THE QUARTERLY STARTUP

LET’S TALK TECH

Jimmy Odom founder and CEO of

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DID YOU KNOW?Over the past 30 years, new companies with 1 to 4 employees have created over 1 million jobs per year.1

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STARTUP MARKETING, JUMPSTARTED.

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1,000,000+ NEW JOBS

Jimmy Odom is the founder and CEO of WeDeliver, Chicago’s first on-demand delivery solution for retailers. WeDeliver offers same-day delivery for local businesses via independent delivery drivers. (Think Uber, but for products instead of people.) Here, Jimmy tells us how a unique marketing strategy helped WeDeliver get off the ground.

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Learn more about WeDeliver at wedeliver.us

Jimmy Odom

LET’S TALK TECH

We offer something that delivery services like FedEx don’t — if you need ink toner in the next 45 minutes, we can do that. If you have a product that needs to get to a local merchant today, we can do that, too. WeDeliver came into the market and offered this solution at a really competitive price point that would allow our customers, who are the merchants, to serve their customers far more efficiently and transparently.

You can’t underestimate the power of marketing in person. So we create great collateral for our sales team to engage potential merchant partners. But also, we get involved: we’re one of the first companies to market on behalf of our partners. We collect insights and create merchant profiles and spotlights on our blog to dive deep into those organizations. Then we communicate that to our local and national audience.

Understand who your customer is. Lots of entrepreneurs will start with the solution before they truly understand the problem. But you have to understand the customer in order to do everything you can to communicate with them. The only way to do that is to spend time with your customer to understand their ailments and how best you can solve them. All the messaging and marketing you do will come from that.

WHAT MAKES WEDELIVER UNIQUE?

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY?

ANY ADVICE FOR OTHER ENTREPRENEURS WHO ARE NEW TO MARKETING?

CDW:

CDW:

CDW:

Jimmy:

Jimmy:

Jimmy:

1 Kauffman Foundation Report: The Return of Business Creation, August 2013

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