Business
Laura Roeder is a social media marketing expert who gives businesses of all sizes the tools they need to make their mark on the web. With all of the clutter on the web, it’s hard to get recognized and your thoughtful post may never get the exposure it deserves. Laura is the Founder and CEO of Edgar, a social media marketing tool, that tackles the problem social media is having today, finding and connecting with your audience. STRATEGIES USED TO FUND BUSINESS Edgar was self-funded. I had another business, LKR Social Media, and also another training business called B-school that I started with a partner. Both of those businesses had done really well, so I used some of the profits to launch Edgar. It was basically a bootstrap model where we didn’t take on any investors or outside funding. FOUNDERS I am a solo founder. My husband is the CTO of Edgar, he built the product. He is like a founder in a lot of ways, but since this product was stemmed from an existing business, we didn’t make him a founder. DESCRIBE A MOMENT WHEN YOU FELT LIKE GIVING UP Once you grow your business larger, managing people is really what you spend your time on. If you have someone on your team who isn’t performing or isn’t a cultural fit, those can be the hardest days. In particular, when I have to let someone go, that’s definitely the most emotionally exhausting and the most difficult thing I have to do as a founder. HUGE SUCCESS Something really fun with Edgar was how quickly it’s grown and how much our customers have resonated with it. When we launched Edgar it was really an experiment. We just knew that we wanted it; we thought that other people wanted it, but we didn’t know if people would buy it. As soon as Edgar got out, we got to our first million in annual recurring revenue in about 11 months after launch. SUPERPOWER I find that the problem is never the lack of ideas; it’s the action of implementing it. Being decisive and putting some version of it out there so that we may continue to improve it would be my strength. KRYPTONITE One of the flipsides of the decisiveness is the impatience, which is definitely a problem of mine. IF YOU CAN HAVE ANY SUPERPOWER I would love to be able to read people’s minds, but I know it would be one of those that I would immediately regret as soon as it happens. RECOMMENDED RESOURCE OR APP Edgar: The Social Media Queque That Never Runs Out Slack: A Messaging App For Teams RECOMMENDED BOOKS