Dear Smakers,

Well, it’s been a wild ride and we gave it a great shot.  Unfortunately, you’re going to have to live with your email and social media clutter for now.

We cannot thank our members enough for trying Smak.  For those of you who were able to get your lives organized, and for all the recruiters who found significant value in the daily alerts, we are truly sorry that we are not able to continue the service for you.  The reality is the pace of changes in social media technology, usage policies and the growing challenge of data security required more resources than we had.  We also have been unable to find a suitable replacement for our service, please let us know if you do!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank a few people who were there for us and made this such a great journey.

·         First and foremost, our spouses and families for putting up with the long days, late nights, and draining bank accounts.  You are why we did this, and why we will not stop.

·         Second, we’d like to thank the great team of people who have been there with us on this journey:  Jeremy Brace, Gina Luciano, Phyllis Speen, Alex Lougovstov, Cassio Domingues, Jonathan Schwartz, Pardees Safizadeh, Kim Ring, Scott Cote, Morris Feldman and other virtual members of Smak.

·         We also thank our mentors and advisors; your support, encouragement and ultimately wisdom to help us come to this decision is so greatly appreciated.

·         Finally, we would like to thank the Northeastern University IDEA team, the MassChallenge team, Bobbie Carlton and Mass Innovation Nights, the 128 Innovation Group, Venture Cafe, Dave McLaughlin and the Vsnap team, and the rest of the awesome startup community that has grown here in Boston.  You have become friends & family, keep the fight alive.

Matt and Doug

To keep in touch with Matt you can follow him here:

Twitter: @VigilantGuy

LinkedIn:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbhooper  (Please add a note to the LinkedIn invite)

To keep in touch with Doug

Twitter: @doug_fleming

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasfleming

You connect with your customers through social media and email daily, but are you making sure they’re getting the experience they deserve?  As professionals, many of us struggle to sift through our communication clutter to find the important data that helps us leverage our relationships and stay on top of possible opportunities.  As more and more social media sites launch each day, and our reliance on email communication grows, the need to incorporate a structured Customer Experience Management (CEM) strategy into your business model becomes imperative for success.

What is CEM?

Customer experience management (CEM) helps companies oversee and analyze every interaction they have with a customer for the duration of the relationship.  The ability to monitor engagement and provide stellar customer service has improved with social media sites as Twitter and Facebook.  Now, brands can provide rich interaction with customers and rapid response to complaints using real time communication. As social media grows more powerful, so does a company’s need for structured CEM.

How can Smak help?

Smak is built for the busy professional who struggles to juggle the massive amount of incoming messages he or she attempts to process each day. Too much social media and email clutter can lead to decreased productivity and missed opportunities – simply NOT an option for optimal success. By providing one view into all of your communication stream, Smak enhances your customer relationships, increases your responsiveness to key clients, improves your sales and lead generation, and automates tedious customer relationship tasks.  Smak makes email and social media intelligence easy with conversations…not clutter.

So we are a weekend away from hearing if we are getting into MassChallenge.  Smak like 1200 other startups hopes to be part of the most energetic startup ecosystem Boston has ever seen.  For us this would be round 2, having been fortunate enough to participate in the 2011 program.

So I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts and experiences for others hoping to realize their dream of being successful startups.  As CEO and co-founder of Smak, I have found starting a software business full of excitement and terror.  Recently I have been telling people startup life is somewhere between suicide and Instragram.

Here are a few things I have learned the hard way:

1) Curb your enthusiasm but not your passion.

It’s awesome all the things you can do, all the places you can take your company, own it.  Seriously own it like your bank card, keep it protected deep in your wallet or purse.  If you let your ideas fly loosely you will set yourself up for frustration very quickly and you will confuse your brand out of the gate.  Unfortunately in the startup scene you will learn about the BHAG  - “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”.  You will be told you must have one.  Translate that very quickly into a very small vision that is big to you.  What investors and mentors want from you is a product you can pump out in the next 6months that will get consistent customers.

After a year of not having a vertical focus, Smak has finally locked on to the recruiter market.  Investors are returning my calls, sign ups are accelerating, and our marketing and product alignment are starting to really gel and take shape.

Every startup I’ve seen get real traction and success in accelerators did one thing really well.  Find that.

2) A world full of headlines

Leave jealousy at the door and put on your learning cap!

