{"id":18653,"date":"2013-08-26T14:15:14","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T12:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=18653"},"modified":"2013-08-26T14:15:14","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T12:15:14","slug":"founder-interview-brand-ministrys-julien-oudart-talks-going-global-with-their-transformative-new-platform-nuke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2013\/08\/founder-interview-brand-ministrys-julien-oudart-talks-going-global-with-their-transformative-new-platform-nuke\/","title":{"rendered":"Founder Interview: Brand Ministry CEO Julien Oudart talks going global with their transformative new platform Nuke"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nuke_itwimage2_21.08\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Throughout the month of August, the Rude Baguette will be running a series of interviews with some of France\u2019s top and rising entrepreneurs, where they\u2019ll share their reflections on their year thus far, their plans through the end of the year and how they manage their businesses through the August down period. In this installment, we talk with Brand Ministry CEO Julien Oudart.<\/em><\/p>\n

Brand\u00a0Ministry<\/a>, a social media tech company, was founded in 2011 by three veterans of the Paris startup scene. They work with brands and agencies in and out of France to help them succeed on social media. They’ve undergone a big transformation recently with the launch of their innovative, comprehensive social media management tool, called Nuke<\/a>. Here company CEO Julien Oudart talks about the company\u2019s year so far, including their disruptive social marketing platform Nuke, and their future plans.<\/p>\n

\"julienWhat have been the big accomplishments for\u00a0Brand\u00a0Ministry\u00a0since the beginning of the year?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By far the number one thing for us has been the launch of Nuke, our Social Marketing platform, earlier in the year. It was an enormous undertaking that has totally transformed our business already, and it\u2019s something I\u2019m really proud of. \u00a0It\u2019s a significant accomplishment, in terms of the sheer number of hours we put in, as well as the new skills and capacities we had to develop, and it\u2019s been huge for our clients, whose feedback has been overwhelmingly good.<\/p>\n

Brand\u00a0Ministry\u00a0was founded in 2011; our focus has always been on helping our clients get results on social media. As our clients became more sophisticated about their online strategies, with more people dedicated to social, they began to look for tools that would really empower their in-house social media marketing teams, especially in terms of Facebook campaigns, and in terms of analytics and social CRM. We built Nuke because there was a need from our clients\u2014and it\u2019s a great accomplishment for us to be able to meet that need.<\/p>\n

What are your goals for the end of the year?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>We built Nuke from the ground up to respond to a demand from a core group\u2014and now we want to bring it global. Nuke is being used by clients outside France already, and for the rentr\u00e9e, it will be up and running in 5 countries and languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish). We\u2019ve just recruited a team to go after key markets outside France.\u00a0\u00a0We actually went through COFACE for partial funding of our internationalization, which can be a great option for French companies looking to move outside the country. We want to establish a strong presence throughout Europe and Asia within the next 6 to 12 months. \u00a0We’ve already signed several\u00a0brand\u00a0and agency clients in the UK and Germany in June and July.<\/p>\n

Our other goals for the rest of the year are very product focused.\u00a0We want Nuke to be the only tool brands need for their social media marketing. To that end we are adding a number of new features: full publishing for the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest), moderating and social listening tools, which will be available very soon. We\u2019ve done a ton of work on our analytics suite already\u2014we just added a competitor comparison tool\u2014and we\u2019re going to keep improving it in the next few months, making it more powerful and more customizable to the needs of specific clients.<\/p>\n

What have you learned this year that you think every entrepreneur should know?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The company\u2019s founders had already helped launch and develop several start-ups between the three of us before creating\u00a0Brand\u00a0Ministry. So that helped us to avoid some pitfalls early on\u2014from the start we had pretty a clear idea about how we wanted to structure and grow the company. \u00a0But there are always new issues to face, which can lead to a lot of learning on a day-to-day basis.<\/p>\n

If there were 3 things I would highlight from this year and in general, they would be:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0One of the big things, in a year where we\u2019ve spent a ton of time developing a new product, is that user experience is not the same for everyone: You design, build, test and retest, and during the process it\u2019s imperative to get multiple perspectives from different people, especially from people who aren\u2019t spending hours every day working on something. But 100 people are never going to agree completely about navigation and other elements of user experience; sometimes people just perceive things differently. Do everything you can to build the best UX possible throughout the entire development process, and continue after you\u2019re done, but in the end you have to build the product that works the best for the most people.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0I would say its important to set concrete objectives for the long (where you want to be in 3 to 4 years), medium (end of year objectives) and short-term (business objectives for the next 3 months). Especially in the longer term, it\u2019s easy to set vague goals, which lets you define success down without realizing it. If you set measurable goals, even if you don\u2019t reach them you know where you stand.<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0Don\u2019t just focus on getting the right people when it comes to your own employees: get the right outside people with the right skills to support you on other tasks that can consume a lot of your time: a good lawyer, a reliable accountant and a flexible HR consultant !<\/p>\n

How does your company handle vacation & the August down period?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aah ! That\u2019s an interesting question.\u00a0A lot of people in Paris complain about the drain on productivity and the time lost during these lazy months.\u00a0\u00a0And it\u2019s true it can be frustrating at times. But I think in a way we\u2019re lucky to have this period. While any entrepreneur should be continuously assessing themselves and their company throughout the year, August in France is an unbeatable opportunity to really reflect on your past and current performance, set goals for the future and decide how you\u2019re going to reach them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout the month of August, the Rude Baguette will be running a series of interviews with some of France\u2019s top and rising entrepreneurs, where they\u2019ll share their reflections on their year thus far, their plans through the end of the year and how they manage their businesses through the August down period. In this installment,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":18657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10563],"tags":[5045,1024],"class_list":["post-18653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech","tag-founder-interview","tag-social-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}