Chad Franzen 3:56
Was Boingnet the business that it kind of developed from?
Dennis Kelly 6:56
Exactly, yes, exactly. And so a lot of the intellectual property we built that, you know, was the basis of Boing that became the basis of Postalytics, but targeting a completely different audience. And, and really solving an end to end problem for marketers.
Chad Franzen 7:13
So Boingnet, boy, that was, as I mentioned, you you have six, six entrepreneurial endeavors. Was Boingnet the fifth?
Dennis Kelly
No, I don’t count that one. Yeah, so this is all one, it’s still the same tax ID number between the two businesses. So it’s simply a rename here.
Chad Franzen
Okay. Okay. So what about entrepreneurship? You know, given the Postalytics as your sixth entrepreneurial endeavor, what is it about entrepreneurship and starting your own thing that you find particularly invigorating?
Dennis Kelly
Well, I think there, there are a lot of reasons that, you know, over time, a person finds themselves, you know, doing this over and over again. But I think some of the, some of the key things are, that, what I really enjoy doing is thinking strategically, while getting my hands dirty. And, and, and so, you know, I like getting things done, I like, being very close to the people in the business that are, you know, making things happen every single day. And, and, you know, what I found is, you know, I started my career in a huge corporation, and got some great training and met wonderful people. But I felt like, my, my impact was pretty limited. And, and that, in order to have a lot of impact, you end up getting very separated from the day to day operations of something. And so I was fortunate at a very young age to get pulled into a startup. And in this found the whole process invigorating, and, you know, there’s highs and lows and a lot of things that you experienced at a startup and as an as an entrepreneur, but, but really, you know, it’s that idea of, I’m building something and I’m, I’m thinking of five years down the road, but I’m actually accomplishing things today that actually move the needle.
Chad Franzen
So do you consider yourself an entrepreneur, a technology expert, or somebody who has focused on turning direct mail into a digital marketing channel?
Dennis Kelly
Well, I can, I can tell you there’s a lot of people my company who would not call me a technology expert. But I guess, you know, at my heart, I’m an entrepreneur. And I love finding great people and building great products. And you know, I find that whole process very easy. explaining and I enjoy doing over and over again. And also Postalytics is the latest thing. And it’s going great after, after that pivot that we mentioned. And you know, my experience, it’s not that unusual. In a start up, as you know, you start down one road, and then you’ve got to make tough decisions, and sometimes, you know, stick a fork in it or take a fork in the road to go down a different path.
Chad Franzen
Do you have goals, kind of moving forward with Postalytics?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, we are very US centric, currently. And so we are printing around, you know, let’s say a million pieces of direct mail a month. At this point, we’re growing very rapidly, about 100% per year. And, you know, we see this growth continuing on outside of the borders of the US, we’ve just launched up in Canada. So we’re excited to, you know, move outside of the US border for the first time. And we see, you know, the growth of the business continuing beyond North America in and, you know, also getting into more and more specific vertical industries that do a lot of direct mail. So, you know, there’s a lot of growth ahead of us, both domestically and internationally.
Chad Franzen
Let’s talk about some of your previous entrepreneurial endeavors. I believe the one prior to this was Wireless City Verizon, was that right?
Dennis Kelly
That’s right. Yes, it was, uh, it was actually a retail operation is my only non non tech startup. And so I had jumped into that with a buddy of mine, who had, who had bought a couple of stores, a couple of Verizon stores, and wanted some help, figuring out what to do with them. And, and, you know, got excited about the opportunity to migrate, folks from the flip phone world in the smartphone world. Okay. So, we were able to build a really a nice business, we had about 50 Verizon wireless stores in three different states. And it was very much focused around the transition from the flip phone to the smartphone, and we had kind of a, maybe an early version of the Apple store, where we had experts that were on staff that were there to help folks, you know, make a decision to move on from the flip phone and learn how to use their smartphone, whether it’s a you know, an iPhone, or Android, whatever it may be. And, you know, we ended up doing really well in the whole thing. So a lot of fun. But I missed software, I miss tech. And so I was really psyched to get back into what we’re doing today.
Chad Franzen
What what do you think made you successful in retail, given that, you know, that was your kind of your first, your first venture down that road? And then you miss tech. So your, your background was in tech, you tried retail, and it was accessible? Why was that?
