Interview with an Entrepreneur: Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory - Part 1

Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in the podcasting space. He also writes the popular blog, The Trend Junkie.
I am attending the Gnomedex conference with him this week and I thought it would be good to release this interview as I cover interesting companies and people at the conference this week.
The following is part one in a three part series.

Please provide us with a bit of your personal background in business and entrepreneurship.

I have been an entrepreneur since I graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1996. During my time at UMBC, I spent a lot of time producing events on campus, mostly concerts, festivals and lectures. When I graduated I decided to jump right into entrepreneurship and started my own production company, Missing Link Media Productions, Inc. This was my first real business venture and one I learned a lot from. One of the biggest things running a concert production and promotions company taught me was how to take risks. Promoting shows is a very high risk, high reward business, and my experience in it helped me develop resilience and thicker skin in regards to business. Sometimes I was the one who had the most expensive ticket in the audience.

I was always into technology. During my time at the university and during my show production days, I was heavily involved in using the web. So when I decided to get out of the music industry, I started developing small business websites very locally in Baltimore while at the same time running a touring food vending business. Then in 1999, I was asked to join a tech startup at the Emerging Technology Center, an incubator in Baltimore City. This was an incredible experience for me as I was the second employee and had a chance to be involved in a very fast growth organization. 6 months into it we were about 20 people and on a $1.2mm run rate.
That was a great experience as I took on several roles within the company as we grew. I dabbled in human resources, project management, account management and finally headed up the sales and business development. About 12 months into the company’s existence, right in the middle of the dot bomb, the market headed south, the writing was on the wall and I left. Faced with a critical decision, accept an incredible offer from another technology company, or start my own. I chose the latter and started Blue Sky Factory, Inc in March of 2001.

Your current venture is Blue Sky Factory - what’s your elevator pitch for it?

Blue Sky Factory, Inc is an email service provider that provides a combination of both services and technology to help our clients leverage the power and effectiveness of the email channel.
The end result is that we help our clients drive revenue using email marketing.

There’s a ton of competition in the e-mail marketing space. What makes Blue Sky Factory unique?

There are definitely a lot of ESP’s (email service providers) out there and it can be difficult to cut through the clutter and find the solution that’s right for you. The market for ESP’s is broken out in three tiers. First there is the very low end, low cost providers, who are scooping up most of the small business sector. We don’t’ compete or play in that world at all.
Then you have the mid-market providers, which is the category Blue Sky Factory falls into. Here, marketers typically have some experience with email marketing but are ready to take it to the next level. They require more advanced features and functionality within the ESP technology, or are looking for a full service offering, with everything from strategy, creative, campaign fulfillment and analysis on reporting data.

The third tier is the higher end, enterprise level ESP. These organizations typically work with clients who are spending 5 figures plus a month on email marketing. They are heavy on behavioral analytics, and are normally executing advanced campaigns using complex segmentations and triggered emails.

Within our tier, there is plenty of competition, so there are a few things that we do to differentiate ourselves. First off, we intentionally don’t compete on technology. This market is not about the technology, as we all have the bells and whistles the other guys have. We all have some features that others don’t and vice versa, etc.. Instead, we feel we are unique because of the experience of Blue Sky Factory. So what does that mean? That means from the way we market ourselves, our unique sales process, down to the way we get you on-board with our team, every experience is unique and positive. As an example, show me another ESP on the market where the CEO of the company makes a custom video welcoming every new client (big clients and small ones) then puts it on You Tube and sends it off to the client. These are the types of things that we do that make us unique.

The experience of Blue Sky Factory is different from any other company in our industry. One of the keys to our offering is that we are a company that’s client result focused. So, no matter if you are a full service client, or a self service one, our account management team is proactively analyzing and measuring your level of success, with triggered touch points that are designed to help you achieve your goals. Some of the other players in the market will simply hand you a username and password and say “your on your own.” We don’t feel that’s the way to maximize the potential of email.

Finally, we have a very attractive price point for the level of service that we provide for both our full service as well as self-service offerings, so we do compete a price often.

NEXT TIME: Promoting Entrepreneurial Spirit, Not Raising Money and Marketing Your Company