and our delivery optimization.  Some of them are pushing over 100 million emails per month!
• We’ve performed load testing on our raw data intake and can handle about billion transactions per month! (opens, clicks, deliveries, etc)
• Our Hyper-Personalized Analytics are FREE.  This includes insights into everything Marketers can do to improve engagement.
• Our Optimized Delivery based on the analytics is what we charge for.  This includes the ability to take action on the analytics and drive revenue.
• We’re focused on continuing to build product, signing up new customers, and preparing for demo day!

Demo Day(s)!   (yes, there are now two)

Our Seattle Demo Day is on Thursday, January 17th.  We’re also lucky enough that the program is setting up a Silicon Valley Demo Day on January 31st!  If you or someone you know would like to attend either, please hit me up!

We’re very excited about what Embarke is becoming.  We have a great vision for the company, and are excited to hit the gas pedal and start making customers happy.  Thanks for following us on our journey!

We’ve been through The Founder Institute…and we received an amazing amount of value from that program (still do today).  It jump-started our business, our network, and our product development.  We are here today because of where we started back then, only 18 months ago.

We expect TechStars and Microsoft to provide the same type of value, at a different level and stage for our company.  We’ve got customers.  We’ve got product.  We’ve got a team.  We’re building like crazy.  We’re very close to being ready to raise money.  This program will help us take that next step in our company’s lifecycle.  They will help us validate, execute, and pitch to investors.  We will be surrounded by amazing mentors, who will help us accelerate our business.

We’ve been here before, and we know the value this type of program can bring…  I can’t wait to see where we’ll be another 18 months from now!

Aside from all of this, we’re the first San Diego company to make it into the program (and maybe even TechStars).  This is further validation that the San Diego startup scene has a growing ecosystem filled with incredibly talented entrepreneurs!  Our San Diego friends, mentors, and colleagues have been amazing to us and we can’t wait to bring some Microsoft and TechStars acceleration juice back home.

See you in January!

UPDATE 2012.10.11 – Embarke featured on Xconomy!

Additional stories about this:

1. Scott Guthrie (Microsoft)
2. Microsoft Accelerator
3. TechStars
4. GeekWire
5. TheNextWeb
6. Xconomy
7. David Cohen (TechStars)
8. Brad Feld (Foundry Group)

Downtown Seattle Panoramic from our Apartment Roof

Team Embarke at Microsoft + TechStars

Here’s the rundown:

DEVELOPERS

Dave Churchville

Thinks in Code
Customer Development Guru
Founded Multiple Companies
Blues Harmonica Player

John Gorton

25+ Year Developer
Entrepreneur His Entire Career
Multiple Startups
Sailer, SCUBA Diver

ADVISOR

Eric Otterson

Sr. VP of Business Development at Cooley
Veteran of 3 VC-backed companies
17 Years in Technology
Skiier, Hiker, Music Mixologist

You can see a full bio for each of them on the updated Embarke Team page!  Thanks for putting faith in us and joining the team guys, we won’t let you down!

Embarke’s Co-Founders Have Been Given Tremendous Opportunity to Give Back

First, I hope all of you are having an awesome 4th of July week (I think most of you are celebrating both weekends, since the 4th is on a Wednesday)!  No complaints about that, right?

In the spirit of this holiday, I’d like to share a little about opportunity and how this country allows us all to do and achieve whatever we’re capable of.  In particular, Bryan and I are dedicated to helping San Diego become more of an entrepreneurial center, and love to give whatever free time we might have to that cause.  Because of this, we’ve been given some incredible opportunities to help out along our travels while growing Embarke.

We’ve recently had the honor of mentoring and even judging at some startup events this year, have been interviewed a few times, and been involved in kicking off San Diego startup-centric programs.  Previous posts have covered mentoring Lean Startup Machine, running a 5-hour Customer Development Bootcamp, and proctoring at Microsoft’s DevCamp Cloud, but the past couple months have had us dive in with Startup Weekend, the Cloud Intelligence Conference, Microsoft’s Channel 9 Developer Network, and the Startup America Partnership.

Since we’ve recently launched a Private Beta into our API, writing about each of these events individually has unfortunately not been possible due to our limited time.  However, we’ve had some amazing experiences and really want to share them with you!

