Batchbook

In 2006, Pam O'Hara was attempting to re-enter the workforce after moving to New England with her young family. While consulting for small and large businesses on data management, she encountered a specific pain point: a small business struggling to keep track of advertisers, customers, and speakers without a proper online tool. "I realized I was working with a small business that was trying to find a way to keep up with their advertisers and their customers and their speakers, and they didn't have a good online tool for doing that," she recalls. With her technical background from previously helping found a technology development company in Washington, DC, Pam decided to build the solution herself.

Pam hired a couple of developers and kicked off development. Interestingly, she met her lead developer and future CTO at the playground while watching their children play. As she describes it, they were "the only two geeks in our little bedroom community outside Providence, Rhode Island." Her CTO was an engineer at Amazon at the time, and together they shared a vision for how cloud technology could serve small businesses—an area underserved by enterprise tools in 2006. Pam launched Batchbook while juggling three children, literally taking customer calls in the car with a box of Twizzlers as a timer for each call.

The early growth strategy focused intensely on one channel: word of mouth, primarily conducted through social media. "In that first $10,000 in revenue for us, it really was about focusing in on one channel," Pam explains. She leveraged Twitter chats, customer service conversations on Twitter, and direct customer engagement. This was before Facebook became prevalent in business channels. These early customers were acquired through direct relationship-building—talking to customers, getting feedback, and speaking with them by phone when necessary.

As Batchbook scaled, Pam evolved the growth strategy beyond word-of-mouth into more sophisticated channels. By 2015, the company was spending roughly $10,000 per month on paid social (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), but early broad campaigns performed poorly. What worked was precision targeting: identifying and targeting customers of Batchbook's partners. "When we really dig in and say, you know, we're going to target a very specific type of customer... if we go in and target them, and not only do we target them, we say we want people that are also like them... now we've got a very low-cost channel," Pam notes. This approach reduced customer acquisition cost from potentially $1,000+ for general campaigns down to single dollars for highly targeted ones.

Pam also made a strategic pricing decision that differentiated Batchbook. Rather than charging per seat like competitors ($10-$80 per user), she introduced unlimited users and charged by contact volume instead. This aligned with her mission of getting entire teams involved in customer relationships, especially important for small businesses where everyone participates in customer conversations.

By the time of this 2015 interview, Batchbook had grown to over 10,000 paying customers (part of a total "tens of thousands" including free users). The company operated with around 20 team members and was completely self-funded. With an average customer paying $42 per month and monthly retention above 95% after the initial trial period, the business demonstrated strong unit economics. Pam remained focused on sustainable growth, reinvesting profits into marketing rather than seeking outside capital, and was preparing to launch a new standalone product in Q1 of the following year—a project that allowed her to "go back to our roots and start over with getting in the weeds again."