David A. George

My name is David A. George and fortunately for me, I was hired by a young SaaS start-up while I was still in college. Our name was Lujure, and our product was a DIY drag-and-drop software to build custom Fan Page apps (think “Photoshop for Facebook”). I was brought on the team to write blog posts on social media marketing - something I had never done before, but couldn’t wait to try. Now, as a Marketing student, this stuff should have been right up my alley; but colleges have yet to catch up with the social platforms, so I was pretty much a lone-wolf on this one. So, I just started researching like crazy. I read line after line of practical, actionable strategy and started pumping out some valuable content for our readers based on that knowledge. And this was just the beginning...   As my time with the company grew (and the name changed to Heyo), my role in the company changed nearly every day. Since there were only about sixteen employees, everyone had to wear a bunch of different “hats” in order to create the best product, attract the most leads, and blow away ALL of our customers with top-notch support.   Working on the blog, I learned SEO and the value of researching keywords using Google’s Keyword Tool. In order to jumpstart our link building strategy, I had the privilege of writing guest posts for other blogs around the web, including a Facebook SEO Guide for SEOmoz, which they featured on their main blog. I began to look at what “referrers” were and where our blog and website traffic was coming from. Then, using both Wordpress and Google Analytics, I developed plans for PPC ads to run both in Facebook and Google Adwords. It was tough, and I didn’t always make an ROI, but after constantly learning and improving upon the previous results, the knowledge gained was worth every penny lost. I topped that off by using social media channels like Quora, Google+ Communities, Twitter, and FB to engage our audiences and drive traffic.    Once I got tired of waiting for development’s time to make a call-to-action or landing page for our blog, I decided to learn basic HTML and CSS so I could do it myself - which made experimenting with CTAs and landing pages exceptionally faster. So after about 16 months of being involved with content and lead generation on our blog, it’s readership has grown from around 500 views per day to over 2,500 views per day.   One role that has remained pretty consistent, however, is email marketing. Oh email marketing, how I love to hate you. A/B tests have become my best friend, accompanying me while I spend long hours and countless headbangs on my desk perfecting subject lines and copy. But at the same time, the best feeling in the world is seeing those open rates and click-through rates just get better and better (it’s totally addicting actually).   Out of all my roles at Heyo, one of my absolute favorites was being involved in product development. My most recent task was to develop the New User Experience and build an analytical tracking system for our software. Through phone calls, email messages, and live user testing, I learned the pain points of our software and where new users were getting stuck. I would then make suggestions for improvements to our platform, and put them in the product backlog to be discussed at the weekly product meetings. Then, using our analytics system, my focus was to find our “customer conversion activities”, or CCAs. These CCAs were the most crucial interactions with our software that would increase the chance of them becoming a paying customer. From that point on, my goal was to get every single person that goes through our Free Trial to complete these actions.    I absolutely love what I do, and the best part is - it's exactly what I want to do! Every day I combine my passion for technology and my love for helping other people by solving their needs through software they love - and I'm not stopping anytime soon!

Passionate, entrepreneur, speaker, surfer, scuba diver, believer, android-obsessed, Hokie, marketer, analytics, software, SaaS