PC4Media is my home on the web where I help people connect to their success.

In business, success usually means more clients. I help people get more clients using the web. How? The internet has created a media platform that allows businesses to be as findable as they want to be  -  and then interact directly with their prospects and clients - efficiently and inexpensively. This interaction creates opportunities to turn their site visitors into prospects and clients into evangelists. 

In 1994, I registered for my first web service, Hotmail. I certainly wasn't one of the first ones to register, but I immediately understood the impact that the viral nature of the web would have on marketing anything and everything. My then new friend and later Best Man, Joshua Brotherton, helped me register. When we were choosing what my email address was going to be, I chose PC4Media. Why? PC4 is short for my name, Peter Caputa IV. It's also a good acronym for what I knew at 18 I wanted to do with my life: I knew that I wanted to run a media company. I didn't know at that time that 'Personal Computing for Media' would make another clever and a bit more relevant interpretation fot the PC4Media acronym. Perhaps it's coincidence. Or maybe it's just meant to be.

 Since 1994, the internet has changed a lot. Hotmail isn't cool anymore. All my friends use gmail now.  But, what was evident to only a few people then, is now evident to a lot more people now: That the internet makes it possible for anyone - even a guy with a Chemical Engineering degree - to start a media company. I've done it several times now. 

Through the process, I've found out that I'm better at helping businesses use the web as their own media tool. Media is no longer the gatekeeper between businesses and prospects. I firmly believe that if a business isn't creating their own media and interacting with their prospects and clients online - they will soon not be in business. Buyers research online starting at search engines, blogs and social networking sites. If you're business isn't findable, you're not going to even talk to them.

So, PC4Media is dedicated to helping businesses make this transition. I'm going to blog and send out email newsletters that not only lead by example, but instruct others how to get started. I'm going to be speaking at and hosting events where interaction begins before the event and continues afterwards online.  I'm going to be highlighting a network of companies as they make the transition, so that we can all support them and learn from them. And lastly and most importantly, I'm going to be findable and accessible for businesses that want to transform their approach to marketing their business so that they are attracting more prospects to them using the web.

I graduated in 1998 with a Chemical Engineering degree from WPI. I worked at Saint Gobain, a HUGE French manufacturing company, for 6 years. I worked in a variety of departments including sales, IT and R&D. I learned a lot. The biggest lesson I learned was that I hate working at big companies. But, the best thing to come out of my 6 years there was that I connected with my friend and perennial business partner, Jeetandra Mahtani.  We started a business in 2003 called WhizSpark. It is an event registraton and event marketing service.  

 At this time, I also married the love of my life, Amy. After our amazing honeymoon in Costa Rica, I returned and embarked on creating WhizSpark as a viable commercial entity. 

I started blogging in 2002. Within two years, I grew my audience to approximately 600 readers - mostly the people that were creating the next generation of web-based businesses. I got tapped to write for the social networking weblog as well as helped several startups with their blogs. My writing affected the direction of a lot of different online businesses and I maintain alot of those relationships today. Unfortunately, it didn't make our startup fly. So, I scaled back my blogging back and started using it more as a diary about how I was growing WhizSpark. 

I focussed my sales efforts locally. In 2005, I connected with BNI and Rick Roberge.  I joined BNI and learned how to be a master networker, hosting networking events with more than 400 people in attendance. BNI espouses the philosophy that "Giver's Gain": Help people first and they'll naturally reciprocate. In a tight-knit network, when you help one person, word gets around and everyone wants to help you. I hired Rick as my sales coach and became a solid salesperson.  Rick helped me connect my sales style to BNI's philosophy. The biggest sales lesson I learned was that if I help people solve their problems, they'll want to buy my services. It seems like a simple lesson and makes sense, but most salespeople still pitch the features and benefits of their products and talk about possibilities, instead of uncovering problems that their prospects have that the salesperson's product or service can solve. 

 With some new skills and a lot of momentum, we kicked some ass for awhile. We were involved very strategically in the New England Business Expo, the Boston Home Show, Worcester's Best Chef and about 80 other events. We started and I still co-host several regularly occurring networking events. We also help businesses by generating leads through online marketing, email marketing and event sponsorship. I generated a live-able income from WhizSpark, but was working my ass off. So was Jeetu. Worse, we didn't see an easy predictable way within our reach of scaling the business to a thousand customers, let alone a million.  We both wanted to be a part of something big and game changing. We knew the basis of the business was game changing. But, it wasn't in our grasp to execute.

 We kept trucking, though adding new clients every month and working our butts off.  On September 20th, 2007, my new sense of purpose was born. He was 6lbs 7oz and 20" long. Amy and I named him Peter Caputa V. I like to call him King Peter or just "V". 

After Peter was born, Jeetu and I launched a new project that is designed to generate revenue without work. Not the  infomercial kind. More like the "Google" kind of business model. We launched hive411.com. It's a work in progress, but is gaining traction and we've figured out some really big things that are within our grasp to exploit.  

A month or two later, Rick's son, Mark Roberge asked me if I'd come join him at Hubspot as an account manager and help figure out how to scale Hubspot sales from several hundred clients to several thousand clients inside of a year. It sounded like a fun challenge. I said I'd consider it. 1 month later, after meeting the team, playing with the product and fully believing that this is going to happen, I accepted the offer. 

Hubspot has inspired me to relaunch my blog [on the Hubspot platform]. I plan to combine Hubspot's capabilities with my online marketing, sales and networking skills to help my existing and future clients attract more of the right visitors to their website and convert those visitors into leads. In other words, I plan to create a killer lead generation business. I encourage you to join us for the journey. In fact, you can apply here.