Even in the often hyperbolic realm of tech startups, Utah’s Podium is on an incredible growth arc since launching its reputation and customer interaction software in 2014.
Just two and half years ago, Podium was housed in a spare bedroom of co-founder and CEO Eric Rea’s apartment.
A year-and-a-half ago, they’d graduated to a space above a Provo bike shop — without heat or air conditioning — and had a staff of 15.Today, Podium has almost 200 employees, is set to make a $10 million capital investment in a new Utah headquarters, is on track to hire over 400 new employees in the next five years and has earned a $1.1 million tax credit from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development for the $124.7 million they’ll be paying out in wages over that time.
Oh, and they’ve become the darling of some very heavy-hitting Bay area tech investors, including Accel (famous for being early Facebook funders), Summit Partners, Y Combinator and GV (formerly Google Ventures) who just completed a $32 million round of investment in the company.
The secret to Rea and co-founder Dennis Steele’s meteoric rise?
“The reason we’ve been able to go from an apartment bedroom to a bike shop to now is our product works, and it works really, really, really well,” Rea said.
That product, which is continuing to evolve, helps offline businesses attract, communicate with and retain customers through the careful management of their online presences.
New ways of connecting with customers
“Two years ago, the heart of what we did was make it easy for customers to generate a review of the business in real time,” Rea said.
“Today, what we found is through working with these businesses, it’s the interactions that are so important, offline to online and online to offline.“It’s way more powerful for the business if we do more than just collect a review at the end of a transaction.”
Chris Carson, marketing director for Draper-based carpet cleaning company Zerorez, said engaging Podium about a year ago has had significant, and measurable, positive impacts on his business.
“When people are looking for a carpet cleaner, they have no idea the difference between one company to the next,” Carson said. “So, the decision about which carpet cleaner to choose typically comes through online reviews and about 80 percent of the people we talked to said they were going by reviews they read on Google.”
Previous to using Podium, Zeroez franchises typically had just a handful of reviews that were discoverable online. But now, Carson said, all of that has changed.
“We’ve seen growth in our online reviews of 100 to 200 percent,” Carson said. “At Zerorez in Dallas we’re approaching 1,200 reviews and Salt Lake…
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