Dennis Kelly
Well, you know, I think that I had a I had a great partner who had some retail experience. But also, I think that approaching retail from a tech perspective has had some impact. Right. So, you know, thinking about the user experience of somebody walking into a retail store, you know, kind of from scratch without a lot of, you know, history of, you know, how retail is supposed to work. And so, and then applying tech to the backside, the the back office as well, scalable tech at an early stage, I think really set the stage for us to be able to grow quickly and and in a very efficient way. So, you know, I think, I think there there was an ability there for us to kind of marry our backgrounds a bit, and and to pretty to create something really cool.
Chad Franzen
How did your affiliation with wire Wireless City Verizon end?
Dennis Kelly
We ended up selling the business to a private equity based rollout. Okay. So, you know, we had created quite a bit of concentration and market share in the states that we were operating in. And, you know, we had very, very strong metrics and numbers and this PE firm wanted to get into distribution in those states and so they figured out the first way to do it was to buy us.
Chad Franzen
Were you looking to sell? Or did they come to you? And it sounded like a good plan?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, now they came to us, I never find that it’s, it’s a good idea to, it’s always a better idea to have people approach you, if you want to sell something around. So, you know, it was the, it was a relationship that was built out of, you know, some industry conferences and things like that. And, you know, over time, you know, they just said, Hey, we got to have this. So…
Chad Franzen
When you, so, after you you sold? Did you already have the idea in your mind for Postalytics or the day where you just kind of hanging out? And it came to you? Like, how did that, how did that happen?
Dennis Kelly
Well, that’s great question. I actually, I took a bunch of time off. And, you know, kids were in high school where they will spend a lot of time with the family. And then they went off to college, I started getting, you know, a little bit antsy. And so, and that’s where it really ran into my current partner, who had, you know, kind of the original idea around point net, and, you know, Postalytics really kind of snowballed and evolved out of that original conversation.
Chad Franzen
What about Adesso Systems? Can you tell me about that?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, sure. So, so it. So there’s sort of a sort of a path prior to Wireless City where I had been involved in a startup called AnyDay.com. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And we, we essentially, we built one of the very first online calendars. And so if you look at Google Calendar today, it’s pretty much what we built back in the late 90s. Okay. And, and, and, you know, what’s cool about Google Calendar is that you can get on your phone, right, and it, it updates the web, and you know, you can share, and, and so we actually built some software, we built a web based calendar. We built software to synchronize the calendar data from the web down to your device. And so the devices at the time were primarily from Palm. And, and so, you know, when when Palm went public in early 2000, they came to us and said, “Hey, you know, we need to have this, the calendar is such a huge part of, you know, the experience for Palm, we want to extend that to the web. And, you know, we need, you know, we need to add some, some web knowledge and IP to our kind of hardware centric product portfolio.” So they bought Postalytics, I stayed on for a couple of years at home, working on their wireless products that were using the wireless web at the time to build out a whole series of tools. And, and so, you know, it was really that experience, that kind of led me to a desktop, where we built a wireless development platform for software companies, or developing operations to be able to very quickly build little apps before the App Store, right. So you could build these little apps to keep your staff productive, whether they were, you know, connected to a wireless network, or disconnected, which, back in the early 2000s, people were disconnected quite a bit on the device. So it was kind of that line that had me end up at a desk.
Chad Franzen
So how did that how did that end then?
Dennis Kelly
It did not end well. So, so I have my six startups. That’s my one. That’s that’s one that went in the wrong direction. And, you know, a lot of reasons I think we were a little bit ahead of the market. Right. So you know, if you think about, as I mentioned, the app stores and the ability to download the apps, were really the thing that lit a fire under the the market to develop applications for your wireless devices. And they hadn’t existed yet. And but I think the other key mistake that we made was we raised too much money from venture capital, too quickly. And, and, you know, I remember I remember clearly, you know, being controlled and pushed by venture capitalists to, you know, up the number that we when take and and you know, I was a younger CEO. And you know, I had a sales background and I thought, You know what? Go close the deal. We’ll worry about it later. Well, you know, a couple years later, we ended up worrying about it.
