Lenddo Raises $8M To Us...

Online reputation and financial services startup Lenddo has raised an $8 million Series A Round from institutional investors Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital, and Metamorphic Ventures, as well as angel investors such as Geoff Judge, David Kidder, Scott Heiferman, and Barry Silbert. The startup plans to take that funding and help make loans available to customers who normally wouldn’t have access to them. Lenddo’s mission is to help consumers in emerging markets develop creditworthiness and gain access to financial services, using online activity as a way to judge their reliability in paying back loans. The startup is already active in markets like the Philippines and Colombia, where it uses activity on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to judge their online reputations and provide capital that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them. Lenddo makes 3-, 6-, and 12-month loans in the two markets it operates in, with the average repayment time currently at about 9.5 months. The startup aims to provide loans with the lowest interest rates available, CEO Jeff Stewart told me by phone, although for many that apply, Lenddo is the only real option available to them. Loan amount are typically about a month’s pay, which is around $400 in the Philippines and $800 in Colombia, according to Stewart. So far, the program appears to be working, with Lenddo’s repayment rate falling roughly in line with other traditional microfinance systems, a rate that is typically above 95 percent. With that in mind, Lenddo has secured funding to hire more engineers and expand into other markets. But Stewart was mum on details of where it plans to expand: The company has members in 35 countries currently, so it plans to let its community decide where its next office will be.

So Email Marketing’s De...

Everyone seems to be real quick to throw dirt on email marketing’s grave these days. Why? Because it’s not social media. Well, not to sound blunt (although it will), that’s stupid. If you need more evidence that email is indeed alive and well you should consider what HubSpot (a Marketing Pilgrim sponsor of our inbound marketing channel ) has added to their suite of, you guessed it, e-mail. OK, so if a company that has managed to get over $65 million in VC backing (included in that is Google Ventures) and currently boasts just shy of 7,000 users of their inbound marketing tools decides to incorporate email into its offerings can it be that dead? The Boston Globe reports When Cambridge [MA] marketing software firm HubSpot Inc. launched in 2006, e-mail pitching was considered old-fashioned and spam-riddled. Consumers struggling with e-mail overload were often not receptive to more electronic clutter. HubSpot didn’t even build e-mail marketing products. That changes on Tuesday, when HubSpot will at last offer its own tools to manage, create, and track e-mail marketing campaigns in its standard menu of services. It’s a mark of how much life the company thinks is left in the old Internet standby. “A lot of people think that e-mail marketing is dead,’’ said HubSpot marketing manager Jessica Meher, “but we think it still has a lot of power if it’s done right.” Ok, so to say that HubSpot has its pulse on everything that is correct is a bit presumptuous. I get that. But why would a company that has already grown at a dizzying rate with a new concept (inbound marketing) and momentum in the marketplace use resources to build something into its platform that is failing? Email marketing is not what it used to be and that’s why it is more effective than ever. I personally have undervalued email marketing and I am kicking myself for it. It can be dangerous to buy into conventional (or crowd) wisdom about things. With everyone barking that spam and phishing had ruined email it almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The difference with email marketing today is that now that there is SO much noise in the online space, it is actually a way to step away from that fray (which I liken to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange where everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs but somehow business still gets done) and be set apart from the craziness that is social media. HubSpot had their epiphany of sorts pretty recently HubSpot’s Meher said the company began to seriously consider adding e-mail marketing services last year after it purchased Cambridge start-up Performable, which had been developing analytical tools to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Performable’s 18-person team moved over to HubSpot. One of the team’s first projects, according to Meher, was to develop an e-mail marketing platform that was tightly integrated with the rest of HubSpot’s offerings. “We weren’t interested in e-mail marketing as a silo,’’ Meher said. It’s this tight integration with other areas of a company’s marketing efforts that is the key. Email, just like any other single marketing technique or tactic, is not the only thing that will win the day. In fact, what may be happening is that rather than the “buy a list and hope someone responds” days we are simply looking at a more mature approach to email marketing. That maturity shows itself in more direct campaigns with very specific goals that go to only the right people for the right reasons. In the process it can promote all the other marketing activities (blogs, social and more) that a company is engaged in to reach their target market where they are rather than where the marketer thinks they should be. Where are you on email marketing? We are seeing more and more talk about its effectiveness in light of the social and mobile Internet age. Are you? Are you using it strategically? Are you finding how it dovetails with the rest of your marketing campaigns and thus becomes truly effective? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Also, would you like to see email from us here at Marketing Pilgrim?

