Entrepreneur Spotlight: An Inside Look at Marketing at Social Tables and the Growing #dctech Community
Q&A with Trevor Lynn, Chief Marketing Officer, Social Tables
Trevor Lynn didn’t always know he wanted to be an entrepreneur, but it didn’t take long for him to find out that he didn’t want to be in finance. “I really think of businesses as the people who make them up, whether they’re the employees or the customers. Finance removes that human element and I wanted more than that.”
And so he set off on a course that would eventually land him as CMO at one of the D.C. area’s top tech companies — Social Tables. “It’s been an amazing ride. D.C. is a great place to be in a startup. It’s a supportive and collaborative community that has contributed a lot to my personal growth and to the growth of Social Tables.” As the calendar turns to 2017, Trevor reflects on the amazing growth of Social Tables, what challenges lie ahead and what his wishes are for the #dctech community.
Q. What’s your favorite thing going on at Social Tables right now?
This is the one time of year that you give yourself the time to look back at the entire year and what you’ve accomplished as well as what lays ahead. When you’re in the moment and you’re pushing yourself to do more and move faster, it’s hard to appreciate the work you’re doing. But every year when I reflect back, I’m amazed at all the things that we’ve done. It’s a wow moment. And that’s always a good feeling.
Then you take that and start to hash through what worked, what didn’t work and where you double down. It’s a data driven conversation. Then you think about the high leverage points that are going to get you the growth you want to see. That leads you to the big investments you want to make and projects that you want to tackle. You get to look out at all of the next year and get really creative. It’s a really fun time. When you move so fast you don’t often get the dedicated time to think and reflect and plot out big things. But that’s what we’re doing right now at Social Tables and it’s exciting.
Q. What’s your biggest marketing challenge right now? Why?
For us, we have some new products coming out and we’re also migrating customers from a legacy product to a new version coming out. So one of our challenges as a marketing team is migrating a large installed base to a new version. Until now, we’ve been very focused on acquisition. Now we’re thinking about how we talk to customers, market to customers and get them excited about a new version. We’re working a lot more with Product and Customer Success to get this done. It’s a fun challenge and our team has embraced it.
Our other challenge is new products. We’ve been selling one product for four years, but now have a portfolio of products. Launching new products means that we need to think about channels, how the sales process works, how to price it, how to package it, etc. There are a lot of unknowns that you need to get feedback on. For us, getting market feedback can be a challenge. You need people to respond. So you send surveys, perform user testing, call prospects and collect lots and lots of data. But you can only move as fast as you get feedback so you need to figure out how to get that quickly.
And then we’re dealing with where Social Tables is within the industry. Our industry is relatively specific so when we go to trade shows, many people there are now customers whereas they weren’t four years ago. So, how do you change the tactics and messaging based on where you are in the market. What strategies do you need to change and shift? How should that change as we add more and more customers. What’s scalable? The majority of our opportunity for growth is within our own customer base and leveraging our own network. So it’s how do you maintain those relationships, grow a great brand that people want to talk about and increase referrals. We try to keep a certain percent of our budget in testing new things and this is an area where we’re thinking differently about how we go to market.
Q. Social Tables is well known for its innovative culture. Tell us how you stay true to the company culture as you grow.
As strange as that sounds, it feels like the secret sauce is putting processes in place. Predictable Success is a book a lot of us are reading right now at Social Tables. It talks about how most companies hit whitewater when they grow to a certain size where they move from the fun period to the predictable success period. Part of that for us is that we have a flat organization that is growing really fast and everyone is making decisions, doing their best and doing whatever they can to make Social Tables grow. But when you get to a certain size, you have a lot of talented people working hard but it’s not always easy to work in unison.
So for us, we say let’s be innovative by creating the right processes and teams to make sure we’re still trying new things but we’re all pushing in the same direction. For example, our engineering team now plans out its innovation sprints months in advance. It makes it much more effective because it’s well planned and we put a lot of thought into it. All of the pre-work helps harness the creative and collaborative power of the team and makes them so much more effective. And that’s true of all teams. If you want to go above and beyond it takes planning. We still have some of those serendipitous ideas over beers that we’ll come in and try on a Monday morning, but it’s a lot harder to do it now when you’re trying to move 130 people and get them bought in to execute.
