Pioneer the Hadoop-based Big Data Analytics Category and Establish Thought-Leadership
Series A start-up funded by Hummer-Winblad and US Venture Partners to capitalize on emerging Hadoop market.
Domains
- Hadoop
- SaaS
- Big Data Analytics
- Developer Tools
Objectives
- Establish the company as a pioneering leader in the early Hadoop Big Data Analytics market
- Build brand awareness for this nascent company, making it look larger and more established than it was
- Build a database of MapReduce developers and SQL analysts for future community initiatives and prospecting
- Find the market for a pre-compilier for MapReduce jobs and a development environment for HIVE-based SQL technology
Challenges
- The company had no paying customers
- The technology was not “sellable” or implementable by a customer in its current incarnation
- Hadoop was far from an established commercial market, let alone Hadoop-based analytics
- Small team of less than 20
Process
- Built marketing team of marketing operations manager, product manager, and product marketer
- Leveraged boutique PR, design and web development vendors to keep costs down
- Surveyed early adopters of free download to understand their demographics, Hadoop knowledge and plans
- Exhibited at Hadoop technical conferences, working the booth and demonstrating technology to get to know the target market, their needs, and what excited them
Findings
- There was a lot of excitement and energy about Hadoop
- Majority of market was still investigating and learning
- Majority of market did not have a use case
- Market was hungry for education
Solutions
- Created messaging platform targeted to developers and analysts learning Hadoop and Hive
- Created thought-leadership marketing content and out-bound programs that educated market on the Hadoop ecosystem and open source projects
- Created thought-leadership and how-to content and programs that educated the market on the difference of doing analytics against big data verses data warehouses, and how to structure non-structured data and develop SQL queries for Hadoop Hive
- Released weekly press releases optimized for Google Alerts and key search words
Results
- 5,000 unique web visitors a month in 1st year, 10,000 a month in 2nd year
- Marketing database of over 15,000 developers and analysts in less that two years for less than $50 cost-per-lead
- Perceived as a thought-leader with content being repurposed by press, partners and prospects to educate their colleagues
- Won 12 press mentions per quarter with frequent references as “Top Ten Big Data Company” and “Analytics Leader” by press and analysts
- Market thought Karmasphere had well over 100 employees, a large engineering team and many successful customers
- Positioned company for successful acquisition by FICO to add to their analytics offering
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