Friday Q&A: Justin Premick of AWeber can beat you in Call of Duty

Technically Philly first met Justin Premick of AWeber in December at our first meetup at Nodding Head over a pint of Monkey Knife Fight.
Since then, we’ve had out eye on the growing email marketing company.
The privately held company was founded in August 1998 by Tom Kulzer. Kulzer, a salesman with a programming background, wanted to automate following up with clients by email and began coding software. After a few years, he left his job and bootstrapped AWeber.
The company has since been based at two other local locations before settling on its new digs in Huntington Valley with plans to continue growing.
AWeber’s new office is five times larger than their last (by the way, they’re hiring) and the company is looking to expand on its existing 75,000+ customer base
We talked with Premick about what exactly the company does, why they decided to lay down roots in Huntington Valley and AWeber’s sweet setup for pwning n00bz.

As always, edited for length and clarity.
What is your role at AWeber?
I’m the director of education and marketing. I’m in charge of putting together content that markets AWeber as well as teaching small business owners to effectively communicate with their prospects and customers.
What exactly does “email marketing” even mean? What do you guys do?
We essentially build tools that allow people to build out an email list and communicate with the people on that list. We facilitate the building of signup forms through our web form generator. We have a couple different of types of messages that allow people to communicate with their list. We were founded on the auto-responder – an email that goes out in sequence as people sign up to your website. That automates some of the sales process.
We also do email newsletters and blog newsletters by offering an RSS-to-email tool.
Who is your typical customer?

“Small business” is a pretty broad brush, but I use it intentionally because our customers are in all sorts of different business and they are all over the world. There’s probably not a country in the world where there aren’t a handful of AWeber users. We’ve probably got about 75,000 customers.
What at AWeber makes you different, as there are a bunch of email marketing companies out there?
We take a lot of pride in innovating. We’ve been doing blog newsletters since 2004. We were one of the first email marketers to integrate with Twitter. We’ve done a number of support documentation on getting out there on Facebook.
 

How many employees are at the company?
About 50, 19 of those are customer service. We are actually hiring for eight positions right now.
Why is the business in Huntington Valley?
We’ve been local from the get-go. We’ve moved around a couple offices in the area but we’ve moved into this office because we wanted something that was a lot bigger. This space is 24,000 square feet and previously we were in about 5,000. We thought it was a cool space and it’s close to the train station. We have a lot of guys that live in South Philly and Center City that take the R3 up everyday.
So what’s next?
The space we’ve moved into has space for about 130 people so we are planning to be here for a little while and keep growing. This is a big space.
What’s the coolest part of the office?
The climate control adjusts based on the number of people here and we have “daylight harvesting.” We’re also big on our game room with an HD projector that puts a screen on the wall that’s about 12-13 feet. We do a little bit of 360 at lunch, a little bit of Modern Warfare. So we have a good time.
If you ever have a Madden tournament, be sure to call Technically Philly.
I don’t think people have gotten into that one, we have a lot of Call of Duty fans here.
Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.