San Diego’s Startup Weekend

First up, San Diego’s Startup Weekend!  Bryan and I got to mentor all weekend, and I even had the pleasure of judging.  Startup Weekend, if you’ve never heard of it, is amazing.  Here’s a summary of what happens:

• 80 people registered and gathered
• 40 people pitched ideas (60-seconds each)
• 15 ideas were voted up
• 80 people converge into 15 teams
• They have 54 hours (a weekend) to build that 60-second idea into a working product
• They pitch their ideas and are judged and awarded

Truly, it’s an amazing sight to see.  People from various backgrounds, skills, and motivations show up and pull together for a whirlwind 54 hours.  Ideas shift as customers are validated, assumptions are proven right or wrong, and products are built.  The product at the end is many times very different than it’s 60-second-pitch cousin, and the amount of work these entrepreneurs get done in such a short period of time is always awesome to see.

Bryan and I spent most of our weekend at Co-Merge and had an absolute blast working with the various companies, met some new friends, and hope we were able to at least shed an ounce or two of insight into their products.

Startup Weekend has posted a couple hundred photos of the weekend here, as well as all of the pitches.  Additionally, for the first time at a Startup Weekend event, you can watch the judges deliberate on the final pitches.  I hope the video shows how difficult it was for us (Chris Corriveau, Chris Waldron, and me) to decide who the best products were…we were amazed by the quality and efforts of all involved.  It’s tough when you have 15 pitches to listen to, absorb, make sense of, and grade (in rapid-fire fashion)…then determine how they stack up against each other when it comes to execution, business model, and customer validation.  I think we used a good combination of actual hard numbers, discussion, and “feel” to make our top 3 selections!

Startup America Partnership

I spent a little time helping the folks over at s.co kick off the San Diego region.  Plenty of others were involved and I played a small role, but the launch event coaxed ~150 entrepreneurs out of bed at 9am on a Saturday to come hang out, eat some food, listen to great startup stories and ask questions of successful entrepreneurs.  We hope that the San Diego region will eventually be able to leverage Startup America (funded by the Case Foundation and Kauffman Foundation) in order to get San Diego Startups the resources they need to help them be successful.  Be sure to sign up to be notified of the next event!

Cloud Intelligence Conference

Microsoft asked us to be panelists at one of the sessions, in order to share our experiences with Embarke and deploying the product within the Azure Cloud framework.  For the most part, Bryan did all the technical talking and I tried to offer some value along the way.  Jury’s out on my success with that!  It was, however, nice to share our real-world experience with people who are in the shoes we were wearing not much more than a year ago.  There’s a lot of excitement building around Azure, and we were pleased to have been asked to be a part of sharing it!

Channel 9

As you may have noticed we’ve done a few things with Microsoft lately, and one of them was a video interview with Brian Loesgen.  Bryan and he discussed Embarke, Azure, and we got to demo our product.  Channel 9 is the video arm of Microsoft’s Developer Network (MSDN), and you can now watch Bryan’s interview and demo.

Photos of Startup Weekend (some courtesy Startup Weekend) and Startup America Launch Event are below:

The goal of the bootcamp was to give these entrepreneurs a head-start to the weekend by teaching them some valuable skills.  About 25% of the Startup Weekend registrants came to the bootcamp.

Bryan’s Lean Track consisted of a heavy focus on Customer Development, the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, and getting a hands-on-approach to validating whether or not your idea is worth persuing…or if you need to tweak it to better fit an actual user need.

This video is around 45 minutes.  Enjoy!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Thanks to Bryan Hall, Dave Churchville, and Al Bsharah for facilitating.

Thanks to Startup Weekend and Co-Merge Workspsace for hosting!

Thanks to the participant who shot the video!  (forgot your name…sorry!)

We’re very proud to be a part of this elite group of local San Diego Startups, and excited that SDVG sees the potential Embarke brings to the table.

Embarke, along with the other 29 companies, will be showcased at this years’ Venture Summit which is an amazing event with amazing people.  Be sure to register!

