Why I’m Joining Crayon

Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Crayon (crayon.co) to lead their marketing efforts! Crayon is a market and competitive intelligence company that provides strategic insights and inspiration for marketers. I’ve been following the Crayon team for a long time now, from their first product launch nearly two years ago, through launching their market intel product last year, and becoming a customer a couple of quarters ago. The combination of the product, team, and market made this an incredible opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

Why I’m Excited to Join Crayon:

Strong Product and User Base

Before launching Crayon Intel, the market and competitive intelligence product, the team spent over a year building the backend technology and free web design inspiration product, Inspire. Today, Inspire tracks hundreds of millions of pages across 2.2 million companies. With more than 45k users already, Crayon has an incredible product and user base for setting out into the market intel field. This is quite the “leg up” for a new marketing leader, but I’m also excited for what this means for future growth and company strength.

Competitive Intel is a Hard, Unsolved Problem

I’ve experienced first hand the problem that Crayon solves - and used Crayon to help solve it in my previous role. Marketers know that their competition has a massive impact on the success of their company, yet the existing tools to monitor the competition are very much lacking. Existing tools will pick up some subset of channels - like social media posts or news mentions - and some companies simply try to solve the problem by throwing people at it to track competitors manually. Crayon monitors 100+ different signals, from online reviews to website messaging changes to pricing and packaging updates, and delivers them to marketing teams so that they can make strategic decisions and arm their sales teams with the best intel. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but I think Crayon can crack that nut.

Marketing to Marketers

On a personal note, I can’t think of a better job as a marketer than to market to yourself. I love talking with my peers - learning about their jobs, their challenges, their careers - and now I can do that as a core part of my job. I get to leverage my own insight and experience as a marketer working in a competitive industry to help drive the company and product. I get to use the product every week and think of new ways for us to use the intel or ways to improve the product for us and all of our customers. I loved doing this at HubSpot and I’m excited to be back on my home turf.

Awesome Team to Work With (Again)

Of course, this is the underlying theme to any company’s success… there are plenty of factors necessary for building a big successful company, but one foundational piece is a great team. As a small but growing startup, each person has a significant impact on the company culture and success. I’m thrilled to be working with some of my favorite fellow HubSpot alumni, as well as a lot of new coworkers who have already impressed me with their passion, intelligence, and experience. Already they’ve leveraged one product to launch another, and we’re seeing customers use the product in different ways from competitive intelligence to business development to customer engagement. Great teams can accomplish great things, and I’m excited to be joining this one to make sure our story is a great one.

If you’re interested in seeing what we’re up to, check out Crayon.co, Crayon Inspire, or Crayon Intel.