Retortal: “We Thrive Of Off This Desire To Always Be Creating”

Describe Retortal in 50 words or less.

Retortal is a white label, social media management dashboard, a B2B sales funnel, generating leads through targeted advertising, and an invaluable social marketing tool for its end user. Our tech, your dashboard, in your brand, and it’s free – you mark it up, profits roll in when your customers upgrade.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

Rich and Ade, our co-founders, have been working with internet technologies and software since the early ‘90s, so they’ve been a part of this industry from its very beginning and have seen it develop from the inside. It would’ve been easy to get swept into one of these huge tech corporations but not simply ‘being their own bosses’ but having a product that’s entirely their brainchild, that they’ve created from scratch, nurtured and seen grow – and succeed! – was always something important to them. Retortal still thrives of off this desire to always be creating and pushing our product to the best we can make it.

7 years from now: How did your startup change the world?

In seven years time, our startup equipped SMEs and smaller businesses to capitalize on social media at the very height of its influence. Admittedly we’re not saving lives, but in the most competitive landscape ever for the smaller to mid-sized business, hyper-saturated and in constant threat of being overshadowed by mega-corporations, Retortal is an inexpensive and really very clever way of that business expanding and adding weight to their brand, extending their reach and generating hot leads and a little extra profit. It’s proved itself a really invaluable tool and has made a significant impact to a lot of businesses who’ve come to us and we’ve worried otherwise might not have made it.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

Our measuring of success is two-tier: first by the number of resellers we have on board, secondly by the number of users signing up to their dashboards. We’re in the unique position that this also gives us this two tiers of feedback – again firstly from our resellers, who have their own suite of tools to set up and monitor the targeted ads that accompany their user’s feeds, and then secondly from their users on how the social scheduler and all of its analytics and extras are performing. We’re all about listening and take pride in knowing our resellers personally, as well as what they and their clients want from our product. Success to us is these two tiers satisfied, making full use of the platform and reaping all its potential benefits – and we don’t lose track by not losing touch.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

First things first, I’ll get down to responding to any support tickets and enquiries that have come in overnight – we operate globally so they can come in at any time and I’ll then work through all the orders that have been placed the night before, setting new resellers up with their accounts and getting their dashboards branded. Then they’re all ready to start providing their very own social media management platform!

Post-sales support is a big priority for us and the majority of my day is spent talking our resellers through getting their white label business off the ground and offering sales advice and tips on marketing and branding. I’ll often write email marketing templates, proofread websites and offer general advice on how to elevate a client’s web presence and get them maximum exposure. Weekly, we also have a meeting with the developers to discuss ideas on where the dashboard is going and what new features are coming soon to ensure that we’re all as up-to-date as possible.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the social media dashboard & marketing suite like you imagined it in the beginning?

We’ve pivoted pretty substantially! The Retortal dashboard was something actually initially developed for internal use to support our content writing and social media management services. Around this time Hootsuite, Buffer and social scheduling started to gain traction and we had that lightbulb moment of ‘our platform could compete with any of these guys’ – which then developed into ‘and couldn’t businesses really benefit from having their own version of it?’ White labelling our platform proved so popular it’s now become the main focus and drive of our business.

Bootstrapped or financed: What fuels your startup now and what will in the future?

We’ve grown our company organically – and we started out really very small. In the very early days, we had a tiny team that not only sold our content services but was also creating the content too!

We don’t tie our clients into contracts so they’ll pay an advance fee to cover the upcoming month. The more accounts we’ve taken on, the more money we’ve had coming in which has enabled us to expand as demand dictates. Whilst this model was risky in the early days, we’ve stuck to this set up and have now built a solid, global client base whilst maintaining that flexibility to expand and grow as quickly as we need to (which is getting quicker every day).

What were the biggest challenges you faced building your startup?

In terms of the actual building and developing of the Retortal platform, the biggest challenge we’ve faced is probably not over-embellishing – we’ve just such a lot of ideas! Our priority is keeping the dashboard as accessible and all of its new tools as easy to use as it was when it was first created. This is again where having that human reality check of feedback from our resellers and their clients is essential as we don’t want to convolute or over-complicate our user’s experience but equally want to find that balance with innovating and keeping up with the pace of the social platforms themselves.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

Ironically, this question is actually pretty succinctly what the Retortal dashboard is all about, giving businesses that little boost to get ahead of their competition.

Personally we believe our edge comes from that foundation of having a genuinely, really very clever product. We don’t have a huge amount of competitors offering a white label social media dashboard, but even amongst them we are truly unique – we’ve just added a whole load of new features, including a bulk uploader, a tool to maximize your content’s viral potential and A/B split testing to reactively shape and optimize your site for sales. When you’re in the social media sphere, you don’t just have to keep up, but to be on the very cusp.

What do you look for in team members?

A desire to create, to innovate, to consistently be pushing to achieve their best and deliver their best. All those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ideals and aspirations we started out with, grounded with a solid work ethic – we work hard at Retortal.

Why would a talent join your team?

We’re excellent tea-makers.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

Think big, act big. Maintain a presence and persona, online and off, of where and who you’d like to be, then grow into it. A strong, cohesive, distinct brand is powerful.

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