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A wild ride from adventure travel to social media marketing
When Victoria Ransom (MBA 2008) wanted to promote her travel company by giving away a trip on Facebook, she couldn’t find the software to do so. Ransom solved the problem, creating an app, and in the process saw the opportunity to develop a social media marketing company. In 2008, long before the business world took social networking seriously, she cofounded Wildfire—all while pursuing her MBA at HBS. The company grew from six to 400 employees in two-and-a-half years.
Ransom’s idea quickly changed how companies use social media to engage audiences and boost the bottom line. Today, Wildfire, which provides a SaaS platform for marketers to manage their presence on social networks, is a division of Google, and is among the largest acquisitions ever made by the Internet giant. Wildfire now has over 25,000 paying customers who represent more than half of the world’s top 50 brands.
Although she sold asparagus on her family farm as a child in New Zealand, and started an adventure travel company prior to HBS, Ransom didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. With Wildfire, she saw a need and was willing to put in the hard work and effort: “The way that I thought about it is, this is an enormous opportunity. The opportunity is now. I may not have this opportunity again, and I’m going to put my heart and soul into it.”
(Published April 2014)
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