Raj Kadam is the CEO of Viralheat, a company that’s trying to simplify Enterprise Social Media Management for large brands and agencies worldwide. Viralheat accomplishes this by creating an unified suite that allows brands to manage their social media accounts, manage security for teams dealing with social media infrastructure, monitor social media, and makes creating detailed presentation reports a snap.
Viralheat is a Social Media Management company. We make a powerful unified suite that allows social media professionals to manage multiple social media properties and perform widespread social media monitoring in one seamless workflow.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and also how you started your business?
I’m a software engineer and always had a great passion for P2P networks. With the rise of Social Media, one thing I noticed was a major shift on how consumers were starting to engage with brands. These users no longer received information about products and services from websites but instead were going on social media to learn more. Brands were really struggling to keep up with conversations across a growing number of channels and that is where the genesis for Viralheat came from.
What are some of the projects you are working on right now?
Viralheat is always working on a variety of projects at any given time. One of the ones that I am most excited about is a brand new set of advanced analytics that will be able to tie any post, retweet, pin, etc to revenue.
Social Media is a fast moving space. The biggest piece of advice I would urge entrepreneurs is to talk to their customers. By doing this you really get a better understanding of what challenges users are facing and how to design products to solve those challenges.
Viralheat biggest driver of customer acquisition is content. We produce a wide range of content for our different channels ranging from our blog to our social media channels.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
The first would be to talk to your customers. As a product person, it is really easy to deduce what your customer would like to see built but it’s likely you are wrong. So, talking to your customers is key.
The second, is when making any B2B product, you need to have customer sooner than later. Having your staff making sure the customer is seeing the ROI from your product helps retention and leads to faster growth down the line.
Lastly, price right. If you price to low, it will sap your business by killing its growth potential. If you price to high, you create unrealistic expectations for a business of your size.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your business?
We use Twitter extensively. It is a great tool to reach out to folks who are looking to purchase products or services.
LinkedIn, is a great way to find professionals in large companies who could be your target client.
Lastly, Marketo which allows us to nurture potential customers and grow our sales.
What’s your definition of success?
Success for us is quite simply. Our job is to make sure we can create a implement technology that allows our customers to manage, engage, and report on social media at scale.
How can our community get in touch with you?
You can reach me on Twitter at @raj_kadam
