Steadily Growing Our Social Media Automation Platform To $1.5M/Year [Update]
This is a follow up story for NapoleonCat. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi! It’s great to talk to you again. My name is Greg Berezowski, and I founded NapoleonCat, one of the world's most popular social media management platforms.
Before I jumped on the mar-tech software bandwagon, I was a co-founder of a digital marketing agency. One of my responsibilities back then was social media, which was when social media marketing was just starting to become famous.
There weren’t many tools on the market to help my team manage social media at scale and improve efficiency. That’s when I came up with the idea of creating my tool that would address my team’s needs and save them time. And that, kids, is how I founded NapoleonCat.
In times of despair, I remind myself that business is not a sprint but a marathon, and crises are inevitable.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Although the recent years have been challenging for everyone in the mar-tech industry, we’ve steadily grown our tool, team, and client base. One of the factors that helped us grow was establishing a Product Management team.
The new team took care of the subjects that had been neglected before and paved the way for developing new processes and features.
We took the more user-oriented approach: we hired a CX expert who conducts research and suggests solutions to burning problems. Then, there are UX designers who take care of our platform’s usability, incredible product managers, and a skilled analyst who helps us derive and interpret numbers. Without these people, our product development process would be a guessing game.
The Product Management team led us toward solutions beyond “classic” social media functionalities like post scheduling or comment moderation. We’ve developed features that facilitate team collaboration and automate tedious processes.
The Product team examines new ideas and provides the basis for processes, but the collaboration of all our teams allows the latest solutions to succeed. This is why I can say that team collaboration isn’t just a concept we sell but also something that will enable us to stay ahead of the curve.
One of NapoleonCat’s team-oriented features is the real-time collaboration view; it allows different moderators to see who’s doing what in our tool and avoid potential mishaps.
We knew that teams as small as two people and as large as 400 people use our tool to manage incoming comments and messages from different social channels. This spurred the idea that their work may overlap, especially in the times of common remote work. We decided to allow our users to follow others’ activity within the same dashboard – just as they do in shared Google Docs.
The solution clicked with our clients, and we became interested in other ways that we could use to help them seamlessly collaborate. Since then, we’ve developed multiple new solutions and allowed them easily onboard new users, securely share access, track performance, manage workflows, and more.
We’ve become addicted to making our clients’ lives easier, although it’s not always been easy for us. In the ever-changing social media world, we encounter obstacles and updates almost every day. But collaboratively, we make it through.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
I guess uncertainty has been the biggest challenge recently. The world is slowly recovering after the pandemic and all the lockdowns; we’ve been hit by the war in Ukraine and its global consequences. There’s one upside, though – it’s now easier to hire talents, which we have leveraged.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Physical health helps maintain mental health.
I was a professional judo player for 30 years, and being highly active every day was natural. I suffered a severe leg injury on the tatami a few years ago and was forced to pause sports for a few months.
Then my first baby was born and… I never got back to regular training. I slowly began to feel worse – both physically and mentally. I had less energy and motivation to work as hard as before.
Last year I forced myself to start working out regularly again, and I immediately felt better. I also initiated the #moveyourcat movement in our company, where we share our sports activities and motivate ourselves to go out and move. It is particularly important when you work remotely and have fewer external factors that force you to leave your home.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next five years?
NapoleonCat is growing steadily, and we plan to continue this trajectory. Of course, we’re constantly adding new platforms that we integrate with to help our customers be even more efficient in engaging their audiences and supporting them at scale. Just last month, we launched an official integration with TikTok, and we have a few other channels in our pipeline for this year alone.
Of course, the explosion of generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT or Midjourney changes a lot for the mar-tech industry. We’re exploring how we can utilize these solutions to help our customers.
We plan to make NapoleonCat a central hub for marketing and customer service teams to engage and communicate with their customers in places where they feel comfortable. We strongly believe this is the right direction for brands that genuinely care about their communities and want to support them actively.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I have been reading product management books in the last year as this is my particular area of interest. One was “When Coffee and Kale Compete” by Alan Klement, which introduced me to “jobs to be done.” It is a great way to look at your potential customers’ needs from the perspective of the goals they want to achieve.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
This will sound like a cliche, but I remind myself that business is not a sprint but a marathon in times of despair. And crises are inevitable – they're an inherent part of this journey.
And you can only finish it if you don’t quit. Chances are you don’t win this race, but you will still be in the 0.1% of people who finish it, which means you’ve achieved something extraordinary.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
At NapoleonCat, new positions open every now and then. Follow our careers page to find the latest offers. We seek passionate talents to join our R&D, Product, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.
Where can we go to learn more?
To learn more about NapoleonCat, follow these links:
Feel free to connect with me personally on LinkedIn.
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