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Jumpstart Episode 17: Kate O’Neill
- Kate O’Neill is founder and CEO of metamarketer
- now in year 3, metamarketer uses their client’s marketing channel data to better understand who their customers are
- was mistakenly taken for social media and SEO experts. Kate made it her mission to have people better understand metamarketer as an analytical firm
- MO does not stand for Marketing Optimization, perhaps it needs an acronym.
- Kate started a non-profit when she was a teenager
- in 2009 she felt ready to start her own company with it’s own distinct identity
- had trouble separating her personal brand from metamarketer at first
- Kate was inspired by Nashville’s growing technology community
- moved to Nashville eight years ago to become a songwriter. Kate sees similarities in Nashville’s technology family with it’s music family. It’s about growing up together and seeing friends become successful.
- she enjoys watching her local peers doing it for themselves like: Marcus Whitney, Jason Moore and Jackson Miller.
- Google Reader is an essential part of Kate’s day
- Kate recommends listening to our podcast, check out the Seth Godin episode too.
- Connect with Kate: kate at metamarketer.dom @kateo @metamarketer
Kate’s 3 1 tips every entrepreneur needs to know
- Nobody needs another stuffy entrepreneur. We need more people with a sense of fun in the space. Go about entrepreneurship with a sense of fun!
Please SUBSCRIBE to the podcast is in iTunes, so you’ll get new episodes as they are available.
Jumpstart theme song “DLDN Instrumental (ft. Onlymeith, Mellotroniac)” by: St. Paul from ccMixter.
TRANSCRIPT
Dave: Welcome to Jumpstart. I am your host Dave Delaney. My guest today is Kate O’Neill, Founder and CEO at [meta]marketer. Hi Kate, how are you doing?
Kate: Hey, Dave. I’m good. How are you?
Dave: I’m well. Thanks for joining me.
Kate: Thank you for having me.
Dave: So tell us a little bit about [meta]marketer. What is it that you guys do?
Kate: We’re in here 2 ½ – no actually I guess you say we’re in year 3, right? We’re 2 ½ years in.
Dave: Yeah.
Kate: And we sort of gone through a few mini pivots, mini transitions on how exactly I would answer that question. But I feel like where we have arrive now makes the most sense for the marketplace. And that is what we’re doing is using the data in our clients’ marketing channels to help them better understand who their customers are and do validation against those hypothesis about those customers. So they have a really confident sense of how to message and really connect with those customers. How to provide them a better experience on their website and then throughout their touch points with those customers? And then we’ll also be able to extrapolate that message out through our offline marketing channels and continue to validate them when they drive those customers online.
Dave: Interesting, so you sort of dig in deeper into the analytics of where people are coming from and who they are and that kind of thing?
Kate: Yeah exactly. We’ve been saying for a long time that we’re like a marketing analytics and optimization company but I think we just didn’t really have the full picture of what value that really provided to customers until just kind of iterating through that a few times and really coming to the realization that people don’t want analytics. They don’t want optimization. What they want is to be able to better understand their customers and be able to make more money from connecting with those customers more effectively.
Dave: Right and customer probably sometimes don’t understand even what SEO is even though what you’re providing them is sort of what they’re seeking but they don’t realize it yet. So by selling it as an SEO thing is probably confusing, maybe a little bit.
Kate: That’s true and we never try to position ourselves around SEOs. That’s kind one of the interesting lessons learned about this whole thing is that there was a time in I think it was 2009 when I was first getting started, somehow or other and I’m not really sure how this happened, I ended up just kind of personally branded around social media and ended up getting a bunch of sort of speaking engagements around town, around social media. And then everybody was kind of talking about me as the social media person in town which was kind of weird because I never really set out to do that or be that. And then I realized that was not really useful to us because we weren’t doing anything actively around social media in terms of how we were tactically engaging social media for our clients. So that wasn’t a valuable kind of positioning for us.
