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Postcards from the cloud — Spreets

Cloud computing makes for a compelling read, but how does it actually apply to the real world? Well, here’s a story that’s almost too good to be true. But it really happened.

While living in Silicon Valley California, Australian entrepreneur Dean McEvoy had a thought.

It occurred to him that most major cities play host to a range of exciting and unusual activities that only a fraction of people actually know about. Everything from balloon, boat and helicopter rides to game parks, massage, beauty treatments and spas and special restaurant deals were largely going unnoticed.

 

Basically he wanted to create a website that would bring together those people interested in such things with the businesses that offered them.

 

But how? Well, McEvoy figured out pretty quickly that customers want value and merchants want lot of customers.

So what was the best way to make everyone happy? What if you started asking people whether they would be interested in hearing about really cool things to do in their home city at great prices, with the only thing required of them in return a simple email address and maybe a mobile phone number. Most of us would probably agree, right?

As your database grows you are able to guarantee that more and more eyeballs are looking at those cool offers, which in turn allows the merchant to keep offering them and at lower prices.

 



 
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An idea takes flight

After explaining the idea to a former colleague in Silicon Valley, McEvoy managed to secure a small amount of seed funding and his baby was born. He called it Spreets.com.au.

"What Spreets does every day is it gives people a reason to do new and interesting things in their city," McEvoy said. For merchants, they get access to a fast growing database of potential takers.

Within a period of just a few weeks, Spreets launched offices in five different locations around Australia. This meant that McEvoy was darting all over the country trying to explain the Spreets idea to anyone who would listen.

But without cloud computing, he knew that he simply couldn't have done it.

With his CRM* business applications in the cloud with salesforce.com, McEvoy had access to all of his business information – such as the number, location and preferences of customers signed on to Spreets, in addition to data on merchants – from wherever he happened to be. It also allowed him to immediately access the resources needed to support the company at every click of its phenomenal growth. Furthermore, he didn't need to buy new servers for any of these offices. All the systems they needed were in the cloud.

 

Growing, growing, gone

From a smallish concern turning over around $4000 a month, Spreets quickly grew to 10 times, 100 and then 1000 times that size, to turning over $4 million a month within less than a year of launching, making it one of the fastest growing companies in Australian corporate history.

"We knew early on that the process of managing contracts and signing up a lot of merchants was difficult especially now that we're in every state in Australia and in New Zealand," McEvoy recalls. "We grew into those areas very quickly."

Earlier this year it was bought by Yahoo for $40 million. Ordinarily, mergers of this sort involve overcoming tricky compatibility issues between business systems. But because of the simple and open nature of salesforce.com and the way that it stores business information, Spreets was able to integrate its systems easily with Yahoo's.

It can play a key role in helping Spreets manage all aspects of its operations, for instance, especially business processes and workflow. Everything from the very first contact a business has with Spreets, through to the very last invoice and payment sent to them is all managed in the cloud.

Salesforce.com was also able to come into its own as a source of valuable business intelligence and as a powerful tool for designing highly customised reports. For instance, it can quickly tell you which customers are more likely to jump out of a plane and those who'd prefer a relaxing massage. And of course it knows everybody's birthday.

"It allows us to make sure that we deliver better deals than anyone else out there," McEvoy says, adding that it also helps in the management of business partners. "It [also] provides the ability for us to look after our merchants better than anyone else."

 

Worry-free

McEvoy says that as the company grew larger, its cloud computing provider also enabled it to better manage the performance of its salespeople in great detail. It allows him to see "who was making enough calls, who was signing up enough leads, who had a good pipeline".

And the cherry on top of all this is having the confidence that all of the IT systems supporting the business are running and working without interruption.

"There's nobody worrying about whether the servers are up; no worrying about whether the technology works – that's all taken care of," McEvoy explains. "We can just focus on growing the business."