About Embarke:

Embarke is solving major hurdles for developers looking to build products for socially connected users:

• Developers can quickly, easily, and cheaply get connected to multiple social channels without learning and managing how to send messages across Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and Email.  They connect to Embarke, we connect to all the other networks on their behalf.
• Developers can break down the typical barriers of social networks, in particular the ability to communicate across them.  They can give their users the ability to talk to any of their contacts on any of their networks, simultaneously, and instantly.
• Our data shows that when developers use Embarke for their messaging platform, they can actually increase user engagements with their products.

 

In April I was invited to be a proctor at Microsoft’s Dev Camp: Cloud Camp at UC Irvine. This was a great event and covered all the major aspects of Windows Azure. Basically the day consisted of short lectures interspersed with hands on labs.

There was no shortage of technical proof as to the merits of the platform. What was most interesting to me though were the questions I was asked. People were interested in my experience with the platform more than they were the specific technical details! Most of these people were experienced developers that were new to cloud computing. They clearly had the background and experience to evaluate Azure on its technical merits, but that did not seem to be their focus.

I think that this can be explained by the way in which we make decisions. Human beings often substitute social proof for analysis. Yes, this is even true of us engineers! If people that we respect are making a choice then we can save a lot of time by simply making the same decision and avoiding a detailed analysis. We are inundated with options today and using this technique helps to reduce complexity. I think that this explains the nature of the questions at the Dev Camp. People were looking for Social Proof, not specs to validate the merits of Windows Azure.

If you’re an entrepreneur or startup looking to evaluate platforms, or simply want to learn more about Microsoft technologies – definitely check out one of the DevCamps!

Recently my co-founder and I were invited to mentor at Lean Startup Machine in San Diego. Al was unable to attend, but I was pleasantly surprised at the experience!

If you are not familiar with this event, Lean Startup Machine is an intensive three-day workshop, which teaches Lean Startup methodologies and their application. The process that they teach promotes a problem-centric approach to business ideation. The event was great in many ways, but the thing that struck me the most was the large amount of tangible learning that happened over the three days.

It was quite striking to see the attendees make so much progress and I think that this was in a large part due to their focus on a “problem-centric” approach. The technique has you list out your assumptions and then work to validate or invalidate the riskiest one…usually by getting out of the building! This forces a focus on being effective rather than efficient and I think that is the key.

Being efficient is incremental. It’s learning techniques to do more with less over time. Being effective is more direct and helps you to solve problems and uncover truths more quickly.

In a startup being efficient is important, but being effective is vital.

If it’s been a while since you have felt truly effective, take in an event like Lean Startup Machine, refocus and remind yourself about what’s possible.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Al Bsharah:
Hi, my name’s Al Bsharah.

Bryan Hall:
And I’m Bryan Hall.

Al:
We are the co-founders of Embarke.

Embarke is a distribution center for social communications, that being social networks but also things like email and text messaging.

Developers connect to us, and we connect to all the other social networks on their behalf.  The other piece is we allow you to start conversations that span across social networks.  So, Facebook people can talk to Email people can talk to Twitter people and SMS and all that.

So, Embarke was recently accepted into the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program.  A little different than BizSpark, but essentially what that means is we get $60,000 of free Azure Cloud Services to use over the next couple of years.  Which, is an amazing kick in the pants for a startup like us!

Bryan and I are graduates of the San Diego Founder Institute, and because of that the Founder Institute was very instrumental in getting us into this program.

We’re going to talk a little bit about why we’re excited about it both from a business and a technology perspective.

Bryan:
Embarke is completely deployed to Azure.  We’re using their cacheing, we’re using their table unstructured storage, their blob storage, and SQL Azure for the database, and all of that stuff is really easy to integrate.

Most of our coding time is focused on solving the issues of our own problems, and not having to futz with what database stack do we use, how are we going to make it scalable, how do we back it up, or how do we make it distributed across a couple datacenters.

Even OS upgrades, I don’t have to upgrade the OS as it’s done automatically, I don’t have to worry about the firewall, I don’t have to worry about virus patches, or any of that stuff because it all happens automatically.

Al:
Talk a little about that deployment process.

Bryan:
We deploy 10 times a day.  We build and test all of our code in Visual Studio, then we check it into the cloud, then this server pulls it down, unit tests everything, packages it up and deploys it securely to the cloud.  The whole process from the time that we finish testing and check it in is completely automated.

