CampaignChain Launches Its Open-Source “Cockpit For Digital Marketing”
Germany-based company offers beta of a central dashboard to handle email and social campaign management through several tools.
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Sandro Groganz
CEO & Founder
Sandro is the lead developer of our product and the CEO of our company. He is a dad to 4 and married to 1.
Advisors
Bryan Bogensberger
CEO Quiver
Bryan is the former CEO at Inktank, software-defined open-source storage solution, sold to Red Hat for $175M. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Quiver, which combines mobile messaging with geo-fencing and time-fencing.
Andreas Ramos
SEO Consultant
Andreas has written twelve books on SEO. He has worked at SGI and SUN. He was a director at Acxiom and Manager of Global SEO at Cisco. Andreas currently manages worldwide digital advertising for MIT OpenCourseWare (in 14 languages) and Harvard medical school’s research hospital (in 42 languages). He lives in Palo Alto.
Mike Grossman
CEO Zetta
Mike headed various Startups with up to $61M investments and all of them were acquired. He is currently the CEO at Zetta, an enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery service, and a board member at Quicken.
CampaignChain Links Channels
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.
Schedule your social media marketing with CampaignChain
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.
Our History
01/14
04/14
10/14
02/15
05/15
10/15
11/15
01/14
Scratching Your Own Itch
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.
04/14
An Idea Gets Real
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.
10/14
Giving to the World
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.
02/15
Good Advise
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.
05/15
It’s a Business Now!
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.
10/15
Fly with Angels
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.
11/15
Ready for Users
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.