#communityovereverything DailyStory
Welcome to our member spotlight blog series! In this edition, we're excited to feature DailyStory, a marketing automation platform that offers a suite of tools that enable businesses to streamline their marketing efforts, enhance their customer engagement, and drive better results. Whether you're a small business owner or a marketing professional, DailyStory has everything you need to take your marketing to the next level. In this blog post, we speak with Rob Howard, founder of DailyStory, to dive deeper into the platform and explore some of the key features that have made it a popular choice among businesses of all sizes.
Tell us a little about DailyStory.
DailyStory is a marketing automation platform that helps customers create sales, build loyalty, and grow their business. The key to DailyStory is automation, which gives you the ability to let DailyStory manage common communication automatically. This includes replies to customers when certain pages in your website are visited, web form follow-ups, abandoned carts, notifications, reminders, and much more.
What led you to starting a marketing platform?
When my first startup was sold in 2015, I was retained as a Vice President & General Manager to run the business unit for the new owner (a large enterprise software company). That included taking back over the inbound and outbound marketing tools and team. I was surprised by how expensive, complex, and generally unhelpful the tools were in helping me as a business owner understand how marketing turned into sales. I realized that if a large billion-dollar software business couldn't figure it out, most small businesses had to be struggling as well. In 2017, I resigned and started DailyStory to solve that problem.
What sets your business apart from your competitors?
Two things: simplicity and incredible customer service. Our number one goal was to create something that was simple and didn’t require a team to run. Next, we are laser-focused on incredible customer service. In a market where most companies do everything they can to avoid talking to customers, we embrace every opportunity we have.
What is something you wish you’d known when you were just starting your business?
My last company had offices all over the world. I spent most of my time in hotels and on airplanes. When I started DailyStory in 2017, one differentiator I planned for was 100% remote, i.e. work from wherever you want. Little did I know that the COVID pandemic would fundamentally change the landscape for work/life balance shortly after.
How do you navigate your work-life balance?
Our entire team has unlimited PTO, work remotely, and work whatever hours are required to complete their job. Work-life balance is incredibly important to us.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I love working with our customers one-on-one to help them make marketing work. Watching a customer use our platform to directly impact their business growth is incredibly rewarding. We work with a lot of nonprofits, and typically these are some of the easiest customers to create immediate, impactful value by increasing their donations. This is not done by sending more outbound marketing, but typically sending fewer, more highly targeted and segmented messages. We’ve gotten to the point with some customers that they know exactly how many emails they need to send to achieve their revenue targets. This helps prevent them from wearing out their customers by overcommunicating to them.
How has being a part of the CityCentral community affected you and your business?
Personally, I love working at CityCentral. I’ve been here for many years now and see it as a purposeful escape from working at home.
If you had a friend in town, and you could take them to one of your favorite restaurants or spots in your community, where would you take them to?
I’d probably take them to Javier’s in Dallas for some real “Gourmet Mexicano” food or to Austin’s BBQ near Addison Airport. As someone who has lived outside of Texas (West Coast) for a period of time and has traveled a lot, nothing beats Texas BBQ and TexMex.
We would like to thank Rob Howard and the team at DailyStory for being a part of our Member Spotlight series! If you are interested in being a part of this series, please email info@citycentral.com or speak to your Community Manager.