Look Out: Pinterest Mar...

A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate , which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA , First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers. Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn’t been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering. Gupta notes that while there have been a number of companies that have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon and started to offer analytics to measure how brands are resonating on the social network, Curalate is the first to look not just at what a brand is posting on the site, but it can also track what regular people are posting. In other words, not just the sweater as J.Crew pins it, but as you or I might pin it, too. “Think of us as playing a giant game of Memory,” he says. “Every time someone adds that sweater it adds that brand. We play that game of memory and deliver the conversation and analytics behind it, all at ‘Pinterest scale.’” Curalate is then able to track how that one piece of content moves throughout Pinterest and potentially eventually goes to a company’s site to convert into a purchase. Gupta notes that the solutions Curalate has built are proprietary but are based on some known techniques in visual search. This is a gap that Patrick Chung, a partner at NEA, says is only now starting to get addressed, as brands continue to see huge traffic coming from the image-based social network — contrary to whatever reports we’ve heard that traffic seems to be leveling off at the site. “Pinterest is being crushed under the weight of its own traffic,” Chung says, who notes that brands can tell that there is a lot of traffic coming to their e-commerce sites from Pinterest, but that’s effectively all they know. “Brands  have no idea how it’s all happening, it’s just a massive amount of traffic being driven to their e-commerce sites. It’s just an enormous black hole. The complaint is ‘we have all this traffic from Pinterest but we have no idea what this is.” The idea, with Curalate, is that they will be able to now track exactly how that user arrived at its site — so that the brand can then hone and improve how it interfaces with sites like Pinterest in the future. Chung notes that while NEA invests in other social analytics companies — for example Hearsay Social and Sprout Social — Curalate stands apart from these in its focus on visual-based analytics. Companies that have already signed up to the service in two months of beta use are a testament to how the service, in its early days, is appealing both to other tech-savvy startups but also more traditional brands. The customer list includes Birchbox, Bonobos, Kraft, Neiman Marcus and Curalate’s Philadelphia neighbor, the online eyeglass sensation Warby Parker. Pricing comes in three tiers: $19/month, $49/month and $99/month for varying levels of service and tracking, Gupta says. While Pinterest will be the initial focus for Curalate, the plan is to extend it to other social networks that are also making a significant impact not through text but images: other sites that are likely to be added into the mix are Polyvore, Fancy, Wanelo and Instagram, says Gupta.

Stock Photography Servi...

The online stock photography service Shutterstock filed its plans for an initial public offering today. The company plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering haven’t been decided yet, but the company’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notes that it plans to raise around $115 million through this IPO. That’s the number Shutterstock used to estimate its filing fees with the SEC, though, so the actual size of the IPO could still turn out to be different. Shutterstock reported revenue of $120 million in 2011 and a profit of just under $21.9 million. Shutterstock was founded in 2003 by Jonathan Oringer, who is still the company’s CEO. The company has received venture backing from Insight Venture Partners and Oringer’s own Pixel Holdings Inc. According to its S-1 filing, Shutterstock currently offers one of the largest content libraries in the commercial digital imagery industry with over 19 million photographs and illustrations and about 500,000 videos from more than 35,000 contributors. In 2011, the company delivered more than 58 million paid downloads. The average cost per image on the site in 2011 was around $3. Shutterstock says that it had more than 550,000 paying customers in 2011. Shutterstock competes directly with other online stock photography services like iStockphoto and Fotalia, as well as more traditional services like Corbis and Getty Images. The company offers both subscriptions plans that give its users access to a set amount of images per day, as well as the ability to buy rights to individual images and videos in its collection. You can read the company’s complete S-1 filing here .