So I actively set out over the next year in 2010, I decided, “Okay I’m going to take hold of this and I’m going to use the term Marketing Optimization and that’s going to be kind of the way I describe myself to people, Marketing Optimization.
Dave: Right.
Kate: Well unfortunately when people hear the word optimitization in this day and age they think of SEO.
Dave: Yeah I just did it. That includes me too.
Kate: No, no it’s cool for the purposes of branding and positioning that didn’t really help because what ended up happening over the year 2010 was got a lot of inquiries around SEO which turned out not to be very good matches for us because the people who are, the companies who come to us interested in SEOs specifically aren’t necessarily interested in the particular value that we bring to the table which is that really deep analytical skill set where we can really help you trace that back on a broader marketing level to who your customers really are and doing a good with your marketing overall. So we really think of ourselves as kind of a new generation of classic marketers.
Dave: Right.
Kate: This is the skill set that marketers used to always have to have and I think it’s kind of gone full circle through a phase where marketing was more about marketing communications and creative. And as important as that is, it’s not the date driven discipline that marketing classically was.
Dave: I know what you mean. You just need a fancy acronym I think like SEO.
Kate: Yeah. Well HMO I guess which is not very useful because that means [Inaudible – 00:04:30]
Dave: Right so that’s sort of confusing. But we’ll work on that for another episode.
Kate: Our new tags would be RMO is Marketing Optimization.
Dave: There you go. So at what point in your career did you realize that you wanted to do it yourself and start your own company?
Kate: I think I was a little bit of a slow savvy at that. Well in some ways I’ve often pointed out in these kinds of interviews or opportunities to talk with people about this that my first company was really non-profit that I launched when I was a teenager. So in a sense I knew very early that I had a little bit of entrepreneurial bug. But that was almost the last venture that went that way because I did a few stints as a consultant or a freelancer here and there throughout the last X number of years that I’ve been in the professional work world.
But it wasn’t until ’09 when I launched [meta]marketer that I really felt ready to launch a company that has its own distinct identity. That was the real kicker. So, much of everything that I had done up until then that was in any sense entrepreneurial was really more solo entrepreneurial. It was really kind of branded around myself.
And to be honest I’m not really sure especially in the early days how distinct the brand of [meta]marketer was from Kate O’Neill. Like I think a lot of our early scaling problems were because the clients that we were able to attract on the strength of my reputation and then it was very difficult to extricate myself as a resource, as a tactical resource instead as the person who’s running the agency and I should be able to bring resources to bear. You should be able to trust me as the leader of the agency to do that.
It was an interesting and I think it’s one that I’ve been able to make some headway on. But yeah in 2009 kind of setting up [meta]marketer and really going about that as I’m really interested and really in building something that is bigger than myself, that has a brand that separates from myself, that feasibly could be run by somebody else, that I could hand over the reins at some point.
Dave: Right.
Kate: That was a totally idea and experience for me.
Dave: Right.
Kate: I don’t exactly know how to say when that happened. I just don’t know how to say why that happened other than there were a series of professional situations that led me to feel like, “I don’t know I feel like this could be done better like I could maybe do this better. I don’t know if I can be the person who does it better but I got to give it a try because I just don’t necessarily feel like things are being done right.
Dave: Right.
Kate: Out there.
Dave: Did anyone inspire you to do this, to start [meta]marketer?
Kate: I don’t know. In a specific way if that’s true. Certainly I think one thing that’s been happening and Dave you know this very well that in the last few years in Nashville there’s been this growing momentum of community around the Nashville Technology scene and the gigs and everything. I think just being connected with a bunch of people who have if not an actual entrepreneurial events going on certainly an entrepreneurial spirit.
Dave: Right.
Kate: I think that embolden me in a lot to be around people at least for talking about it and thinking about it and trying to figure out if it was the right thing to do. And then knowing people who actually were going out and starting ventures and being a part of almost like a graduating class out of the community, right?