Chad Franze
So, someone, something like that, you know, when something like that happens? Was your response, just, you know, figure out something else you can start, or did you think I’m just gonna go get a job?
Dennis Kelly
Now, now, I is definitely, you know, I need to go figure out something else to start in. And that’s, you know, I took a little bit of time off, and that’s when I ended up going over and starting Wireless City shortly after that.
Chad Franzen
Okay, did you learn any kind of valuable lessons about raising capital? Or what lessons have you learned about raising capital?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, yeah, you know, I think that it’s really easy to let the tail wag the dog in the in the financing world. And, you know, it, we I’d had some really good success raising venture capital previously. And you know, that the ability to attract money can help cover up a lot of mistakes, and give you flexibility to kind of move and groove and get things done. But, but the, the idea that you should structure your financing strategy around, what the financing markets want to give you, is, I think, a flawed thought process is very easy to fall into that and say, you know, firms writing checks of exercise, you know, therefore, I need to build a strategy that allows me to take a check of exercise and apply it to this business. And, and it really should go the other way, it should be a ground up things, say, I need, my business is calling for this. Let’s go find financing that fits that scenario. So I think a lot of a lot of young entrepreneurs make that mistake, and they get kind of caught up in the siren song of the venture capital world. And the venture capitalists are off, you know, they’re out for their themselves. That’s what they do. It’s, it’s their business. And, you know, you gotta you got to stand up and you got to do what’s right for you.
Chad Franzen
What was your, your first entrepreneurial endeavor?
Dennis Kelly 22:42
Yeah, great. So I was, when I got out of college, I worked in Manhattan for Prudential Insurance. And I was selling corporate benefit plans to businesses. And, you know, had a great couple of years, I enjoyed it a lot. But I felt like, I just wanted to get involved with something a lot smaller. And so a friend of mine, , who I went to college with, and I were talking and he and his brother were starting up at the time a computer company. And so, you know, it was up in the Boston area, I was in New York, I wanted to get out of New York, go to Boston. There was a young lady I was dating that was up in Boston as well. You know, the stars seemed aligned for me to quit my comfortable job where I was making really good money and up into a startup where I was making nothing. And so I was young, you know, in my 20s, as was my buddy, and his brother, who’s young. And we made a lot of mistakes. But eventually figured it out. Got rid of hardware, we ended up writing, just pulling out of the software and building it in a way that enabled it was it was a healthcare software. So we’re enabling nursing homes, retirement community, do their bookkeeping online for the first time. And so, prior to that, everything was done by hand. It was all manually done, typed up invoices, that kind of thing. And so, you know, took a few years in that business eventually took off. We sold it, I think, eight years after we got it off the ground, to a larger healthcare software company.
Chad Franzen 24:41
At that point, where you kinda like, you’re sold, you’re an entrepreneur for life.
Dennis Kelly
I was in and so that was, you know, that was 95. I stayed on and ran sales for that other company for a couple of years. And then, you know, 97 the internet was really starting to bubble up? And I thought, “Hey, I gotta, I gotta play in this.” And so that that went to be an add experience,
Chad Franzen
What kind of mindset you talked about how you quit your, your high paying job to take a job that paid nothing? What kind of a mindset? Do you have to have to be an entrepreneur, as opposed to just somebody who who wants to get the paycheck?
Dennis Kelly
Well, you know, I think you have to have a lot of faith and confidence. So it might say irrational confidence. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, you have to, you have to feel in your gut, that you’ll figure it out, you know, no matter what, you’re going to figure it out, and you’re going to land on your feet, and you’ll think your way through it, you’ll work your way through it, you’ll do whatever it takes. So that, you know, your fate is not tied so much to the fate of others, or the the work ethic of others, or the decisions of others, you know, comes down to yourself. And so, I think, you know, I was fortunate I had a lot of that mindset instilled in me, at a young age by my parents. They pushed me to do a lot of, you know, I grew up in a farm, so I was always working, working, working, working. And they pushed me to do a lot of kind of young kid entrepreneurial stuff like mowing lawns, and washing cars. And, you know, I did a lot of stuff, just kind of seemed natural to me to kind of take control of my, of the things that were impacting my life.
Chad Franzen
Sure, sure.
During your journey, how did you get help? How have you kind of known or figured out that it was time to pivot or try something else?
