A Marketer's Quest to Save His Soul

When Dave Meyer looked upon the sea of cubicles at his new job at a large corporate bank in the 1990s, he quickly realized he needed to make a change to “save my soul.” And so, he decided to start his own web design business on the side while still working this day job.

In 1999 when he made this decision, domain names were readily available, and Meyer wanted an easy name that communicated his new company’s purpose: to build websites for businesses. With that criterion in mind, he booked the domain BizzyWeb, and the rest was history.

At the time, web development was still a new field, and with a background in communications and marketing, he knew he could add value to the web design process for clients. While still working at the bank, he built up a client base that would allow him to leave his day job in 2008, even as the Great Recession was in full swing.

Just like the coronavirus pandemic, the Great Recession forced companies to rethink their marketing strategies. With less money to go around, they had to market smarter and for a better price, which was an “easy win” for BizzyWeb. It was the clients they assisted during this time that helped BizzyWeb grow into the company it is today.

“Then our clients needed marketing, so we started doing marketing. And then, our clients had marketing, and they really needed sales enablement and automation, which is really where BizzyWeb is now,” Meyer said. “We have CRM, marketing automation and sales automation, and we’re HubSpot Platinum Partners.”

By expanding BizzyWeb’s scope to better serve his clients’ needs related to online sales, Meyer set his company up for the job of a lifetime: building a website for the musician Prince. On a Thursday before the Superbowl weekend, Meyer received a call from Prince’s manager asking if BizzyWeb would be willing to take on a project with a short turn-around to sell Prince’s new album without going through iTunes. Meyer then asked the manager when the website needed to be ready, and he said the Monday after Superbowl Sunday, just four days away.

“My team worked around the clock to get this live, and it was incredibly successful from the moment it went live,” Meyer said. “We knew there would be a huge demand from the moment we announced the website, so we created an automatic server-spawning farm to handle the volume. But go figure, Prince tweeted about the website five minutes before the farm went online, so as we were starting, our servers got crushed right away.”

All ended well, however, thanks to some quick troubleshooting, and the website was working again within 25 minutes. And this attitude alludes to Meyer’s overarching business strategy of putting the customer’s success before profits.

“In my time working with Google and Hubspot, the biggest learning I had over the years was to focus on our customers, and not BizzyWeb, in our marketing. Our website is about who we serve and the needs we solve for those customers, including adding a number of helpful tools to let them start self-solving for the things that they need,” Meyer said.

The COVID-19 pandemic only further amplified the need for services like BizzyWeb as traditional forms of lead generation and sales, like in-person marketing, expos, and shows, have fallen to the wayside. Meyer said that companies must now use data and analytics to target the specific needs of potential clients and best serve them.

“Once clients use a CRM as a central database to make meaningful connections, they have a hard time going back to the old ways,” Meyer said. “You have much higher quality interactions, and it lets your sales team meet people where they are.”

And at BizzyWeb itself, the use of CRM technology allows the company to expand without having to hire more staff. Meyer attributes this technological convenience to HubSpot, an online sales and marketing suite that allows BizzyWeb to better direct customers to the content they want to see.

“We’re not trying to sell thing as much as we want to help people, and that’s really the sales mantra of the future,” Meyer said. “People love to buy online, but they hate to be sold. General broadcasting messages don’t work as well anymore.”