Laurie: Today I’m talking with Kate Bradley Chernis, the CEO of Lately, which is a new company that helps businesses to consolidate and streamline marketing activities into more of a unified step-by-step playbook. Kate, before we get into what Lately does, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the company?
Kate: Sure. A little background on me is I own a marketing agency. Eight years ago I was managing a Walmart campaign and the best tool that I could find to organize everything was this insanely thorough spreadsheet. I pulled in everything from analytics to budgets, and I made a calendar, added the graphics and key messaging and everything else we needed for the campaign. We were doing radio, TV, cable and social media and more. The results for the campaign were 130% ROI for three years, year-over-year. Walmart rolled the template of my spreadsheet out to all their campaign managers, which was awesome. Then I noticed that my other smaller clients, startups or non-profits or other smaller businesses than Walmart, had similar problems and we were getting the same type of success using my spreadsheet for their campaigns. Lately was born when I had the idea to automate this process.
Laurie: So you turned the spreadsheet into a solution to streamline set up and all the tasks in the campaign?
Kate: Exactly. It’s called Marketing Resource Management, which isn’t a sexy term, and hard to understand because its sort of a new category. Basically, it’s the idea of managing pieces, kind of like a dashboard for all of your marketing.
Laurie: How long ago did you launch Lately and then, can you tell me about what it does?
Kate: Lately was born live to the world in October—just a few months back—which is exciting. Lately does a lot of stuff. For instance, we have marketing calendar so you can instantly see what’s going out, when it’s going out. You have visibility and can easily show your boss or clients what you’re doing. We also help you automatically organize messaging. For example, we can check messaging as you type it in to make sure it’s consistent. We know that marketers forget to use key messaging 82% of the time, so we catch this. We even create messaging for you so you can just push it out.
Laurie: Yes, you showed me that in the demo, which is on your site. So anyone that’s interested can see the way Lately just kind of auto magically does things for you.
Kate: Our goal is leverage all the work you do, help you do it faster, and make it easier collaborate with team members. For me, I find that organization makes me feel calmer as a person and that’s the feeling our customers get too–it’s all here, it’s super organized, now I can get my work done and feel more empowered.
Laurie: Is Lately for marketers, agencies, small, medium, large business—who are you targeting?
Kate: That’s my favorite question. Short-term, its small marketing agencies or consultants similar to me, who are forgiving, because it’s a new product. So we’re learning with them, they’re our partners and we’re building the product out based on their input. Most of these folks that work with about 25 clients, which is ideal, because our long-term goal is to reach SMBs. We want Lately to become the QuickBooks for marketing. Just like QuickBooks pulled back the black curtain, on accounting so that anyone can do it, even me—I’m a fiction writing major—our goal is to make it easy for anybody to do marketing.
Laurie: Tell me a bit more about the category you’re putting Lately in—Marketing Resource Management—what defines the category, and how does Lately differ from other offerings in it?
Kate: You can kind of think of it like Lately is trying to do for Marketing Resource Management or MRM what Salesforce did for CRM. Currently, there are a handful of MRM competitors. Their solutions start at $25,000, and they’re made for an elite group of marketers who really know what they’re doing and have pretty high technical skills. Whereas, Lately starts at $99 and like I said, its simple and designed for self-service. That’s $99 per month per company, so you can invite as many people as you want to use it.
Laurie: About how long does it take for non-marketers to get up and running and productive?
Kate: It takes seconds and it is do-it-yourself. Being that we are so new, we love to give people a 15-minute demo first just to make sure we know the basics. But it literally takes seconds. I was giving a demo to a class the other day. There was a Macintosh there, which I’m bad at using that’s I use a PC, so I needed help with the Mac. A student came up and just did the demo for me because it was so easy.
Laurie: How are you kind of getting the word out and marketing and selling this?
Kate: We’re starting out light, looking specifically for smaller marketing agencies and consultants who want to get in on the ground floor and partner with us. So, we’re social media, we’re constantly testing our own messaging, and just doing direct sales and marketing right now. So we’re really excited to have this opportunity with you because we haven’t thrown a lot of spaghetti at the walls yet!
Laurie: Well, the demo looks great, definitely worth a look!
Kate: Thank you so much.
Source: Laurie McCabe’s Blog