Q. You’ve spent your entire career in entrepreneurship. Why did you choose this path over the big company route?
I studied finance in school. I thought I was going to do the whole finance path, maybe investment banking. But what ended up turning me off from finance is that entire companies are little dots on a graph that become some way to diversify a portfolio. I come from a small town and my parents run a small business. Knowing that each dot was made up of thousands of people, employees and customers, that depended on that for their livelihood or business, I didn’t like boiling that down to a dot and analyzing whether that dot was going to move up or down on a chart. It’s way bigger than that to me.
So I started working at Affinity Lab, which was one of the original coworking spaces in D.C., and I saw all these dedicated people working on their passion projects. They would come in off the Hill in their suits at 6:00 and they’d sit down and they’d just be in there until midnight just hacking away and working on their big ideas. To me, I saw these people that were really dedicated, they loved what they were working on and they wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world. Then I had a chance to go to LivingSocial, which was growing blazing fast. And that’s where everybody at that coworking space wanted to be. So I was pretty convinced that the journey from an idea to a company with revenue and customers would be a pretty amazing journey. So far that’s definitely true.
Q. What do you like most about being part of the #dctech community?
I think we have a really collaborative community here in D.C. One of our investors is based in San Francisco. They have these great CMO roundtables and I’ll go out there every now and then and take part in those. And every time I do it, I feel like I’m Buddy from Elf in New York City. I meet these marketers from cool companies that I follow, and they’re doing interesting things in their marketing and I’m super excited about it. I want to nerd out on it and there are a few people there who do too. But for the most part, the folks in Silicon Valley are so desensitized to it and they’re not as excited to collaborate, swap notes and talk strategies.
In D.C., it’s the total opposite. Everyone is so excited to learn from each other and trade notes. Everyone is open to taking coffee. In D.C., you could be a lifestyle software company and other people in the tech community, from big companies to small, will be pumped to talk to you. The way that I learned was by reaching out to people on Linkedin and asking them to coffee and talking about their experience for whatever project I was working on. You can be a first time founder or first time in a role, first time in a software company and you can find a lot of people in town who are willing to chat with you. I love that. Without that there’s no way that I would have grown as fast as I did. I’ll always love D.C. for that.
Q. Any predictions for #dctech in 2017?
I don’t know if it’s a prediction as much as it’s a wish. It feels like from the time I’ve been around #dctech, call it six years ago, a lot of people have been starting a lot of companies. We’ve gone through lots of classes of companies, so to speak. Obviously LivingSocial was one class. You have the Social Tables, Contactually, TrackMaven class. For 2017, I hope that there’s a class of companies that comes out. And It feels like there might be a good class brewing and that would be awesome. One of the founders of HelloWallet is starting another company. You have Upside Travel, which was started by one of the founders of Priceline. And the security companies have done well with a few Series A deals out there. There’s more people doing more stuff, bringing more talent into D.C. and getting more eyeballs on D.C. So, it’s my wish that we get a class of real sustainable tech companies that are a staple here in D.C. for years to come.
Q. Your company recently hosted a #dctech ping pong tournament. Who is this best ping pong player in #dctech?
That’s a great question. I was thrilled with how good some of the people were who came out for the tournament. I don’t know if I can name names, but the #1 spot at Social Tables moves often. I mean, they put in a lot of reps. The tournament was a lot of fun. I think that’s what we need to do more of. Less of things that are more planned out and here’s an award and more of the hey, anybody want to play ping pong. Does anyone want to play a cornhole tournament? I think those things are really cool and #dctech is a great place to do more of that.
Rapid fire questions — Get to Know Trevor Lynn
- What song/music is most played on your iPod?
Soulection. He’s a DJ. It’s perfect work music. 3 hours of low key mixes that you can listen to forever and its level headed.
- Who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
Twitter is a gold mine of funny little quips. I recently took Twitter off my phone, turned off the notifications and I’ve enjoyed Twitter more that way. I check it more to see what’s going on rather than having it blast things at me. I really enjoy Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. He is the most unbelievably witty person on the planet.
- What is the first website/app you access every morning?
I use Headspace, it’s a meditation app. I have a rule that I can’t check anything until I meditate. So It’s the one thing above all else that I do, even if I have email notifications.
- Three people living or dead you’d like to have over for dinner
Warren Buffett — I love him. He’s a prolific thinker.
John Wooden — I think between him and Warren it would be a really interesting conversation.
Michael Jordan — He’s an unbelievable winner, very cut-throat and intense. I’d just love to hear his commentary and thoughts.
Follow Social Tables on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
www.socialtables.com
Editors Note: Social Tables was acquired by Cvent in 2018