You will find yourself getting pissed every time you read a headline about another company getting investment, press pick-up, a killer advisor.  Get over it, and quickly. This is not a time for whining and moaning and self-pity, it’s a time for you to imitate and improve.   The whole part of being in the ecosystem is  to learn from others and build skills (or find people who have them) that will take you to the next level.

A perfect example of this for me was in March, 2012 when Paul Graham released the blog “Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas” #2 – a new Email client, Ugh! everyone and their brother felt obligated to tell me about this post making me really question whether Smak was such a good idea.  At the same time Engage.io a Smak competitor announced a great round of funding after only being around for 4months.  For weeks I was like “what are we doing, how can we possibly compete with guys like this”. Then I read a post by the founderWilliam Mougayar.  Reality is he had been working on this for years, struggled significantly, and continuing to fight for his vision.

So I got over my jealousy, studied and watched him closely, learning, learning, learning.  He is amazing, and I have learned so much from him in just a few short weeks.  So don’t let the headlines beat you down, dig into what is behind the headlines.

3) You don’t ask, you don’t get

One of the biggest mistakes we made in the 2011 program is we did not ask enough.

Ask quickly, ask often, ask specifically.  You are going to hear an expression: “Ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you’ll get money”.  My experience is I asked for advice and I got… advice!

Boston has incredible resources, but like any resource it’s limited.  Funds, people’s time to help, technical talent are all limited pools that a lot of other companies are competing for.  Figure out what you truly need and make that all you need.

We wasted a lot of cycles last year on investors.  We thought we needed money (cause we did), but we didn’t have product market fit yet.  Once we realized that we could never get money without market fit and customers we stopped wasting time on getting funds and focused getting out of Alpha and into Beta. Now that we had market fit next we needed customers.  Now we need cash and because we have market fit and customers, we’ll get it.

So here’s the point! If you don’t have a production ready product yet and get an intro to a VC, understand you will likely not get money from them, however you could get access to their Entrepreneur in Residence who could give you some awesome guidance.  If you waste time going after money you are really not ready for, you lose the opportunity to get what you really need which is validation and direction.  Remember point 2 above, “learning” is critical at this stage of your business.

I wish everyone of the 1200 all the best in their business, whether they get intoMassChallenge.

If I can be of any help let me know.  Best way is to hit me up twitter @heyhoop  or@vigilantguy.

Our unique intelligence platform is what we call LifeModes^TM.  The idea is based simply on the fact that we all have different conversations going on in our life.  Some personal, some professional, and others just interesting news or information we want to stay on top of.  Our communication is not based on our interests, rather we have channels of communication that puts all of these conversations into single buckets.

For example, think about the communication you try to manage.

Facebook – Family, friends, hobbies, news, for some more and more it’s business colleagues.

Email – We get news letters, emails from friends, work emails on our personal accounts, news in our business accounts.

Add your other 4 email accounts, LinkedIn, Twitter, ugh!!!  Somebody Smak me.

This is where LifeModes^TM come in. LifeModes^TMare your high-level buckets. Think of them as inbox’s for your interests and focuses. We provide 5 for you when you first sign up for Smak.

Work – Business related communication

Home – Personal related communication

Hidden – Communication you don’t want to see unless you search for it.

Unassigned – This will show all the communication that you have not assigned.

All – This shows all communication, no matter what LifeMode^TM it is in.

As you assign your contacts into LifeModes^TM, Smak will become smarter, and start to recognize patterns and automatically sort information for you.

You setup LifeModes^TM based on your own personal lifestyle.  However, to get you started here are a few best practices we have learned from our Beta Users

LifeModes^TM suggestions:

News  - Assign the twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts you follow for news to this LifeMode.  You can also send all the newsletters you follow here as well.

Personally I have 3 Sub-LifeModes^TM setup under my news:  Smak News; Startup News; Tech News.  Just so I can scan through them quicker.

Coupons  - Assign all the advertising and brands you follow to Coupons.

Events - I love this one.  Assign all your Eventbrite, Meetup, and other automated program alerts so you can see events in one place.

Network – Great place to dump people you meet at event or networking, but you are really not sure where the relationship is going yet.   (remember it’s super easy to re-assign later)

Purchases & Registrations – Dump receipts from Amazon, BestBuy, Staples, even your Smak registration here.  You don’t need to be bugged by these updates, but you don’t want to unsubscribe either.

