How Sendible's Founder Rescued His Startup From His Employers

 Zuckerberg Dorsey, and Hoffman are arguably the three most famous social media entrepreneurs in the world, giving us Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn respectively.

All three are also from the US, a nation with a propensity for producing successful tech innovators.

Now the UK is getting in on the act with home-grown social media management dashboard Sendible, founded by software developer-turned-entrepreneur Gavin Hammar.

It is notable for being the world's only social media dashboard that helps businesses generate leads from social media. This lead-generating capability works across all the social media channels, including blogs and video, and is a serious challenger to Hootsuite.

On the back of a major deal with Bluehost and global exposure to its millions of users, Sendible is set to triple its current user base of 100,000 subscribers, a mix of agencies, small businesses and individuals.

Without any investment, Hammar has effectively grown his business organically since 2009 to an almost £2 million subscription-based turnover.

How he achieved that is all the more remarkable, given that he had to wrestle ownership of Sendible away from his former employers, under whose watch he developed the platform.

The Sendible story began a decade ago, before social media was an established term.

Hammar says: “I noticed more and more social networks cropping up, each one allowing users to post updates. Facebook was just starting to gain momentum and Twitter had not yet become mainstream.

“I had the idea to build desktop software to allow users to post to multiple services at once, saving them the hassle of having to log in to multiple services and post updates manually.”

In 2005 he was working as a software developer with a tech startup. They built banking integration software that connected multiple financial systems, and it was that experience that enabled him to start work on his own software project.

After leaving the company in 2006, Hammar began work on his own integration platform in his spare time.

“I initially named the application IntelliMail and the integration system I was building made it possible to connect just about any third party service together in just minutes,” he says.

“Since social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn were gaining popularity and people were looking for ways to save time by scheduling updates in advance and posting to multiple sites at once, I decided to develop these integrations first.”

Hammar had also started working for a software consultancy as a development team leader. As part of his contract, he needed permission from the two directors before he could register a company of his own.

“The directors themselves had previously started and sold a company to Visa so I was really excited to tell them about my startup,” he recalls. “Although they initially seemed impressed, they immediately started questioning the idea and business model saying things like ‘ Google could build this in day’ or ‘Why would anyone want to schedule social network updates?’.”

However they granted Hammar permission to register Sendible as a company, in return for a 10% stake in the business. In exchange, they would give him a desk, a dedicated phone line, a server and allowed him to work on Sendible one a day a week for six months.

But they wouldn’t be providing any cash.

“We never had a term sheet or any formal agreement in place because they refused to cover the legal costs,” says Hammar. “They also had no idea that the Sendible website had been developed on top of the IntelliMail application, which was essentially, where the intellectual property lay.”

This would prove instrumental in Hammar’s exit strategy.

For several months he worked from home one day a week developing Sendible. However, when the directors failed to deliver on their promises of help with business strategy and introductions to their key contacts, he resigned.

However they still had their 10% stake in Sendible. When Hammar asked them to either invest cash or return their shares, they declined.

Without the IntelliMail application Sendible itself was worthless. Hammar played his trump card, informing them that he would be shutting down the company, as it was not profitable.

Realising their investment was only in the Sendible brand they sold their shares back to Hammar for £8,000. He also had legal and accounting fees of £5,000.

In effect he had spent £12,000 buying back his own company, one that had no real income, so he had to find of making the company profitable, very quickly. And he did it by offering a white label version of Sendible that could be rebranded by agencies and resellers, using their own logo, colour scheme and web domain, and enabling them to bring their own clients onto a self-managed platform, as if it was their own product.

This version, launched in 2010, proved to be the catalyst that allowed Hammar to continue working on Sendible full time without the need for any outside funding.

The company now employs a team of 20 in its London office, is plans to open a US office as part of its impending global expansion.

Hammar says: “It’s time for social media to work harder for businesses in the creation of targeted leads, and the time and effort saved on generating the perfect lead should rather be spent on creating high quality content, meaningful engagement and adding value to the conversation, which no technology can replace.”