Ryan just wrapped up Tend’s intro video. Believe it or not, he did nearly the entire thing with a combination of Keynote and Screenflow. Great work Ryan!

It’s been about one year since we came up with the concept for Tend.

In early 2014, I was noticing that some of Purlem’s most active users were using PURLs as way to segment out their customers into specific marketing “buckets.” For example, those that visited their PURL on multiple occasions would be sent to a “hot lead” bucket. Or if a PURL visitor clicked on a link to learn more about healthcare, they would go into the “healthcare” bucket. The buckets would then be used to trigger future marketing messages.

At first, I was thinking of ways to build the “buckets” in as a feature to Purlem. Around this same time, Ryan was also thinking of ways to automate marketing messages based on website visitor activity. I remember day, “Dude - we better keep talking, otherwise we might become competitors.”

“Ryan and I last Feb working on Tend”

So we did. We did a lot of brainstorming...

I’ve written about The Purlem Story a couple years back on Purlem’s blog. When I started Purlem, I knew very little about software development. Sure, I could throw together a quick site in Dreamweaver, but making that site dynamic in any way was a bit outside my wheel-house.

I’m saying that because I was not a software developer when I started Purlem. I had an idea, threw something together in Dreamweaver (you could do the same with square space, or launchrock), and tried to sell it. No developer necessary.

Here is what one of the first iterations of Purlem looked like. Don’t laugh.

I see it often - somebody has an idea for an app, and they assume their first step is to find a developer to build it. I mean, this is the fun part! However, unless you have a ton of cash on your side, this is a mistake.

Take Alex as an example. He’s a friend of mine and who recently built...

If I’m not hanging out with family, I’m probably in front of my computer building something. Family and business are the two loves of my life. And I feel extremely fortunate that my business (ie Purlem and Tend), allow for this balance.

My goal with this blog is to create a daily “journal” on the art of bootstrapping a business, while maintaining a lifestyle you can be proud of.

There was a stretch of about a year that I wrote on Purlem’s blog nearly every day. My primary objective for blogging was to help Purlem’s ranking on Google, and it did work for the most part. You can now find Purlem ranking on page 1 for most of our major keywords.
I then started to get burnt out from the blogging, and new posts started to slow drastically. Thankfully, I haven’t been punished by Google yet for the lack of new content.

I nice side-effect was that I found blogging helped me to think...

Welcome to StorkBoots - a new journal format blog about business and babies. I’m Marty - founder at Purlem.com, co-founder at Tendinc.com, husband to my biggest cheerleader, and dad to the new loves of my life - Dillon (2 years old), Emma (1 year old), and another baby girl on the way. Yep - three kids under 3 years.

A year before I started Purlem, you would have found me walking into random mom and pop stores, to sell them radio ads. I’d take appointments anywhere. Once, I found myself on the south side of Chicago, walking into a “drapery” company - which ended up being in somebody’s living room. I step out of my car, feeling incredible uncomfortable wearing a suite, and a bit scared for my life. I walk into their house, baby screaming in the background, as they proudly showed me drapes. I wasn’t sure who was selling who. They didn’t end up buying.

“MariKate and I around this...