Scott Burns and his longtime ski buddy, Zach Stabenow, founded and operate a growing, profitable multimillion-dollar company that has virtually no competition.
If you receive e-mail messages from the city of Duluth regarding new City Council agendas on the city Web site, for example, they were sent by GovDelivery. If you have signed up for newsletters from the Minnesota Department of Health, you receive an e-mail telling you when a new one is online from GovDelivery. If you register for Web site updates from the Centers for Disease Control about the avian flu, you’ll get notification about new information from GovDelivery.
The St. Paul company sends out more than 5 million e-mails a month to people who are interested in the workings of government or government services, from the local to the federal levels.
The company started out in a different direction than it’s headed today. Stabenow came up with the idea of making state and federal labor law posters more accessible at a Web site where they could be downloaded for $15 to $50 each. In February 2000. The Web site was an immediate success.
One feature of the Web site was automatic e-mail notification of law changes, so clients could stay current.
One day, St. Paul’s director of economic development and e-government initiative visited GovDocs. After seeing the e-mail feature, Stabenow recalled, the official said, “‘Hey, wait a minute. Couldn’t you take this application and tweak it?’” The official thought it would be a way to keep citizens informed of city government matters, from snow emergencies to the availability of city council minutes.
GovDocs worked with the city and created a system to notify subscribers of new information on the city’s Web site. It was what Stabenow termed an “instant success,” with several thousand subscribers.
“It’s mushroomed from there over the last six years,” he said.
Photo by gasman40.
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