Social Updates - Another great one.  Bulk all those crazy updates into a bucket.  No need to look at them, but keep them around for searching and analytics.  (facebook, twitter, klout, empire avenue, google+, branch out, plaxo, LinkedIn, Quora, pinterest, yelp, foursquare, gowalla, getglue…. I’m sure I’m missing a few here.)  My current unread 700+   That is a lot of stuff I didn’t have to read and a lot of time saved.

Have some more ideas?   Please share them with us, we’d love to crowd-source some of these practices.

-Matt

March 27, 2011

Introduction:

Welcome to Social Media 202:  What’s Next?  The importance of social media for business growth is constantly being drilled into our professional heads.  But let’s face it…we barely have enough time to keep up with how we communicate on a daily basis.  How do we get the mental bandwidth needed to juggle all of these social media sites, and guarantee that the time put forth to maintain them will produce a high ROI?

We asked all of you about the challenges you face when it comes to social media.  This is what we found:

In this cut throat competitive world, we are hungry professionals bombarded by noise and fighting to get our message heard.  We’ve put together a panel of some of the top professionals in Boston who have proven experience and success using social media to break through the clutter and engage their clients.

We would love to hear about your experience at Social Media 202.  Send us your feedback at feedback@mysmak.com.

The Experts

Senior Vice President / Director Digital Incubator
Allen & Gerritsen

@SchneiderMike is SVP, Director Digital Incubator for Allen & Gerritsen, ranked by Advertising Age in the Top 50 Independent agencies in the US. The Digital Incubator is a lab responsible for building products and engaging experiences rooted in ROI while helping define “what’s next” for the agency and the industry.  Mike has crafted paid, owned and earned media strategies, built award-winning communities, designed and implemented B2B and consumer segmentation, content management and customer relationship management solutions. He blogs for several sites including a technology and social media blog called Digital Before Digital. He was recognized in 2010 as one of Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40. He is writing Location Based Marketing for Dummies with Aaron Strout.

Joselin Mane
Founder
Boston TweetUp
@JoselinMane is a passionate Internet marketing consultant with more than 20 years of computer technology experience complemented by nine years of online marketing experience and more than 10 years of business development experience. His focus is working with small/midsize businesses, organizations and entrepreneurs to best leverage Internet technologies to systematically reach their financial and/or growth goals. Joselin specializes in wrapping marketing around technology to help grow his clients’ businesses in a more efficient way. Joselin’s expertise led him to be featured in a full-page advertisement for IBM within two years of being employed there. He was also appointed to an elite team within IBM’s elearning division, where he received personal requests for all large and/or strategically sensitive deals.

Lora Kratchounova
Scratch Marketing & Media
@ScratchMM Lora has a Bachelor of Arts in journalism and mass communications from the American University in Bulgaria and a master’s degree in advertising and consumer relations from Emerson College. Among other things, she is a Six Sigma Green Belt, so watch out.  Lora currently serves on the Executive Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge and heads up the Marketing Committee – join the MIT Forum on Facebook and follow the MIT Forum on Twitter at @Mitefcmb.

Michael Pace
Community Manager

@mpace101 Michael Pace (currently a free agent) was previously the Director of Customer Support & Community Management for Constant Contact & Capital One, and a leader in transforming the customer service world to exceed the needs of the customer, including this new social landscape.  He is considered one of the country’s leading speakers and writers on the topic of social media customer service, and has actually created scalable, high quality social support environments.  Active Board Member of the North East Contact Center Forum, New England’s largest call center community.  You can connect with Michael on Twitter @mpace101 and on LinkedIn.  Michael also writes a weekly blog at www.thepaceofservice.com

Matt Hooper

CEO & Co-Founder

Smak

@HeyHoop A serial entrepreneur, technologist and marketer, Matt has led innovative companies by aggressively building competitive brand recognition and customer retention. Matt is the PR & Marketing Chair of Boston Society of Information Management, and co-host of the #1 rated ITSM podcast.

Agenda

7:15 pm – Welcome

7:30 pm – Begin panel discussion (three topics):

1. Building and maintaining a brand digitally

2. Making your brand stand out in the sea of noise that exists with social media

3. Leveraging social networks and relationships to improve customer service and engagement

8:15 pm – Questions and Answers
(Submit in person, via Smak Facebook page or via Twitter Chat:  #SMWN2020)

8:30 pm – Open Networking

Notes

Where our co-founders will be interviewed by Jeffrey  Davis author of  ”The 24 Hour Turn around” and host of  ”Mind your Own Business“ Radio Show. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Thursday to hear my segment!

