Harness the power of your customer stories
Today, we’re extremely excited to announce that Encore is in the third class of startups participating in the DC-based Acceleprise accelerator. In addition to the financial faith our investors have placed in our team, the accelerator gives us a valuable runway to hustle and grow under the tutelage of some absolutely amazing advisors and fellow classmates.
We’re beyond thrilled. If you could see us through our screens right now, we’ve got big stupid grins on our faces. For those of you who already know our story, you can see how this is an especially well-timed blessing for our company: a couple of our co-founders, James Li and Mike Hauser, just graduated from Georgetown University, and this program allows us to finally pour our full-time resources—our hearts and souls—into nurturing Encore. It came down to deciding between a few programs, but we believe Acceleprise is a great fit for us because of its enterprise technology focus, people, and location.
While we’ve always maintained that we’re entrepreneurs who happen to be students (don’t tell our parents), school has been a (admittedly necessary) distraction.
We’ve also got some other news:
Mike will be leaving the team in June to move to New York (but secretly his heart is with us); ever since the day we came up with a seed of an idea while watching The Social Network, he’s been an invaluable fire and financial brain for our team. We wish him nothing but the best and will continue to be inviting of his counsel!
We’re also welcoming Felipe Lopes, our new CTO, to the team. One of our biggest struggles since day one has been the lack of a technical cofounder onboard; with Felipe’s own startup background and technical experience at Dell, we’re ecstatic to see our ideas and designs come to life as we push out better updates and versions, faster. He joins Tammy Cho (who is just a sophomore at Georgetown, and makes the rest of us feel old) and James as the core team moving forward.
But the most important news of all:
While we’re excited about Acceleprise, we know it is very much just the beginning. One of the things that we’ve heard over and over again from our customers and sales calls is that our story collection process is what provides the most value—it helps organizations easily source stories from the field, relieving the marketer of that “oh crap, what do I write about” moment when they’re staring at a blank newsletter template or tweet compose box.
With this feedback, we’re currently and quickly moving toward putting a larger emphasis on this story collection piece and widening our focus to serve not only nonprofits, but brands as well (another common request). Our hypotheses is that as more and more channel tools (like Hootsuite) exist and make spreading information easier, you can never get past without starting with good content. Customers, volunteers, board members, internal employees, frontline staff, campaign supporters—they all have amazing, passionate stories to tell, and there isn’t an effective way to capture and use these stories—yet. You’ll see that the language on our home page reflects this larger vision, and we’re really looking forward to meeting with some brands, through the folks at Acceleprise, to receive more feedback as we iterate.
That said—we know we’ve got our party hats on today, but we’ve got one request: if you are a marketer at a company who sees user-generated stories as one of your best assets (or you know a marketer at such a company), we’d really love the chance to talk to you and get your advice! Please email us at james@encorehq.com.
Last but not least, we want to thank everyone who’s helped us get here so far. The list is way too long and we’re 100% forgetting someone, but please forgive us; it’s a reflection of the heartwarming and inspiring outpouring of support from the community we’ve received over the last year and a half.
First, thanks to our team members, who have contributed in the past or who are still helping drive us every day: Elle Kang, Erik Nguyen, Russell Kreutter, Ava Chang, Lauren Reese, Nicolas Berger, Mike Dee, and Jason Thompson. Thank you to our long-time mentors—Tom Hajduk, Jeff Reid, Anton Zolotov, Alyssa Lovegrove, Michael Rylaarsdam, Alice Lee, Jess Rimington, Jamil Poonja, Arthur Woods, Neil Shah, Anthony Lazaro, Jason Connell, Mike Wang, Mark Silverman, Dave Sandrowitz, Patricia Louison, Anthony Lazaro, Teresa Mannix, Charles Tsai, Steve Richardson, Qiwei Chen, Danielle Tuason, Mark Raymond, Scott Bechtler-Levin, Chris Golden, John Oppenheim, Jon Carpenter, Tom Raffa, Maddie Grant, Steve Loflin, Tonio DeSorrento, Leslie Schall… and so many more (you know who you are, because we’re likely in your inbox again), for not slapping sense into us yet.
Thanks to the first nonprofits who trusted us—Pathways Hospice, Horton’s Kids, GiveSocial, The Wooden Floor—to our first customers, and the hundreds of nonprofits who we’ve met in between—your humble passion continues to drive us every day. Thank you to our team at Acceleprise—Allen Gannett, Sean Glass, and Collin Gutman—for this amazing opportunity. And of course, thank you to our parents for putting up with our antics, for unwavering understanding, and for what we hope won’t be the worst investment you’ve ever made in your life—we love you!
The post Encore is now full-time, venture-backed, and in Acceleprise! appeared first on Blog by Encore.
