Marketing
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Develop a buyer’s guide to educate your startup’s sales team and customers
Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution.
This is especially the case when a solution doesn’t have many reference points and its significance may not be obvious.
My view is simple — some buyers could use a walkthrough of the buying process. If you are building a singular product in a nascent market that necessitates forward-looking customers and want to drastically shorten sales cycles, I have a proposal: Create a buyer’s guide.
A buyer’s guide is essentially a prescriptive summary that provides an understandable overview of how a customer may buy your solution.
A buyer’s guide is essentially a prescriptive summary that provides an understandable overview of how a customer may buy your solution. What does your product actually do? Is it secure? How would you implement the technology? What does it replace, if anything? It should be short, simple and speak the customer’s language. It also acts as a sales-enabling tool. Sales teams, especially at smaller startups, can review the guide quarterly and analyze what is and isn’t working as the company goes to market.
Here is how to put together a buyer’s guide, including what to sort out before you type a single word.
Know your audience
From the start, it’s important to think about who the stakeholders are for your product’s buying cycle. One typical issue with early-stage startups is they meet with an enthusiastic buyer — a CIO, CTO or VP of product — but neglect to include the other stakeholders who should be part of the conversation. More importantly, a lot of companies don’t realize the impact of their product on a group or team that they would not typically sell to.
For example, target the security team as an early stakeholder, because they’re probably going to review your product. If the solution is focused toward, say, integration, then hone in on who would be owning the integration process on the buyer’s team.
If you’re selling a martech solution, on a business level, you have to consider a finance business partner for marketing. Think about the problems your customers face and also how others in their company relate to them.
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Apple launches an affiliate program for paid podcast subscriptions
Apple last month unveiled its plans for paid podcast subscriptions in a newly redesigned Apple Podcasts app. Now, it’s introducing a new program that will help podcast creators grow their subscriber base: affiliate marketing. The company’s “Apple Services Performance Partner Program,” which already exists to help market other Apple services like Apple TV, Apple News and Apple Books, is today expanding to include paid podcasts.
The new program — “Apple Services Performance Partner Program for Apple Podcasts” (whew!) — will be open to anyone, though the company believes it will make the most sense for publishers and creators who already have an audience and a number of marketing channels where they can share these new affiliate links. When users convert by clicking through one of the links and subscribe to a premium podcast, the partner will receive a one-time commission at 50% of the podcast subscription price, after the subscriber accumulates their first month of paid service.
So, for example, if a paid podcast was charging subscribers $5 per month, the commission would be $2.50. This commission would apply for every new subscriber that signed up through the affiliate channel, and there’s no cap.
Podcast creators can also use the affiliate links to promote their own paid programs, which would allow them to generate incremental revenue.
While anyone can apply to join the affiliate program, there is an approval process involved. This is mainly about keeping spammers out of the program, and ensuring that those signing up do have at least some marketing channels where they can distribute the links. The sign-up form asks for specific criteria — like how many channels are available and how the partner intends to use them to promote the affiliate links, among other things.
The program will be made available to anyone in the 170 countries and regions where paid podcasts subscriptions are being made available.
Once approved and signed in, affiliate partners will gain access to an online dashboard where they can create links (i.e. shortened URLs) much like any other affiliate program. They can also create multiple URLs for an individual podcast to make it easier to track how well different channels are performing. The URLs can be posted on their own, tied to a “Listen on Apple Podcasts” badge, or can be made available as a QR code. The latter may make more sense when live events return, as it could be printed on signage or in flyers that were distributed during a live taping, for example. It also could be used in other sorts of advertising, including both print and digital.
Though premium podcasts already existed, until more recently that often involved paying a podcaster directly to access a private RSS feed. Smaller services like Stitcher also used subscriptions to provide paying customers with a series of perks, like ad-free listening and exclusive content. The new efforts by both Apple and Spotify are focused on wooing creators to their platforms, where they’ll take a cut of the subscription revenues. Spotify is waiving its 5% fee for the first two years, while Apple is employing its usual model of 30% in year 1 that drops to 15% in year two.
While people can begin to enroll in the new affiliate program starting today, paid podcasts aren’t actually launching until later this month, per Apple. When they do, those enrolled in the affiliate program will be able to create links and begin earning commissions on subscriptions.
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5 ways to raise your startup’s PR game
There’s a lot of noise out there. The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a role in determining who wins a new space — you or a competitor.
Most people get that. I get emails every week from companies coming out of stealth mode, wanting to make a splash. Or from a Series B company that’s been around for a while and hopes to improve their branding/messaging/positioning so that a new upstart doesn’t eat their lunch.
You have to stop thinking that what you are up to is interesting.
How do you make a splash? How do you stay relevant?
Worth noting is that my area of expertise is in the DevOps space and that slant may crop up occasionally. But these five specific tips should be applicable to virtually any startup.
