I did a post all about MarketMeSuite and wanted to learn a bit more about the Lady behind the Dashboard!  I love the idea that a company goes from paid to FREE with a great dashboard that has all kinds of bells and whistles.

Now I am not so naive as to not comprehend that they will have to make some other things paid upsells. I am totally OK with that. I approached Tammy, who very kindly answered my questions:

Hello Tammy, I wanted to put a face to my favourite social media dashboard.. so I have a few questions:

Are You single or married? you have kids and a dog I think.. can you tell me a little more?

I am married to a wonderful stay at home dad. And I have a wonderful little two year old boy (two tomorrow actually!).  I always know the age of MarketMeSuite b/c we launched our first beta test the week I gave birth, haha!  I have a dog named Skoda, who comes to the office every day, along with Brian who is my co-founder’s dog. Both rescue dogs, both vital to the work environment — they keep us happy and well entertained

Tammy, you are/were a New Yorker, why start-up in the UK?

Were?!  I will always be a NY’er!

Alan (@wuup) and I (@tammykfennell) started MarketMeSuite together but remotely. I was a marketing chick and Alan a tech geek from Norfolk, UK. We met online after both consulting on different areas of the same project. Building an app was probably the last things on our minds. We both had our own small businesses at the time. But, in chatting, we both realized we had the same issues in each of our businesses — How to use social media to manage and convert leads. And we did what a lot of great (and stupid) people do. We took a leap of faith, formed a company, and worked like maniacs to get MarketMeSuite built and out to the masses.

I moved over here to the UK in early 2011 because we decided it was time to raise a small investment round. My husband is British, so it’s pretty easy for me to move freely between the US and the UK, whereas it’s a little more difficult for Alan and our lead developer, Bill, to move to America!

You were deemed an innovative Subscription only service. You hit record high subscribers in Nov and Dec 2010.. your growth topped 500% in the last 6 months of 2010; what prompted you to make MMS a free suite of tools/social media dashboard?

I cover a lot of that in this, http://marketmesuite.com/blog/why-has-marketmesuite-gone-free/, but basically the most important thing we can do is make sure MarketMeSuite is THE social media dashboard of choice, and we spotted an opportunity in the marketplace to break through.  We have plans to introduce paid upsells which will appeal to a certain demographic of our base.  We’ll be releasing an analytics element that will measure interactions, growth and ROI in a very unique way — based on actual use of the app. It’s a pretty groundbreaking approach, so our top priority is to make sure we have as many people using and benefiting from features of MarketMeSuite as we can, and we have big plans to keep pushing more features and innovation. Some paid, some free. We’re pretty excited.

MMS  Opened Free on Sep 26th 2011(I hope that is correct) then doubled its user base in 4 weeks, adding 10,000 new users. Within that time over 500,000 updates have been sent via MarketMeSuite: What was your initial goal for the firth month?

It’s funny I actually said “I want to hit 10,000 users in our first month.” So we hit it. And since we’ve been growing exponentially. People are realizing that we are out there solving a problem, and we’re continuing to find new and unique ways to give more to our users. We absolutely love our community and I feel so lucky to have such an engaged user base!

As someone who uses MarketMeSuite I just wanted to tell everyone how marvellous is it and that they ought to use it!!  ( I can be a bit obsessive with things I like)