Local Stations:

WBNW 1120 AM – Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA

or stream online @ MYOBTheRadioShow.com

Visit www.24-hourturnaround.com

Where our co-founders will be interviewed by Jeffrey  Davis author of  ”The 24 Hour Turn around” and host of  ”Mind your Own Business“ Radio Show. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Thursday to hear my segment!

Local Stations:

WBNW 1120 AM – Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA

or stream online @ MYOBTheRadioShow.com

Visit www.24-hourturnaround.com

We don’t have all the answers. What we do have are these 8 small ways to help keep you more on top of things. These are some tools we’ve used on our own crazy lives, and they’ve helped.

1. Feng shui your office/house.
Your office should be efficient, but pleasant. Use your own tastes to create a streamlined, organized environment that you actually like spending time in.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/using-feng-shui-at-work-private-offices-and-cubicl.html

2. Make lists of tasks as you go through your day and check them off. Mashable put out a great list of 5 free list-making apps. We love Lucid lists, which puts your tasks in order of priority and alerts you when a task has been on the list unchecked, for too long.

http://mashable.com/2010/11/25/iphone-to-do-list-apps/

3. Remember people’s birthdays.
Sit down with a list of names, find their birthdays on Facebook, and put them in your phone calendar. It’ll take an hour and make you a better friend for a year.

http://download.cnet.com/Storm-Software-Birthday-Alert/3000-2094_4-10452184.html

4. Stop being late.
We don’t need to tell you why. The “Routine” app is helpful at scheduling time for your day’s events and making sure you stick to the time constraints.

http://dailyappshow.com/routine-timer-iphone-app-review

5. Be prepared on the go.
Keep a phone charger in the car. Leave one with you. Carry one with you. It’s a small investment for a big reward. This iPhone solar charger is great – you don’t need anything around to keep your phone juiced.

http://mashable.com/follow/topics/solar-charger/

6. Streamline your conversations. Smak
 organizes your contacts to best serve you. Depending on where you are – work, home, school – you limit your interactions to only work contacts, only family, etc. Use your time wisely.

www.mysmak.com

7. Daily affirmation or notes of encouragement really do remind you to think positively and stay focused. There are apps that will give you a daily affirmation, or you can look up your own favorites and post-it them in a place you’ll see every day.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unique-daily-affirmations/id418693319?mt=8

8. Organize your computer desktop. If your desktop looks how mine used to, you probably have documents scattered everywhere. Organize with folders. Clutter is intimidating, organization is easy.

If anyone has additions, forward them on. We’d love to hear what works for you.

You love that Smak can look across all the social networks and email accounts you manage, but you are not ready to give up your Inbox of choice.  We get it, and we are good with it.

Smak is about productivity and intelligence.  Thus we are extremely excited to announce our partnership with PowerInbox to deliver an exciting new feature.  You can now get communication from any contact from any of your networks delivered to you in your current email client. This partnership with PowerInbox will save you valuable time and make interacting with us easier by providing rich dynamic functionality inside your email. For instance, instead of a simple message forwarded to your Gmail, you can now see the full conversation of your contact from all the ways you are connected to that contact (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…).

It’s free, fast and all for you. The best part is, this will work across any of our emails on any email client (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc). Yup, life just got a lot more convenient.

When would I use this?

You’re a sales person waiting to hear from a client.  Will they send it on LinkedIn, Twitter, or your private email address.  Now it doesn’t matter.

Have a meeting with someone coming up?  What if they need to cancel and use LinkedIn or a DM on twitter to tell you?   With Smak alerts, it doesn’t matter.

Just add all your accounts in Smak, click the contacts button and set which email you want the communication alert sent to.  <detailed instructions here: http://www.mysmak.com/PISmaksetup.pdf>  Don’t hesitate to email us with any problems getting started.

We are continuing to crank out features to make your life easier, so please keep the feedback button lit up.

Smak Team

Support@mysmak.com

See more about PowerInbox:

Boston Innovation http://bostinno.com/2012/02/08/powerinbox-launches-api-so-you-can-learn-to-love-your-inbox-again/

TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/08/powerinbox-the-service-that-turns-emails-into-apps-launches-api/

The Next Web http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/02/08/powerinbox-launches-a-massive-api-letting-anyone-add-apps-to-their-emails/

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