Tend is 1

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 on what Tend could be. Although we never broke out the business model canvas we did focus our early conversations around how the product would fit/be different in the current market, who the potential customers could be, and how we would be able to make money from it.

I jumped on developing the product right away around the “buckets” concept. We had a working product within two weeks and immediately started inviting friends to use it.

Getting the product out there, with real users, allowed us to get quality feedback extremely quickly. Throughout the year we (we’ll - mostly Ryan) would meet with our users and prospects face to face. We were doing things that certainly wouldn’t scale. But it gave us immediate and quality feedback on the product.

And then the iterating began. For a while it became more of a sales tool. Then email tracking. Then a full-blown analytics platform. Today, it’s a data feed of what your customers/prospects are doing and where they came from. The product is 100% better than I ever could have imagined when we set out last year.

I’m very happy with where we have been able to get the product in a year. As of today we have 90 people with Tend installed on their website, and we’re identifying a new website visitor every minute.

Moving forward we will be faced with our biggest challenge yet - letting enough people know that Tend exists, while not breaking the bank. After all - we are bootstrapping!