Leverage your founders
This is especially important if you are a small startup that not many people know about. Journalists don’t want to hear opinions from your head of marketing or product — they want to hear from the founders. What problems are they solving? What unique opinions do they have about the market? These are insights that mean the most coming from the people that started the company. So if you don’t have at least one founder that can dedicate time to being the face, then PR is going to be an uphill battle.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to do to support these efforts. Create a list of all the journalists that have written about your competitors. Read those articles. How can your founder add value to these conversations? Where should you be contributing thought leadership? What are the most interesting perspectives you can offer to those audiences?
This is legwork and research you can do before looping founders into the conversation. Getting your PR going can be like trying to push a broken-down car up the road: If the founders see you exerting effort to get things moving on your own, they’re more likely to get beside you and help.
Here’s an example: It may be unreasonable to ask a founder to sit down and write a 1,000-word thought leadership piece by the end of the week, but they very likely have 20 minutes to chat, especially if you make it clear that the contents of the conversation will make for great thought leadership pieces, social media posts, etc.
The flow looks like:
- You come up with topic ideas based on research.
- The founder picks their favorite.
- You and the founder schedule a 20-minute chat to get their thoughts on paper.
- You write up the content based on those thoughts.
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Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact
Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.
The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startup’s best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.
Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.
Many startups make the mistake of choosing systems and employing procedures to solve the immediate needs of the department that requires them.
I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.
Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.
As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasn’t made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were “learning in public.” Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.
Retelling this story isn’t to blow my own trumpet, it’s to make clear that you don’t have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?
Getting your structure and technology right
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startup’s marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the “top digital customer experience challenges” for businesses:
- Limited budget/resources.
- Siloed systems and fragmented customer data.
- Limited cross-department alignment/collaboration.
- Outdated/limited technology, operations or processes.
- Lack of in-house expertise/skills.
Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.
With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments — whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information — is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.
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One CMO’s honest take on the modern chief marketing role
There’s no shortage of commentary around the chief marketing officer title these days, and certainly no lack of opinions about the role’s responsibilities and meaning within a company. There’s a reason for that. CMO is the shortest tenured C-suite role — the average tenure of a CMO is the lowest of all C-suite titles at 3.5 years.
CMOs either produce the numbers or we find another job.
That’s because the chief marketing officer’s role is increasingly complex. Qualifications require broad, strategic thinking while also maintaining tactical acumen across several functions. There’s a big disparity in what companies expect from CMOs. Some want a strategist with an eye for go-to-market planning, while others want a focus on close alignment with sales in addition to brand awareness, content strategy and lead generation.
Still other companies want their CMO to emphasize product marketing and management. Ask 10 CMOs how they define their role and you’ll get 10 different answers.
So, I’m sharing my honest, straight from the mouth of a tenured CMO take on what the role actually means, plus the key attributes of today’s modern CMO.
We must be the Master Builder
Hat tip to “The Lego Movie” for this analogy. Today’s marketing executives must bring functions and teams together. From sales and marketing alignment to product and everything in between, chief marketers are the connective tissue between every function. Driving alignment between these functions is table stakes.
Same goes for people teams and culture — I’ve experienced an increase in CMOs serving as the linchpin of a company’s culture. My CEO lives by the famous phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and driving culture alignment now sits squarely on marketing’s shoulders.
Consistently drives new opportunities
Ah, demand generation. Driving new opportunity creation will continue to be a top priority for CMOs, of course. I’m not sharing anything new here, but the stakes are higher. CMOs either produce the numbers or we find another job. Doesn’t get any more straightforward than that. But, simply generating leads to check a box doesn’t cut it in board rooms anymore.
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Heirlume raises $1.38M to remove the barriers of trademark registration for small businesses
Platforms like Shopify, Stripe and WordPress have done a lot to make essential business-building tools — like running storefronts, accepting payments and building websites — accessible to businesses with even the most modest budgets. But some very key aspects of setting up a company remain expensive, time-consuming affairs that can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses — but that, if ignored, can result in the failure of a business before it even really gets started.
Trademark registration is one such concern, and Toronto-based startup Heirlume just raised $1.7 million CAD (~$1.38 million) to address the problem with a machine-powered trademark registration platform that turns the process into a self-serve affair that won’t break the budget. Its AI-based trademark search will flag if terms might run afoul of existing trademarks in the U.S. and Canada, even when official government trademark search tools, and even top-tier legal firms, might not.
Heirlume’s core focus is on leveling the playing field for small business owners, who have typically been significantly out-matched when it comes to any trademark conflicts.
“I’m a senior-level IP lawyer focused in trademarks, and had practiced in a traditional model, boutique firm of my own for over a decade serving big clients, and small clients,” explained Heirlume co-founder Julie MacDonell in an interview. “So providing big multinationals with a lot of brand strategy, and in-house legal, and then mainly serving small business clients when they were dealing with a cease-and-desist, or an infringement issue. It’s really those clients that have my heart: It’s incredibly difficult to have a small business owner literally crying tears on the phone with you, because they just lost their brand or their business overnight. And there was nothing I could do to help because the law just simply wasn’t on their side, because they had neglected to register their trademarks to own them.”
