At Thrive Workplace, all of our members are unique and play a vital role in maintaining the lively, welcoming and innovative atmosphere we have cultivated. Each member has found his or her own path to success, and Thrive Member, Adam Greenbaum, CEO of WhiskerCloud, shares his experiences on how he abandoned a fruitful ad agency to start to follow his passion for animals, and ended up cornering a market and finding even greater success and personal fulfillment.
Before joining the Thrive community, Adam was running his own advertising agency. As he assisted other businesses with digital growth and branding initiatives, his agency developed a glowing reputation. The agency, Greenbaum Digital, was named to Built In Colorado’s “Top Startups to Watch in 2016” list, yet a particular client made Adam “sick to his stomach.” After the client spent months calling Adam vulgar names, cursing at him and berating his employees, Adam did what was ultimately best for the long-term health of his agency. He fired his biggest client. While the agency was successful, Adam found that he wasn’t personally fulfilled by the work and decided to follow his heart.
Adam is passionate about his two Boston terriers — Sophie and Baxter — and runs iBostonTerrier.com, a global online community for Boston terrier owners and lovers that helps Boston terriers in need. Adam’s passion project has been featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, and has led to speaking opportunities at pet conferences across the country, as well as opportunities to advocate for rescue groups and animal shelters. Yet upon moving to Colorado, Adam struggled finding his beloved Boston terriers trusted veterinary care. Google searches proved fruitless and he didn’t trust any vets based on their website alone. In today’s digital landscape, a substantial website goes a long way toward developing that trust and is a reflection of the brand or company.
Adam recognized an opportunity to lend his expertise in web and marketing to veterinarians and ultimately benefit animals and their owners globally. Enter his pet project — WhiskerCloud.
Adam’s new company provides beautiful customized websites, SEO, social media, analytics and web design to veterinarians in need. Since launching in May 2016, WhiskerCloud has grown much faster than Adam anticipated. Adam’s original goal was to secure five veterinary clients by the end of July — but he achieved that in the first three days. WhiskerCloud hoped to have 25 clients by the end of the year and they have already surpassed that total. The company now employs two full-time employees in Colorado, three part-time employees, a tech specialist in Bangladesh and has its own cloud server in Dallas. WhiskerCloud recently partnered with four of the most notable veterinarians in the world.
The incredible success that WhiskerCloud experienced in a mere four months affords Adam with a number of valuable insights to share with the Thrive community:
- Certainly, a lot of WhiskerCloud’s success can be attributed to Adam’s passion and drive, but knowing the right time to pivot was crucial, as well. Even though his ad agency was successful, Adam wasn’t passionate about the work he was doing and opted for a change — for the better.
- WhiskerCloud developed a very specific niche — and owned it. Adam’s new venture allows his company to help an industry that has, for the most part, not yet embraced technology. Adam’s recommendation for all startups is growth hacking — a process of trying out various, inexpensive marketing techniques to identify the best ways to, you guessed it, grow your business. For WhiskerCloud, it was sharing Facebook content they truly believed in — honoring the veterinary professionals they work with — to people with veterinary interests and people in the veterinary industry that reached over 500,000 people in the veterinary industry, leading to engagement and brand awareness.
- Data scraping provides a lot of value for startups. Data scraping involves extracting data from a computer program or information from websites. For Adam and his tech specialist in Bangladesh, it included pulling every public email for veterinary professionals and sending an offer to 8,000 of them. WhiskerCloud’s clientele tripled in one week after the email offers went out.
- Another crucial technique that Adam has nailed is context marketing, which includes having an interesting blog. WhiskerCloud offers tips and tricks to veterinary practice managers, acting as a thought leader. Producing real and relevant content further drives conversation and allows you to amplify your message.
Finally, Thrive has been the perfect fit for Adam and WhiskerCloud. The flexibility of Thrive works for Adam and his associates to utilize Thrive’s drop-in desk space membership. Employees are able to work remotely or come into the office. On Fridays, they all meet at Thrive’s Cherry Creek location to work and go out to lunch.
Thrive provides a flexible working environment that isn’t overwhelming. One of Denver’s biggest coworking spaces was too loud and crazy for Adam, but Thrive has a more friendly, warm, collaborative, thoughtful atmosphere for all members, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Through his experience working at Thrive, Adam has made friends with the people he works around and involves himself in other initiatives through the relationships working at Thrive has allowed him to cultivate. Most recently, Adam has become a participant for Founder’s Institute, an accelerator and startup launch program that just established a Denver presence.
If you see Adam around the work space, come say hello! We aim to help Thrive members continue to learn from each other and continue fostering an atmosphere of collaboration and innovation.