Dave: Yeah.
Kate: I always say that about the songwriting community a lot. I moved here 8 years ago to Nashville to be a songwriter. And that was one of sort analogies that give news a lot about the songwriting community in Nashville. It’s almost like being in high school or college where you come in as a freshman and the people that you meet in that year you kind of grow up with. And then there’s a point when they start getting deals and you start getting deals, everybody is kind of helping each other because you came up together.
Dave: Right.
Kate: And I see that a lot kind of happening to geek community too. There’s the class of us that kind of came up like ’07 or ’08 or whatever we all knew each other as bloggers and through social media. And now a lot of us are starting our ventures. You’ve got Marcus Whitney doing moon toast. You’ve got Jason Moore, Jackson Miller both doing their things that were recently incubated at the Entrepreneur’s Center.
Dave: All guests on Jumpstart as well I must say. Or Jason is coming up soon actually.
Kate: Okay good cool. Yeah he’s going to be great. Yeah so I mean it’s a very interesting thing to be watching your peers kind of coming into their own thing and starting their own things and to recognize too. To sit where I am and recognize, “Hey I’m doing as well.” It’s neat to be finding that footing and seeing that happening all around you too.
Dave: That’s great. Are there blogs or websites that you subscribe to regularly that you would recommend for other people getting started or have already started?
Kate: I don’t know. It’s funny I have my Google Reader is a staple of my day to day experience and I’m on there pretty often throughout the day. But I have it all grouped into categories so I don’t necessarily always have a sense of what I’m reading all the time.
Dave: Yeah fair enough.
Kate: So I can say for sure that there are some great Nashville resources and this is obviously one really solid one. If anybody is checking this episode out because it’s been link on to Twitter, Facebook or whatever and it’s a first on I highly recommend going back and listening to. Some of the earlier ones especially I mean we have Seth Godin on. You can read out and [Inaudible – 00:20:40]
Dave: Thanks Ma’am.
Kate: Yeah that’s cool.
Dave: Thank you.
Kate: And then there’s just a bunch of the folks around town. The names I just mentioned as well as other folks who have started their own companies who are starting their own companies that do blog. It’s really cool to watch them have time Jackson does.
Dave: Yeah.
Kate: To watch them occasionally post their thoughts about where they are in the process and what they’re learning so I think that’s really valuable.
Dave: For sure. Okay I end every episode by asking you for three tips that you would provide for other entrepreneurs. Do you have three tips?
Kate: I’m going to go all Seth on you. But there’s really only one that I’ve got for you.
Dave: Okay.
Kate: And I probably have other bits of advice but they don’t necessarily stand out as much to me in the moment. But I guess what I would say to folks listening is no one really meets, I don’t think that the market or Nashville or the country in general really needs another stuffy entrepreneur. But what we definitely need is more people who are going to approach this space with playfulness and a sense of fun. And even maybe a little bit of a sense of reverence. I high encourage everybody to think about whether they have a business idea in them and a startup in them. But definitely go about it with a spirit of fun.
Dave: That’s true.
Kate: It’s way fun. Just have some fun with it.
Dave: That’s true. Life is too short.
Kate: Absolutely.
Dave: Yeah great. Thanks Kate, I really appreciate it. Where could people find you?
Kate: You can find me at metamarketer.com, kate@metamarketer.com if you like the old email. But on the Twitters I am @kateo or @metamarketer.
Dave: Cool well thanks so much again for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Kate: Hey man, thank you I really appreciate it being on here.
Dave: Talk to you soon.
[Music playing]
Moderator: For show notes, links discussed in today’s podcast, and much more visit jumpstartpodcast.com. Thanks for listening.
Posted on August 14, 2011
Categories: Blog, Podcast
Tags: Jackson Miller, Jason Moore, Kate O'Neill, Marcus Whitney, metamarketer, Seth Godin