Al:
Right, and once it’s deployed to the cloud Microsoft kind of takes over.

Bryan:
Exactly, it’s live all the time.  It does rolling upgrades automatically, so that our site’s never down.

Al:
Talk a little about the scaling and some of the automatic capabilities, and just how easy it is for us.

Bryan:
With the scalability framework it’s really easy for me to say, that worker should never have fewer than two computes and maybe the maximum I’d ever want to see is ten.  Maybe when it’s 80% utilized, I’m going to have it scale up another compute.  It’ll do that for you automatically, and I can do it by time of day.

Al:
Or we know we have a TechCrunch bump coming and we need to change all those maximum parameters to just let it ride.

Bryan:
As a startup, using Microsoft and Windows Azure, it’s a little bit unusual.  We’re not doing lamp stack, we’re not doing PHP.  I think people are starting to understand the strength of Azure.  We’re starting to get this flow of people that are interested in a startup company, and they’re good developers and they want to learn Azure.

Al:
We’re pushing the limits of Azure.  New stuff comes out and we’re adopting it pretty quickly because it’s right for us.

Bryan:
Any time we’ve had a problem that’s kind of more towards the edge, a simple call to Microsoft and they’re hooking us up with the engineers that are working on that piece of technology.

Al:
Yeah, the evangelists have been fantastic, they’re very accessible.  Even from a business perspective the guys are just there, they’re great and they’re more than willing to do what it takes to help us be successful.

Microsoft knows that they need to get this cloud thing right.  That’s why we get to benefit from BizSpark Plus, and we’re getting a lot of money thrown at us to build cool products on Azure.

Bryan:
We saw it a little bit in BizSpark, but in BizSpark Plus you really feel the force of how much energy and dollars Microsoft is pushing towards the cloud.  And…it helps us!

Al:
Yeah, we’re not complaining!

As Howard Lindzon says, crowdfunding has been around for years.  So what’s the big deal with this legislation?  Today, if you’re to invest your hard-earned dollars in a company (for equity ownership) you need to be an accredited investor.  This is legacy law from years ago when people weren’t empowered with information to make intelligent decisions, as a protection from scams.  Back then, it made sense.

Today, things are different.  As Naval Ravikant and Jason Calacanis discussed on This Week in Startups, any idiot can blow their bank on a mortgage or Vegas…but can’t make an intelligent equity investment in a company.  Today, there is more social proof and information about companies, startups, and people than ever before…so why not allow any person to benefit by being able to invest in the next Facebook or Zynga…early on?  Because of the JOBS Act, they will be able to…and that’s pretty exciting!

Fred Wilson also has a pretty good summary of what’s going on with the JOBS Act, and there are countless discussions elsewhere…so start googling if you want to learn more.

The SEC still needs to put legislation around this, and they have until the end of the year (approximately) to make that happen.  So, kick back and relax – nothing’s changing for a while.

Early talks say the legislation that the SEC may put in place could be so protective of the consumer that the laws wouldn’t benefit startups enough and the entire model would fall apart.

There’s talk that angel investors and venture capitalists will look down on companies that go for crowdfunding, but the counter to that is a solid company with a great team, traction, and terms will get funding because they’re worth backing. It won’t matter where previous rounds have come from.

There’s talk that the scammers will come out of the woodwork and ruin things. They’ll certainly come out and give crowdfunding a bad name for a while, they always do.  How the ecosystem reacts and adapts to it will be most important.

There will be countless (countless) companies launched to help you as a startup get your crowdfunded investments.  It will be overwhelming.  When the dust settles, there are some that think the existing “funding incumbents” will come out on top (like Kickstarter, AngelList, etc).  Time will certainly tell.

All I have to say is that this is VERY exciting!  Not just for startups.  Not just for people willing to invest money in startups.  But…for our economy…and for our country.  This has the POTENTIAL to fundamentally change how we do business, and that is something to get fired up about.

UPDATE:  Additional resources
Infographic from CrowdFunder.com
JOBS Act explained by Steve Case

The venue was East Village Tavern and Bowl.  The event was great and we met a ton of people interested in Embarke.  I’ll keep this short and get right to the photos.  The place was packed 20 minutes into the event and ran strong for a few hours.

