"Don’t be too hard on yourself when you’re first starting out" with Jessica Day

Jessica Day is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at IdeaScale — leading idea management software for the enterprise and government. IdeaScale has a client roster that includes numerous industry leaders, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers, Doctors Without Borders, Freddie Mac, Marriott Vacations Worldwide, NASA, the United Way, the US Air Force, and many others. Day volunteers for sustainability organizations and lives in Napa, CA. She holds an MFA in English, Creative Writing from the University of Washington.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I grew up in rural New Hampshire with a love for two things: people and stories. I loved to ask people questions and I spent most of my free time reading (if you’re familiar with the Book It program - I basically lived off of a steady diet of Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas that I bought with all the book credits that I got). That love of reading became a love of writing that eventually led to a Masters's in Creative Writing at the University of Washington. 

When I graduated from that program, I realized that the internet had created a demand for a continuous stream of storytelling content: case studies, press releases, interviews - and I finally got start taking my love of interviewing people and telling their stories and turning it into meaningful online content.  I started writing for a number of different companies: Microsoft, Ascentium, while also freelancing for several smaller firms which is what led me to my co-founders and our company, IdeaScale. 

What inspired you to start your business?  

Well, it’s funny how when you care deeply about people and their stories, you learn a lot about what happens to people and their ideas. When my co-founders and I were starting our careers at large companies - we ran into a lot of people with the same frustration: they had lots of great ideas that never took off. You could spend years at a company: earn credibility, build alliances, and still never be able to present your ideas to senior leadership. We wanted to help people gain more visibility for their ideas and to help organizations to see into their blind spots.

Where is your business based?

Our headquarters is in Berkeley, California.  

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?

Well, IdeaScale had created our first minimum viable product as President Barack Obama was entering the White House and when he did, he launched the Open Government Initiative in which he stipulated that all government agencies needed a system that connected them to citizens in a way that was transparent, participatory and collaborative. And that’s just what our system was designed to do… and also to give leaders and organizations the ability to organize and take action on that feedback.

So actually one of our first contracts was the White House who was launching to several agencies and when that happened, we ended up launching in 23 other agencies at the same time. And to make sure that those first customers were successful - we spent a lot of time customizing. IdeaScale was what people called a “new media” company (not just Twitter and MySpace, but tons of other companies that aren’t around anymore like Challengepost) and there were a lot of earned and unearned expectations. In fact, one of the biggest conflicts was about removing our logo from the site and we didn’t do it. We were talking to our contact at the White House and they said something like “you know that we just got off the phone with Google and they took the YouTube logo off the video, right?” and we just shifted uncomfortably in our seats and said we were leaving our logo up there and they went with it.

But we did launch and those customers propelled us into more agencies and relationships and that is why we’ve been able to bootstrap our business rather than ever take on any funding.

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?  

Because we were gathering and organizing rich sets of data for a completely new product offering (innovation management), one thing that we found we could offer that few other people could was data! We could take that data and repackage it into insights and content that drove stories and interests so that when people were just hearing about the concept of crowdsourced ideas for the first time, they ended up on our site!

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?  

One of the biggest challenges was switching our mindset from a sales-first organization (one that prioritizes new wins) to a company that was entirely customer obsessed. It is so much more cost effective to keep and grow existing customer relationships instead of always hunting for new business. Before we changed our strategy, we found that we were losing a lot of opportunities for growth. 

One of our most successful strategies in addressing this problem was building our customer success team to be one of our largest teams and up-skilling their capabilities to move beyond the software into strategic thinking. We also instituted quarterly business check-ins as a standard business practice with every customer to track their progress and make useful recommendations and as a result we’ve significantly improved our customer growth and retention. 

How do you stay focused? 

I thought that as an executive that I would spend more of my time researching and creating a vision for the company, but the fact of the matter is that I spend a lot of time in meetings with others - learning, removing obstacles and making decisions. You could be talking about wildly different and important things meeting to meeting, but to cope with that, I find myself returning to a piece of advice that I heard attributed to Bill Gates: when you’re in a room, be JUST in that room - not the one you just left, not the one later that day. That is the only way he was able to make impactful decisions together… by being present. 

How do you differentiate your business from the competition?  