Dennis Kelly 26:51
Yeah, great. That’s a great question. And, you know, I think it would be easy to point at certain things and say, wow, you know, it was obvious. I had to make a really tough call, and I had to do this. But in the times that I’ve done it, it’s never black and white. Right? It’s not something that you immediately know. But it’s more of an accumulation of evidence, where you try you test, you, you, you work with some rigor on things. And then I think your gut instinct, over time gets developed, as you have more data. And and so I think that there are certain signs, right, that you need to be very concerned with and the velocity of sales? Is it is such a critical one, right? Like, how long is it taking to sell this? How easy is it for us to get new customers to start using this? You know, all of those types of things, at the early stages of a business, you have to be very sort of hyper focused on. And, you know, you always look back after a pivot, and say, “Well, I wish I’d done it, you know, a year earlier” of course, when it works out, but the reason why you didn’t is because it wasn’t like somebody was screaming at you. Typically, it’s that, well, you’re very heads down, you’re working on something, and you’re accumulating, you know, data and evidence about what’s working, what isn’t working.
Chad Franzen 28:40
You talked about the influence of your parents, who have been some of your mentors, maybe it’s been them, and what has been some advice that you really found memorable?
Dennis Kelly
Well, you know, I think I’ve had a lot of great mentors over the years. And in a lot of different types of capacities, and, you know, both of my parents were, were very much people, there were people that worked very, very hard. And, and they expected nothing but hard work from and, and they also were very much believers in you know, kind of the American ability to go out and create something. And, and, and that there are no limits really, in you know, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, lower middle class kid in a farm, right? Or whatever. If, if you work hard enough, and you have the right mindset, you can do a lot of things in so I got that at a very young age from them. And then, you know, I also I had a great experience in college. Um, that was very challenging. You know, I, I played football, and, and I was a really good football player in high school, and I went to college, and I was surrounded by a lot of other really good football players, as you can imagine. And, you know, I worked really hard, and I felt like I should have been getting on the field, and I wasn’t. And, you know, after some time, it became apparent that I was sort of, you know, beating my head against the wall. And, you know, these coaches were never gonna play me. And so I really wanted to quit. And, you know, I had some coaches, you know, helped me through that. And, you know, at the end of the day, I didn’t quit. And in my senior year, I got a couple breaks, and things went great. I had a phenomenal on field experience, my senior year in college. And, you know, I really learned at that point, like, you know, what, if you really believe in yourself, which I did, like, I thought I should have been playing, I thought I was better than these guys. You know, don’t give up, don’t quit. Because, you know, eventually there’s going to be a break. And if, and you have to be in the game, in order to win. If you walk away from the game, or you decide not to start the game to begin with, you have no shot. And so that really helped inform my thought process later on. You know, as I’m thinking about taking a lot of risks, starting a business, that, you know, I kind of was able to see, hey, you know, if you grind away, you’re gonna get a break at some point. And then you just got to be smart when you when you get that break in, and execute and go. That’s great.
Chad Franzen
Great, great insight. Great story about your, your college and your football career. Hey, I have one more question for you. But first, tell me a little bit more about how people can find out more about Postalytics.
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, absolutely. So of course,Postalytics, is on the web, we’ve got a great website with lots of great information about direct mail and how it can assist your email marketing or digital marketing and how automation is the smart way to do it now. That’s a Postalytics.com. Okay, you can also find me on LinkedIn. I’m active there, and a little bit on Twitter and other social but mostly LinkedIn and online.
Chad Franzen
Okay, that’s great. Sounds good. Hey, I last question for you. When you are at a social event and you meet someone, and you get around to talking about work and people ask you what you do. What do you say?
Dennis Kelly 32:58
I say I start up businesses.
Chad Franzen 33:02
Okay, perfect, perfect.
Dennis Kelly 33:04
Startup guy. That’s what I do.
Chad Franzen 33:06
Very nice. Very nice. Hey, Dennis, it’s been great to talk to you. I really appreciate it. I love hearing your stories and your experience. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for that.
Dennis Kelly 33:16
Thank you. It was great speaking with you and I hope the audience enjoys the episode.
Chad Franzen 33:20
Absolutely. Thanks so much, so long everybody.
Outro 33:22
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