Small businesses need help marketing themselves online. And Tyler Scionti, a Holy Cross graduate, aims to help them do that through a Worcester startup called Blog Trackr, of which he is CEO and founder.
Can Blog Trackr succeed?
For a startup to be successful, it must solve the right problem more effectively than competitors do. More specifically, startups ought to operate at the intersection of four sets: potential customers who are suffering from considerable pain, large vendors who do not offer a solution to that pain, the startup’s founding team has the skills and passion to build a better solution, and the market’s potential revenues exceed $1 billion.
Let’s see if Blog Trackr has all the necessary ingredients.
Mr. Scionti loved Holy Cross. As he said in a Feb. 4 interview, “I am from Sherborn, Massachusetts. I went to Holy Cross — it was the first school I visited, and I fell in love with the place (doesn’t hurt that three of my great-uncles went as well).”
He aspired to write, but decided to hedge his bets. “I declared a major in English because I knew I loved to read and write, I wanted to be a sportswriter for a bit, though added an economics major, which geared me towards finance,” he said.
Within three years he had started Blog Trackr.
“After I graduated in 2015 and worked at a small finance tech company and then started working at a marketing software company (tying in my English major). Over the years since graduating I taught myself to code, as well as skilled up on the basics of marketing and product development, which led to Blog Trackr’s founding in February 2018,” he said.
The company is based on the idea of relieving pain for small businesses. According to Mr. Scionti, “I saw that there are so many businesses starting up, and things like blogging just aren’t enough. Businesses need to be a lot smarter when it comes to marketing, but if you have a five, or 10-person team, it’s difficult. Blog Trackr aims to meet that need by making things like SEO and content marketing a lot more approachable by automating the more time-consuming aspects of them.”
Mr. Scionti plans to sell to businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
“Our target market is small businesses, primarily one to 20 employees, that work in industries like finance, healthcare, or technology (as they need to have an industry-specific content strategy). This gives us a possible market of around 800,000 businesses here in the United States, which is only growing as new businesses continue to pop up around the country,” he said.
He believes that Blog Trackr offers a better solution at a lower price than competing ones.
“We’ve got a few competitors in the content curation space, namely at the enterprise level. We feel we’re a better solution for our target market due to our focus on search engine optimization (as opposed to leaving that up to a larger team to handle) as well as our lower price point,” he said.
Blog Trackr’s staff is growing, and it’s self-funded.
“When we began it was just me and my co-founder, John Morton (also a Holy Cross grad from 2015), now we’ve brought on three interns for our marketing team as well as an intern on our engineering team. We hope to keep growing this year to round out our technical team further. We’re fully bootstrapped, we began bringing in revenue in 2018, which helps though we’ll see where we end up by the end of 2019,” Mr. Scionti said.
Worcester is the right place to be for Blog Trackr.
As he said, “When it came time to settle on a place to call home, Worcester really was the only place I seriously considered. As a startup in Boston we’re just another startup in Boston. But in Worcester we get to be part of a community. Having gone to school here I grew to love Worcester, and it’s amazing how much the city has grown since I graduated. Getting to be a part of that is something John and I have always wanted, so it’s great to see that goal coming true.”
For Blog Trackr to succeed, it will have to win the business of a considerable number of those 800,000 U.S. businesses it’s targeting. I am looking forward to learning more about its progress in the year ahead.
Peter Cohan of Marlboro heads a management consulting and venture capital firm, and teaches business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College. His email address is peter@petercohan.com.