If you also have photos of the event you’d like to share, send us a note and we’ll get them posted!

Photos 1-10 are courtesy of Richie Edquid.
Full album located here.

Photos 11-13 are courtesy of Kevin Baird.
Full album located here.

Thanks for the great snaps!

The festival was two solid days, day one being 8am-6pm and day two running until around 8pm or so.  That’s a lot of standing and a lot of talking, but it was well worth it.

We had two goals in mind going to this conference, and both had to do with developers.

1. Meet developers (and companies) that want to use our product.
2. Meet developers that want to work with us on Embarke.

The festival brought a lot of both to the table and we’re very happy about that.

Below are some photos, which can also be seen from our Facebook Page.  Cheers!

From the BizSpark Plus website:

Microsoft BizSpark is a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage startups. The new BizSpark Plus Program is an extension of the BizSpark Program, designed to provide high potential startups with additional offers, products and services from Microsoft, available through select incubators and accelerators. These BizSpark Plus Partners are chosen for their exceptional ability to impact their local markets, their influence in the entrepreneurial community and their proven success with early-stage startups. BizSpark Plus offers are available to leading startups by invite-only through their relationship with BizSpark Plus Partners.

Our long-standing relationships with Microsoft have been amazing and our evangelists have been beyond helpful to us since inception.  We’re looking forward to this next phase with them!

Thanks very much, from Al and Bryan!

Embarke's New Website Design

After grinding it out for a few weeks, today we officially launched our new website!

As you can see, the focus is heavy on the API we’ve been working so diligently on.

The purpose of this website re-launch is multi-fold:

1. Build it on a Content Management System that we can grow with.
2. Showcase the Social Conversations API.
3. Have this ready for the Launch Festival, which we are attending on March 7-8th.  We have a demo pit booth, so come see us!
4. Step it up a notch!  Hopefully you think we did…

Feel free to provide feedback on the site in the comments below, good OR bad (we can take it, and appreciate it!).

Some of you may be wondering where the old site and Twitter-based “product” went?  We’ve named it and you can find it at RemoteReply – Our goal is to release this on open source in the near future, and create other sample products to go along with it!

Cheers…

Chris Corriveau, StockTwits CTO, Embarke Advisor

I’m incredibly proud to announce that Chris Corriveau, the CTO of StockTwits, has joined Embarke as an advisor today!

Chris has been an amazing resource for both Bryan and I since June of 2011, and it was time we made it official.  He’s been a firm believer in what we were trying to accomplish even when our initial ideas were full of holes and lacked a viable market.

His technological background, aptitute, and grasp of the entire social ecosystem that exists on the Internet is astounding and in case it’s not been made clear yet…we’re STOKED to have him on board!

To learn more about Chris check out his profile here on Embarke, or start with his about.me profile where all of his social connections are listed.

Cheers!

We just received word that Embarke was tied for 3rd in the demo table competition at the Founder Showcase last week!  There were 31 other tables at the showcase so we’re pretty proud of this accomplishment.

The spectators at the conference were the ones voting and they included a mix of entrepreneurs, developers, and investors.  We launched our first version of the Embarke at the showcase, and are excited to see that we resonated with enough people to share a 3rd place spot.

Cheers!

Al and Bryan at the Founder Showcase

On Tuesday, November 8, 2011 – Embarke released its first beta version of code (nicknamed “iterate”).  The launch occurred at the Founder Showcase in San Francisco to a crowd of 500+ attendees.

After weeks of preparation, a weekend of insanity, a day of the Showcase, and another day of Founder Institute Graduate sessions, we were spent.  However, it didn’t take long for us to wake back up and get to work again.

Expect one of our update emails coming next week (around Tuesday).  If you’re not on the list, or want to try out the beta…be sure to sign up.

We’ll be sending out beta invites at a pretty frequent pace starting next week!

Until then, enjoy a few pictures of the event on our Facebook page – and give us a “like” while you’re there!

Cheers!
Al  @ALBsharah
Bryan  @Bryathlon
Embarke  @Embarke