There are tons of longtime competitors: from BrightIdea to Wazoku, but IdeaScale has a foundational belief set that good ideas can come from anywhere that guides much of our decision making.  In short, we try to remove all barriers to good ideas being heard… no matter what that looks like. For example, to make sure that anyone (no matter their capabilities) can participate in these conversations, we provide Section 508 capabilities out of the box or if you want to be able to share ideas with those who speak a different language, our crowd-validated real-time translation is really important to you. But we also want to empower people and process, and that’s led to our focus on building a community of practice: digital roundtables, our podcast, our invite-only user conference, an active LinkedIn group, and more. Really it’s about finding out what you need to create positive change in your system and configuring our team and solution around that.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

From the beginning, IdeaScale has been built on inbound interest and we’ve generated that interest by optimizing our site for search engine algorithms by sharing compelling, researched content that features real stories. For that reason, if you’re searching “online suggestion box” or “idea management software” (terms that my mom probably wouldn’t be searching as a consumer, but business leaders might), you’ll find stories from our customers. We also encouraged early partners and customers to link back to our site and we continue to invest heavily in content marketing even today - blog posts, video, infographics, and more.  

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?  

Don’t be too hard on yourself when you’re first starting out. There’s always room to innovate and iterate. The internet has a refreshingly short memory. And having a short memory of your own makes a big difference, too - so try to hold onto that positivity and optimism which can be totally transformative and share off the losses as quickly as possible.

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why? 

Favorite app: Well, I don’t really remember life before Slack, but one of my favorite add-ons to Slack is @heytaco - a tool we use to recognize our colleagues.  

Favorite blog: Without a doubt the Hubspot blog - they provide such a great array of examples, research, and easy-to-read content.  

Favorite book: Most recently, in business: Originals. Adam Grant does a great job turning a lot of misconceptions about creativity on its head including ways to think about divergent thinking, evaluating new ideas, and creating coalitions around new ideas. Personally, The Goldfinch is one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the past five years - such a rich love letter to vulnerability and the power of art.  

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why? 

I can’t get enough of Canva - and I’m a big admirer of Melanie Perkins - their CEO. It’s one of the most empowering tools out there for entrepreneurs and it’s helped us do a lot of things rapidly: creating a custom report for big clients, packaging a new social media post, you name it. It’s allowed all of us to make the creative work move a lot faster. 

Who is your business role model? Why?  

I think that I’m most inspired by Wendy Kopp and the faith and purpose that led her to create Teach for America. After I heard her How I Built This interview, I went out and bought her book and was moved by her clarity and purpose and her willingness to listen to others as a leader.

How do you balance work and life?  

Efficiency is my best friend. And one of the ways that I most preserve my efficiency is to time-limit when I check my email. I am not always successful at this, but I find that on the days that I only respond to emails between noon and two, I get more done, feel less frantic, and enjoy better, more deeply thought out results. I was also surprised to learn that I process just as many emails when I only look at them once a day rather than monitoring them all day long.

What’s your favorite way to decompress?  

I believe in the well-documented powers of exercise and meditation - they provide necessary breaks from the constant stream of information and sometimes it’s the only stillness to my day. However, I’ll also admit that a good karaoke session can be a game-changer. I have secretly prepared for a big presentation by singing “What’s Going On” in my car before walking into a building and it can release the same amount of endorphins to belt out a song as it does to go for a run.

What do you have planned for the next six months?

We have plans to re-invent our demand generation strategy in 2021 to make it smarter, more personalized, and more dynamic. So we’ll be working on finding the talent to help us with that process and the research to make sure that it’s successful. Know anyone? 

And speaking of research, we always spend a good part of Q1 in a deep dive into our customer data which we use to craft our strategy for the year ahead. This means surveys, SQL queries, Salesforce data parsing and more, but all that data informs our customer success efforts, our product roadmap, our go-to-market strategy and more.  

We’re also working on some new PR approaches to level-up the visibility of our customers. For example, our contacts at NASA did some great work with our tool to help fight COVID-19 and we turned their story into a comic book. We’ll be looking for more unique opportunities to do similar work in the coming months.

How can our readers connect with you? 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juniorday/

Email: jessica.day@ideascale.com