Carbonite Founder Likes Radio

David Friend

Carbonite is a popular Cloud-based file storage service designed for consumers and small business created by serial entrepreneur  David Friend.

According to a Forbes piece, yhe key to David’s success lies in his own experience as a small business owner. Friend has been a successful entrepreneur for more than 40 years, acting as co-founder for six technology companies in the Boston area. His most successful endeavor to date, Carbonite Inc., was formed in 2005 in his dining room, and grew in less than six years to a publicly traded company.

The Boston-based Carbonite now has 425 employees with revenues of $107 million last year (up 28% Y-O-Y), and is the fourth joint venture between David Friend and Jeff Flowers, both well-known Boston-based entrepreneurs. Prior to Carbonite, Dave and Jeff founded Pilot Software, FaxNet Corporation and Sonexis Incorporated.

Once the technology issues were solved, the company’s next challenge was creating a brand that people would trust with their most precious documents.  Marketing would need to be the driving force to grow the company.  That’s when the company came up with the idea of using endorsements from talk radio show hosts.  “That was another stroke of good luck. We found out that people who listen to talk radio, especially conservative talk radio, really trust the hosts,” says Friend.  The company then went out and signed up every national talk radio show host from Howard Stern to Rachel Maddow to Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh to pitch for Carbonite.

“It was a real stroke of brilliance on the part of our marketing VP.  Every year we doubled the ad spend which doubled the revenue.

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