Local social media management site Hootsuite has existed for three years.
On Thursday, it signed up its 5 millionth user, having gained over four million users in less than two years. It has now expanded to the U.K., and is available in over 200 countries in 20+ languages.
Dave Olson was employee No.7 at Hootsuite back in the day when the company was still just a promising start-up.
He is now the vice president of community at the rapidly expanding company.
Hootsuite was designed with a non-technical mindset. And while their early competitors were “built by geeks for geeks,” Olson says Hootsuite targets marketers and brand managers who need to manage multiple social media channels, but don’t need to be tech geniuses to figure it out.
“Anyone can jump in, whether from a non-profit group, or you just want to set up Twitter and Facebook for your softball team, we have a tool that everyone can use.”
The bulk of Hootsuite users are individuals who use the service for free.
For companies and social media agencies, there is a paid pro account that gives unlimited options and access to analytics.
There is also an enterprise package for the biggest companies in the world, which include McDonalds, PepsiCo, WWF, Lamborghini, Virgin, Sony Music and many more.
Olson says the pro and enterprise accounts are paying the freight for everything.
“This does not diminish the contributions of our free users. We love them all equally.”
Asked how Hootsuite went from scratch to 5 million users in a few years, Olson says much of it has to do with being able to respond to unique opportunities when they present themselves.
“You can plan all you want, but when an opportunity presents itself to tell the story or get involved in a story, you have to be nimble enough to seize and participate in that story.”
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One of these stories was the 2011 revolution in Egypt.
After realizing the full potential of social media to drive change within its country, the Egyptian government lost no time blocking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Hootsuite, meanwhile, was not affected.
“For 36 hours, we were the voice of the revolution, the US embassy, Christiane Amanpour, CNN, every social message that went out from Egypt during that time went out through Hootsuite,” says Olson.
That brought Hootsuite into international headlines.
Then, there was the Chrysler Twitter disaster when someone with access to the company’s account dropped an F-bomb on its thousands of followers.
The incident happened on a Thursday.
By Tuesday of next week, Olson says Hootsuite had introduced a security feature for its enterprise customers to prevent anything like that from happening in the future.
Hootsuite employs over 200 people. Just a year ago, they had 45 employees. They are now moving to a bigger office, and have recently opened their first office abroad.
When it comes to hiring people and doing business, Olson says maintaining their “culture” is paramount.
“We are a pretty flat hierarchy…and because so many people have been here for less than 6 months, there is a bit of an egalitarian feeling.”
“You hear a lot about these dot com officers. We don’t have a gourmet chef or a massage room and all that. Maybe one day…..But that is not us.
The most valuable thing that you get here is your ideas have meaning and merit, and the things that you do might be seen by millions of people tomorrow.”
Throughout its existence, Hootsuite has remained faithful to Vancouver.
It’s buckling the current trend that sees a lot of growing Canadian start-ups pack up and move to either the Silicon Valley or New York.
But, Olson says all the talent they want is already here.
“Here we also have this cape of solitude where we can figure out our own way of solving problems. We don’t have the influence of all these people saying — this is what you should do. It allows us to conduct our own experiment, and do our own thing.”
Locally, there is also no one who can even marginally compete with Hootsuite.
Globally, they are seeing their former competition slowly disintegrating, but there is a new cohort of competitors who are watching the owl like a hawk.
“We have a new batch of competitors who have really come up on the heels of Hootsuite,” says Olson. “They watch us very, very carefully and think they can do something better and differently. But rather than talk about them, we look at how hard we can push ourselves.”
When it comes to Twitter itself, Olson says they don’t consider Twitter to be their competitor.
“Think of us as a social media Switzerland. We are a kind of clearing house, a switchboard for all these different tools. We are a transmission company.”
He says Twitter realizes that brands need a tool like Hootsuite in order to manage their multiple accounts.
“So they would rather play friendly with us.”
Even though Olson dodged the question of whether Twitter has ever offered to buy Hootsuite out, he said, “I think since we are still here, you can imagine what that answer would be.”
“We want to make this into a billion dollar company, and we are not there yet. We all know we can add more value to this. We are having a great time building this company despite our ugly officers and chaotic environment.”
As for the company’s future, Olson says it definitely lies in the mobile and continued expansion abroad.
But even more importantly, it is about maintaining the very culture that made Hootsuite successful.
“Keeping that entrepreneurial hustle alive and, dare I say, innovation, behind us. This is critically important,” says Olson.
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