Sam Hutchinson and Everlytic managing director Walter Penfold
Everlytic is a proudly South African organisation that has developed a rich, integrated email, mobile and social communications tool designed to help businesses communicate better with their customers. Innovation forms the core of this organisation, carried through in its products, people and plans for the future.
This small to medium enterprise was started by entrepreneur Sam Hutchinson and Josh Adler when they were fresh out of university and has continued to evolve year-on-year to become a remarkable success.
“The fundamental thing about almost all entrepreneurs is that we believe in our ideas, no matter how good or bad they are. You actually have to be a little crazy, so that that you try the impossible and push the boundaries,” says Hutchinson.
“Some of these ideas turn into great things and some don’t, but the reality is that if you are a hard worker and remain agile you can turn just about any idea into a success.
“I believe the concept that people just come up with an idea, build it and then it works is generally misguided,” he adds. “Most ideas progress from something small and through hard work and total commitment the idea progresses into a reality. At Everlytic, we are always trying to do things better and service our customers better but we start with something small, test if it works, and then build on that success.”
Everlytic is a remarkable product and business. Innovation is steeped in the culture, the business model and in the product itself. Designed as a digital communications product that allows the enterprise to communicate with customers and contacts over email, mobile and social media, it can send anything from a simple newsletter to complex, dynamic content based on user behaviour.
“The solution can even send things like invoices or credit card statements and has been scaled to deliver complex communications over mobile as well. Mobile is an area where there is definitive growth right now,” says Hutchinson. “Once we send the communication our product reports back on everything: who read the mail, what links they clicked on and even what device they are using. Powerful reporting can assess if the communication has been well received and its effect on customers, which then allows the organisation to make better decisions about its business and communications going forward.”
As a business, Everlytic is structured on the premise that commitment pays off and this is in all areas, from people to product development to innovation and change. It is this focus that resulted in the organisation undergoing a significant restructuring in 2011 in order to hone its capabilities and make it far more scalable for the future.
“When we first started in 2004, we were fresh Computer Science graduates in need of some work. We started out as an IT development services business doing almost anything legal for money,” says Hutchinson. “We did this for about five years, and had great success, but eventually we realised that we had built lots of pretty average things. Nothing we had done had been at all amazing. So we decided to pick an idea, focus on it, and be the very best.
“We focused on just being the best at this one thing, and that was Everlytic,” says Hutchinson. “In the first month of Everlytic the platform was sending out in excess of 400 000 emails a month and was already making a name for itself as a solution. Fours year later, we send out over 130 million emails a month. We would not have been able to achieve this growth and success if we had not focused on this one thing and made sure we were brilliant at it.”
It was a paradigm shift that has underscored the organisation’s commitment to excellence and ensuring that the products on offer are scalable and sustainable. As a product, Everlytic didn’t need a lot of hand holding and additional staff; it was already a self-contained solution that could be used by anyone effectively. This gave the business greater scope for growth without the inevitable impact on the bottom line.
“We built this product on our own terms — if it had a great feature, then we would include it. If a client wanted a feature and we didn’t like it, we didn’t include it,” says Hutchinson. “We focused hard on building something that could be used and sold over and over again, and used by many different people. Products are scalable, but they are also risky as you are creating something from an idea of your own and you are only hoping that people will like it.”
Hutchinson says he followed his dreams and developed something that he believed in. It was a gamble that paid off. Everlytic is growing and it is also recognised as a product that epitomises the values of innovation.
“For many people innovation is what you build and we have built a phenomenal product with cutting edge features that’s easy to use, with a great user experience,” says Hutchinson. “The features are very powerful and allow non-technical people to achieve very complex technical things in terms of their email and SMS communication. Most of our customers are not technical and so the features we offer are world leading in terms of what we can get them to do, and they can also scale as our customers scale.”
The other aspect of innovation is the people.
Hutchinson is one of many successful entrepreneurs who have recognised the value of people and the fundamental role they play in making the business a success.
“The culture of a company breeds innovation,” he says. “We really do embrace innovation at Everlytic. Our tech team takes a week off every two months — the whole team — and they run a week’s project where they can build whatever they want to build. We may use what they create or we may not, it doesn’t matter. The point is that they get to follow their own dreams and interests and often this can result in something incredible.”
The same principle is applied across all the departments in the business, allowing each unit the opportunity to explore innovative thinking and planning.
“All of these creative days and hackathons are structured, they are not people wandering off by themselves, they follow a process on how to come up with something innovative,” says Hutchinson. “We follow an agile methodology in our company where we improve on actions and use this to improve our business on a regular basis. However, you need structure in order to breed innovation. When people understand what output is required from the innovation week, they often come up with useful ideas we can actually use.”
This culture of innovative thinking and a commitment to implementing this into products and solutions has ensured that the business remains at the forefront of its market.
Hutchinson places emphasis on how innovation remains key to their success across the development and other departments in the company, as well as respecting the people who make up the lifeblood of the organisation.
“People always start by saying ‘let’s build something innovative’ instead of asking how to become innovative,” he says. “It sounds a bit airy fairy, but if your staff are committed to you and you ensure that they are well looked after, then you are already heading towards success. They won’t commit to your dream unless you put food on their tables; if you pay them properly and don’t force them to work 16-hour days, then they will want to be a part of your dream and business. If you treat your people right it has a knock-on effect on your business and your country.”