Currently, marketers manage their partnerships by sending emails back and forth, manually syncing up marketing calendars, and working with IT or their agency to build custom landing pages. According to Kurt Uhlir, this allows too many opportunities for these partnerships to break down or become ineffective.
By not allowing a proper measure of success for specific partnerships, there is no way to determine which partner is actually performing. The result of all this is wasted time, ineffective use of headcount, and no ability to glean partnership results.
That’s why Uhlir decided to found Sideqik, a partnership platform for marketers. His platform allows marketers to connect directly with their partners, launch collaborative cross-promotions, and measure the effectiveness of their partnerships through a cloud-based system.
The idea was born during his time at Flashpoint. Uhlir interviewed hundreds of marketers in the course of 10 weeks to really understand the intricacies of what it takes to make these marketing partnerships work, pairing his conversations with past field experience.
“I’ve been part of some really successful marketing partnerships over my career,” says Uhlir. “They take a ton of time and effort to set up and successfully launch them.”
Getting Sideqik up and out the door was no small feat either. Building a strong team was a big first hurdle, but Uhlir pushed further in an effort to understand his team and their unique communication styles: he wanted to foster a culture of communication.
“Jeremy Haile and I worked together at Vitrue, exited to Oracle in 2012, and had been friends for a while, so we knew that we wanted to work together,” says Uhlir. “But it took us several months to really learn each other’s communication styles and how those change given the supersonic pace we’re going at with Sideqik.”
And taking the time to cultivate a culture of communications has led to some initial successes for Sideqik. Recently, Sideqik was featured by Website Magazine and then later selected to kick off Venture Atlanta.
“Venture Atlanta companies have raised more than $1 billion dollars since 2002,” says Uhlir. “It’s a huge testament to what our team is building and sets us up to follow in the footsteps of some other successful marketing tech companies from Atlanta.”
The response from their initial customers has been congruent with their press praise. KontrolFreek came on board early in Sideqik’s life, but Uhlir has also worked with the marketing teams from iTunes, Garmin, Microsoft Games, and Samsung.
“We’ve been part of some great companies before, and have worked in Chicago, on the West Coast, East Coast and other continents. Atlanta tops them all,” says Uhlir.
There seems to be a trend of strong tech startups coming out of Atlanta recently, and Sideqik is another major, local talent. The low cost of living, access to university students, and density of marketing are helping Sideqik thrive in a stout startup community.
Sideqik was featured at our Tech Cocktail Atlanta Mixer and Startup Showcase in October.