Difficult beginnings
Paweł Kijko, CEO of Heraldbee
When I started my adventure with online marketing in 2008, the world of advertising was completely different than today. All of us have been learning how to work with small businesses. We tested different solutions.
- Does it make sense to set up a Facebook Business Account? Is it worth to run it for a small business?
- Is SEO beneficial?
- How should a website look like?
- What kind of technology should we choose?
Today we know answers to these questions, they are obvious. But they haven’t been obvious before.
Soon I realized that I wasn’t able to do everything by myself. I met cool guys (Graphic designer and Developer) and for 10 years we’ve been working together on different projects (I was the Marketing guy). Each of us had other projects as well, we worked as freelancers. Each of us was building the portfolio and gaining experience. Each of us participated in at least 100 successful projects.
And we’ve experienced everything – bans from Google, servers’ overloads, hackers attacks, unsatisfied customers, accusations of non-compliance with copyright… We survived and learned from our mistakes. Nothing can surprise us anymore.
On the other hand, we contributed to building some of the biggest e-commerce businesses in their niches, we changed small businesses into huge, national companies and some of them go public now. We are now experts in our field.
The world of Advertising Agencies
During these 10 years, the whole industry has changed with us. Many smaller and larger agencies arose in big cities and they’ve gone through better or worse days, just like us. Some of them didn’t survive and got closed down, while their employees joined the bigger, more successful ones. Over time, there has been developed a certain model of managing an agency that can grow. Maximizing commissions, having good PR, taking advantage of customers’ lack of knowledge.
I will never forget when my good friend, who previously supported my home business, decided to join the big, corporate agency, and after a month came to me surprised and said:
“They do exactly what we did, they just charge 10 times more for this”.
There has always been something disturbing about it, but as an economics graduate, I knew that the price of service didn’t reflect its value, it just reflected customers’ willingness to pay. The point is to find the right customer. And this depends on your marketing.
What will be the future of internet marketing?
The biggest advertising platforms of our times – Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others, rely on the analysis of users’ preferences in order to improve the targeting of their customers’ ads. Technology is advancing and so is the complexity of marketing tools. Of course, this fact makes advertising agencies happy as their support is more and more necessary. And that’s a good thing, but for big companies.
However, what in this situation should do entrepreneurs who are at the beginning of their adventure with an online business? They want to move their sales to the Internet, but they still rely on a relatively small profit from their stationary businesses. Fortunately, technology comes to the rescue.
Our mission
Our mission is to help those businesses, which are not a target of big marketing agencies because of their budget. We want to automate small- and medium-sized e-commerce stores, so that store owners’ would be able to manage to advertise by themselves. We strive to create technology which facilitates setting up, optimizing and managing advertising for those who need it but can’t afford the services of advertising agencies.
We want to help them understand, above all:
- What is online marketing?
- Do they have to advertise their products and services on the Internet?
- How to advertise and not overpay?
- What’s a reasonable budget for marketing?
We don’t want to create „sales funnels”, we want to create advertising that converts into sales. We’ve become an Anti-Agency.
Many investors liked this idea and we also received support and funding for further development from the National Center of Research and Development.