Interview with Tanyette Colon, Founder of InFUUSE
Can you tell us about your career path to becoming an entrepreneur?
What inspired you to start your current company, and what problem does it solve?
How did you identify your ideal customer profile? What steps did you take to validate your product or service with them?
These days, there’s a lot of talk about company culture. What type of culture are you building?
Can you walk us through your company’s growth trajectory and success to date?
From a young age, I’ve always had an entrepreneurial drive, but my career path initially led me to the world of sales and marketing. While still in college, I began working in media sales and spent several years in traditional radio sales. During this time, I also pursued my passion for sports reporting and even landed a spot on a nationally syndicated sports radio show. However, in 2006, I took a new direction and joined an early stage start-up called ReachLocal. This experience was a turning point for me and ignited my entrepreneurial spirit. Over time, ReachLocal grew and eventually went public. In 2018, it was acquired by Gannett | USA Today, marking an exciting chapter in my journey.
During my tenure at ReachLocal, I had the opportunity to work with some of the largest hospital systems and most renowned medical practices in the world. While developing marketing strategies for these organizations, I noticed a recurring problem: they would invest significant resources into their marketing efforts, but often failed to pay attention to the customer journey. As a result, they experienced significant revenue losses due to lag time and inbound inefficiencies.
This observation struck a chord with me. I realized that there was a huge gap in the market for a solution that could help businesses optimize their customer journey and streamline their sales processes. I became increasingly passionate about finding a solution to this problem, and after years of research and development, I decided to start my own company.
My goal was to create a platform that could not only help businesses better understand their customer journey, but also provide them with the tools they need to optimize it. By leveraging cutting-edge augmented intelligence technology, humanization and data-driven insights, I knew that we could revolutionize the way that businesses approach their sales and marketing strategies to meet potential new customers exactly where they are.
It was a problem that came up consistently for all of my customers for years during my tenure at ReachLocal.
In the tech industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the features and benefits of technology and throw around acronyms, but we recognize that it’s the people who are the heart of any company. At InFUUSE, we believe in having a clear north star with a strong social mission at its core. Our mission is to help over 3 million businesses reach a new stage of sustainable growth. By identifying latent revenue in overlooked areas, we can recirculate money back into businesses and communities, creating a ripple effect that benefits everyone. We believe that healthy businesses are essential for building healthy communities and that we can play a vital role in helping businesses achieve success.
To achieve our mission, we look for team members who are entrepreneurial, passionate about making a difference, thought leaders, innovators, and have a #givefirst partner mindset. We value empathy, heart-centeredness, customer focus, a drive for the greater good, and the ability to navigate adversity with resilience and self-awareness.
At InFUUSE, we foster a culture of possibility where we believe that the impossible is possible. We encourage our team members to think outside the box, take risks, and push the boundaries of what’s possible. By bringing together talented and driven individuals who share our vision, we believe that we can create a culture that fosters growth, innovation, and impact.
Our journey began in late 2019 under a different name and model that focused exclusively on healthcare software with service delivery. As a bootstrap start-up, this made for a heavier financial lift. Despite the challenges, we hit some incredible early targets, including generating $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue within just 120 days.
During this period, we learned a great deal about how to make our software more intuitive and user-friendly for our clients. One example of our success was our work with a five-location lasik surgeon. Prior to working with us, the surgeon was only spending $10,000 per month on Facebook marketing and achieving a 1% conversion rate. However, in under 120 days, we were able to help them increase their conversion rate to 13%, resulting in just under a million dollars in additional revenue.
Our success can be attributed to a simple formula: meeting customers in the communication door of their choice, removing lag time, hyper-personalizing, sweeping data, and blueprinting – then meeting a new ICP (ideal customer profile) at a higher level of humanity and repeating the process.
Today, I am about to go to pilot with a SaaS only product for specific industries including medical and we will have true conversational AI to blueprint said industries. A partner ecosystem will support our client’s business journey to empower their growth.
