Germany-based company offers beta of a central dashboard to handle email and social campaign management through several tools.
We are open Digital Marketing
CampaignChain, Inc. sets out to make life a lot easier for everyone involved in corporate communications. We build the command center that gives you a high-level strategic overview as well as a quick route to tactical implementation. Plus, you can add online channels and integrate tools on-the-go. That way, companies can engage fully with a target audience to create positive experiences that keep a company relevant.
Germany-based company offers beta of a central dashboard to handle email and social campaign management through several tools.
CampaignChain includes open source capabilities, drawing developers to build on the value to the software. That aids marketers looking for a flexible channel management tool, as well as those who find themselves priced out of the enterprise solutions market.
In this article, we will introduce you to CampaignChain, an open source social media marketing tool that can help you create, plan, execute and monitor your social media platforms.
It was at the beginning of 2014 that our founder Sandro Groganz was dissatisfied with existing marketing tools. Not that they were particularly bad, the successful ones were actually very good at what they did, but they were mostly point solutions. Sandro was looking for a tool that would allow him to automate marketing across all online channels and software tools.
Back then, he ran a marketing agency he co-founded, which specializes on consulting for open-source software vendors. He was tired of all the manual work involved, such as making sure that content gets published at the same time on multiple channels and collecting statistical data about all channels for each month to do marketing controlling.
The only viable solutions he knew were the marketing clouds provided by the big vendors. They are expensive, proprietary and not really extendible. With his coding and business expertise in Open Source, he quickly came to the conclusion that there’s an opportunity for creating an open-source alternative.
In April 2014, Sandro coded the first prototype of CampaignChain, which was dubbed “Amariki” back then. That’s a word his younger daughter Emilia coined. She always said it when she was very happy, she invented it, no one could yet tell us, whether it actually exists in a language.
With the prototype, Sandro wanted to see whether the basic concept would work and to test whether it could be done in the technology he chose. He did not code for 10 years, so he also wanted to verify that his rusty skills could be vitalized and modernized. Once he started coding, he realized, there’s no need to worry. It was in fact a spiritual experience for him to re-activate his programming skills, his developer synapses started firing like crazy and connected with the parts of his brain that hold all the marketing expertise. After 1 month of intense programming, he was amazed at how quickly he could achieve a viable prototype and felt inside, that he was really onto something.
After 6 months of coding many days and nights, Sandro released the code on GitHub. He also found a name for the product: CampaignChain. Along with the source code, he also published the initial Website at campaignchain.com as well as software documentation under docs.campaignchain.com.
Since its initial release to the public in October 2014, Sandro added a lot of new functionality and the product matured. In February 2015, he was able to win Bryan Bogensberger as an advisor. The former CEO of Inktank, which got sold to Red Hat for $175M, was instantly convinced that CampaignChain meets a broad market need. A couple of months later, Michael Grossman joined as an advisor. He was the CEO at 3 startups, one of them received over $60M in funding and all of them were acquired. Both Bryan and Mike are of tremendous help for Sandro in building the business.
To make the move from a pure open-source project to an open-source business, Sandro incorporated CampaignChain, Inc. in the USA and registered the trademark.
More and more people got interested and involved in CampaignChain. They started contributing code, but some also saw a business opportunity and wanted to invest in the company. Soon after Sandro started talking to Angel Investors, they agreed on a deal. This allowed him to focus full-time on CampaignChain and to build a team.
The Angel Investment allows CampaignChain, Inc. to build the infrastructure to run CampaignChain as a SaaS offering. As a start, private beta users will be able to try CampaignChain for up to 6 months at no cost.
Our goal is to help everyone make innovative marketing ideas come true. Today, marketeers face an increasing amount of online channels, tools and devices (IoT, beacons). As the opportunities for highly targeted marketing grow, so does fragmentation of workflows. CampaignChain allows marketeers to plan, execute, monitor, and optimize campaigns within a holistic overview across many tools and channels.