Gilad Salamander is Co-founder/CEO at eClincher – the most advanced social media management tool. With a proven track record in Business, Product & Engineering Management, New Product Introduction (NPI), and Manufacturing and Support, he has the proven ability to implement strategies that support business growth. He is an active investor in several startup companies and a co-founder/partner at EpiMetrix Inc. Strengths include product vision, strategic planning for growth, full P&L management and operational excellence.

Show  Notes:

Here’s a fun question for you…If you walked in your sleep, where would you go?

Probably to the beach, but I need to wake up before going into the water.

What is eClincher all about?

We started the concept about four years ago; we wanted to build a social media management tool for the Micro, Small businesses. We developed that with a cool user interface. Customers compared us to some of the big competitors. We find that we had to build an amazing solution for end users that was transparent. There was also a lot of discussions with our customers. We sought feedback and continuously improve our platform to include features so that they don’t have to go to multiple tools to find unique solution for things. They can do it all in one platform in our system.

We also wanted to save them time because we know how businesses and entrepreneurs are. They need help. That’s our vision. We’re are about entering solution and engagement.

What problem is eClincher solving that Hootsuite isn’t?

Social media has evolved from social media marketing and publishing into engagement. Social Media is expanding into support and CRM. That’s aligning well with our vision and we have developed our tool to address those issues. The differentiation is that we take care of the publishing and the scheduling. We do it really well with features like post preview, edit links, free access to stock images, animated GIFs, integration with Canva (the publishing aspect). We added another great feature called auto-post with queues. You can use queues to queue a category of posts, fill it up with content and schedule weekly schedule. Once you turn on auto publish it will continue to recycle each post at a time until it reaches the end. There is the option for one time publishing as well as queues with end date that allows you to run campaigns. That can get as 80-90% engagement.  The publishing is the tool to get more engagement. In addition, we have analytics, RSS feeds, content curation, inboxes – an amazing way to get engagement. Everything gets collected from all your social media channels into one inbox. You can respond, follow, follow from different profiles rather than going to the different platform. It saves a lot of time.

What are some your users saying about eClincher?

We get a lot of 5-star ratings from software review sites. The main thing they are saying is that they like the completeness of the product. They can get everything in one platform so they don’t have to use 3 or 4 products. The price is reasonable, we are efficient with everything on stored on the cloud.  We continue to evolve into adding new features and the customers benefit from that.

Is eClincher the first product you’ve worked on?

I’ve worked on new product introduction in different companies and managed teams but this is my first startup. I’ve done some investment and other stuff so I understand what it takes to build and define a product. It has helped me a lot with eClincher but I also learnt a lot of new things with the experience. I can certainly share tips I’ve learnt along the way.

What are some of the things that are foremost on your mind when you are thinking about developing products?

In general, for entrepreneurs and startups the two most important things that an entrepreneur need to focus on is:

1. Connect with the end user. How are they going to use the product? Is it solving a pain point? What is the advantage? If you think you have something that they are going to benefit from go ahead. If the answer is no you probably shouldn’t do it. Try to think from the end user’s perspective and not from an engineering one. It is not easy but they are things you can do to help for example ask questions of others to get feedback.
2. Execution – this starts from the very basic of design and thinking about the product all the way to go to market and trying to sell it. There are lots of services out there to help you and you need to execute to sell your product. Entrepreneurs that are coming from a technical background don’t feel as comfortable to go out and sell. There is no one better to sell your product than you. When you talk to people they will give feedback that will help you to improve it.

Was there any major challenge you faced during the development stage of eClincher?

As a startup, you think you develop something that everybody is going to go wild and want. The reality is that once you develop it, you shouldn’t fall in love with it thinking this is the best thing on earth and everybody is going to run to you and pay for it. You have to be open to listen to get feedback from others. Customers can give you an idea of what they want and you can develop it into something better. Someone with a technical background to switch into that mode is a challenge.

The second thing I would say is the packaging. It is important how your product is going to look, your user interface, your website. All of this is affecting the decision of the end user whether they should buy your product or not.  Be open to get feedback from them.

I had to try to be as neutral as possible saying, is this what people really want?’ Is this going to solve their pain point? Try to think ahead where the social media trend is going. What will people need 2 or 3 years down the line. We all tend to be very focused on the development of the product and we sometimes forget to separate ourselves and think from a high-level perspective. It is challenging for technical people because they love to write the code.

Main Take-Aways:

• Be open to getting feedback from your customers.
• Pay attention to your product packaging.
• Social media has evolved from social media marketing and publishing into engagement.

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