Yahoo: Lying, Resigning...

If you are Yahoo you have got to do one thing moving forward and one thing only. You have to find a way to make news that doesn’t involve you CEO’s level of competence. It’s pretty simple, don’t you think? Yahoo is a large publicly traded company, has (or more accurately had) thousands of employees, still is one of the leaders on the entire Internet in overall traffic but all it has become known for is being the fodder for the new National Enquirer type of “reporting” that has become the Internet industry space at times. They just need to stop listening to everyone and everything, they need to determine what it is they actually do, state it clearly then do it with a laser focus. Laser focus has not been the company’s forte in recent years. Want to see what I mean? Let’s review. Jerry Yang replaced by Carol Bartz – This was billed as the move for Yahoo to get serious. The removal of Jerry Yang to make room for a tough veteran c-level executive with a penchant for swearing like a longshoreman was supposed to put Yahoo on track. To sum up, we are now a couple years removed from the original hiring and high hopes around Bartz. Let;s just say her era at the helm will be felt for some time to come. Oh and, by the way, those effects have not been close to positive. Carol Bartz replaced by Scott Thompson – Once Bartz’s act grew old enough to get her fired by e-mail (or so the legend goes) we were introduced to the Scott Thompson era. An executive from PayPal with no experience dealing in a company that does what Yahoo does (whatever that is today), Thompson came in and started throwing away everything regardless if there was bath water, a baby or even a tub. Much of that collateral damage was more employees losing their jobs. Now the number of ex-Yahooers might actually outnumber the ranks of the current? Shareholder gets a bee in his bonnet and Thompson exposed as liar - If only Scott Thompson’s exposure had been him being a flasher in the park this would have all been easier to make sense of. Instead, one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, Daniel Loeb of Third Point, LLC wanted to run Thompson out of town. There were board of directors seats in question and things got testy. Loeb must have gone into this with his ace-in-the-hole being that he knew that Scott Thompson’s resume was, well let’s just say embellished a bit. You probably know about that matter of Thompson claiming to have a degree from a college that didn’t offer that degree program until years after he graduated? Those kinds of things can bring integrity into the fray. A no-no for sure. Thompson goes silent – In what can only be explained as a “WTF do we do now!?!?!?” reaction, Thompson and Yahoo played some bizarre dance of going silent, half apologizing then pointing fingers at the recruiting firm it hired to do such a stellar job of finding such a great CEO like Thompson. In the process that recruiting firm, Heidrick & Struggles, showed that there is sometimes more to a company name than meets the eye, as they struggled to not go down with this listing ship. In the end, Thompson’s and Yahoo’s handling of this is yet just another in a long list of reasons why Yahoo has become great business school case study fodder for what not to do in virtually every business situation. Thompson is fired resigns – Thompson has now been fired resigned and has been replaced. I won’t even bother giving you the name of the person because it may have changed from the time I finished this post and hit the publish button. (Actually it’s the head of global media at the company, Ross Levinsohn, who is now in charge and a new chairman of the board, Fred Amoroso, is in place as well). Thompson reveals he has cancer – The Wall Street Journal reports that late last week Thompspn revealed to the board that he has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and that is part of the reason why he is stepping down. I feel for the man because cancer sucks. It’s just so odd that this is being used as an element of this whole plot. It simply adds to the bizarre nature of the whole situation. Yahoo to decide if it pays Thompson on way out – Depending on how this whole thing is interpreted it appears that Thompson may miss out on some big money as a result of how this all came down. We’ll let the lawyers figure that out over time. In the end, there stands Yahoo. Living off the fact that a lot of people have apparently developed a Yahoo habit of coming to the site for years for email or whatever without really thinking about what Yahoo was doing to keep pace with the rest of the online world (which has not been much). It’s bruised, battered and looks nothing like it used to. Apparently the remaining staffers are quite demoralized and who wouldn’t be? I wish this would all just go away and Yahoo would just get down to business ….. or least what’s left of it. Your thoughts?