When I met Chad Mallory in the early part of 2010, he was in the midst of selling a company he founded nearly 10 years ago. I was in the midst of returning to the entrepreneurial world after a stint as a VC here in Atlanta. I had told a friend about some ideas I had around online customer acquisition / lead generation and he instantly insisted on introducing me to Chad. About 10 minutes into the conversation with him, I realized that a) this was one of the smartest guys I had met in my 15+ years in the technology world and b) this was a guy who happened to be particularly smart about the technology side of the business I thought needed to be built. We started a sporadic back and forth online and over the phone for a month or so and then, on the way home from bringing my 2 year old son back from our ritual Saturday morning breakfast, it hit me – Chad and I needed to build a new business. I drove home and told my wife. Spouses of entrepreneurs are special people. They have to endure the struggles of watching their husband or wife create something from the void – all the good and not so good parts of that process. Thankfully, I’d done it before, been successful, and she assured me that we could do it again. I called Chad that morning and he was equally excited. We got to work that weekend.

We started BrightWhistle with a fairly simple belief – that real content designed to help people make better decisions could be leveraged in new ways to assist companies build their own pipeline for prospects – both in producing search driven leads as well as creating more effective targeted online ad campaigns. And we saw a void in the market – if you’re a digital marketer, you get calls all the time from the latest and greatest marketing software company – there are a great many solutions focused on helping you manage leads once they’ve been generated, re-market to existing customers, or build a lot of social media metrics that can’t be connected to any real ROI. Nobody seems to be focused on helping marketers with their biggest headache – automating the process of actually generating the leads themselves.

So we started with some basic “What If?” statements –

1. What if we could build a system that could instantly create and manage multiple websites that would represent a company’s local points of presence? This would represent a digital matrix of sites that would magnify a client’s online presence.
2. What if we could fill these “containers” with real content acquired from experts in a particular field? We had no interest in building a content farm – we only had interest in acquiring exclusive, premium content that would be geared toward educating prospective customers.
3. What if we could use this same functionality to create a new ad platform capable of building dynamic landing pages that pulled information and content from the client’s matrix of sites and our library of content? Moreover, what if we could then place that landing page within the most relevant site in the client’s new digital matrix?

We believed strongly, and now know through empirical data, that such a system produces more customers, more efficiently, for our clients.

Over the coming months, we will use this blog to tell our story in more detail. If you’d like to learn more about our solutions, click here, or contact us here.