In part, there’s a lack of awareness around what it takes to actually register and own a trademark, MacDonell says. Many entrepreneurs just starting out seek out a domain name as a first step, for instance, and some will fork over significant sums to register these domains. What they don’t realize, however, is that this is essentially a rental, and if you don’t have the trademark to protect that domain, the actual trademark owner can potentially take it away down the road. But even if business owners do realize that a trademark should be their first stop, the barriers to actually securing one are steep.
“There was an an enormous, insurmountable barrier, when it came to brand protection for those business owners,” she said. “And it just isn’t fair. Every other business service, generally a small business owner can access. Incorporating a company or even insurance, for example, owning and buying insurance for your business is somewhat affordable and accessible. But brand ownership is not.”
Heirlume brings the cost of trademark registration down from many thousands of dollars to just under $600 for the first, and only $200 for each additional after that. The startup is also offering a very small business-friendly “buy now, pay later” option supported by Clearbanc, which means that even businesses starting on a shoestring can take the step of protecting their brand at the outset.
In its early days, Heirlume is also offering its core trademark search feature for free. That provides a trademark search engine that works across both U.S. and Canadian government databases, which can not only tell you if your desired trademark is available or already held, but also reveal whether it’s likely to be able to be successfully obtained, given other conflicts that might arise that are totally ignored by native trademark database search portals.
Image Credits: Heirlume
Heirlume uses machine learning to identify these potential conflicts, which not only helps users searching for their trademarks, but also greatly decreases the workload behind the scenes, helping them lower costs and pass on the benefits of those improved margins to its clients. That’s how it can achieve better results than even hand-tailored applications from traditional firms, while doing so at scale and at reduced costs.
Another advantage of using machine-powered data processing and filing is that on the government trademark office side, the systems are looking for highly organized, curated data sets that are difficult for even trained people to get consistently right. Human error in just data entry can cause massive backlogs, MacDonell notes, even resulting in entire applications having to be tossed and started over from scratch.
“There are all sorts of data sets for those [trademark requirement] parameters,” she said. “Essentially, we synthesize all of that, and the goal through machine learning is to make sure that applications are utterly compliant with government rules. We actually have a senior-level trademark examiner that came to work for us, very excited that we were solving the problems causing backlogs within the government. She said that if Heirlume can get to a point where the applications submitted are perfect, there will be no backlog with the government.”
Improving efficiency within the trademark registration bodies means one less point of friction for small business owners when they set out to establish their company, which means more economic activity and upside overall. MacDonell ultimately hopes that Heirlume can help reduce friction to the point where trademark ownership is at the forefront of the business process, even before domain registration. Heirlume has a partnership with Google Domains to that end, which will eventually see indication of whether a domain name is likely to be trademarkable included in Google Domain search results.
This initial seed funding includes participation from Backbone Angels, as well as the Future Capital collective, Angels of Many and MaRS IAF, along with angel investors including Daniel Debow, Sid Lee’s Bertrand Cesvet and more. MacDonell notes that just as their goal was to bring more access and equity to small business owners when it comes to trademark protection, the startup was also very intentional in building its team and its cap table. MacDonell, along with co-founders CTO Sarah Ruest and Dave McDonell, aim to build the largest tech company with a majority female-identifying technology team. Its investor make-up includes 65% female-identifying or underrepresented investors, and MacDonnell says that was a very intentional choice that extended the time of the raise, and even led to turning down interest from some leading Silicon Valley firms.
“We want underrepresented founders to be to be funded, and the best way to ensure that change is to empower underrepresented investors,” she said. “I think that we all have a responsibility to actually do something. We’re all using hashtags right now, and hashtags are not enough […] Our CTO is female, and she’s often been the only female person in the room. We’ve committed to ensuring that women in tech are no longer the only woman in the room.”
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Learn how to create an effective earned media strategy with Rebecca Reeve Henderson at TC Early Stage 2021
TechCrunch’s Early Stage 2021 is back for part two of our bootcamp-for-entrepreneurs event, with a focus on marketing and fundraising. Building on the first half of the event in April, this two-day virtual sprint will take place July 8 & 9, and we’re thrilled to welcome Rebecca Reeve Henderson as one of our all-star slate of experts. Rebecca will be joining us to share insight on how to build an effective earned media strategy for your startup, building on her deep expertise developing effective communications programs for some of the top business software companies in the world.
Earned media, aka the kind of exposure you get from a TechCrunch article, is a key element of any startup’s marketing strategy. It’s something that is best used as a complementary component to paid marketing and owned channel promotional efforts, but it’s also one of the trickiest things to get right, especially for first-time founders. Rebecca has worked with companies ranging from Slack, to Shopify, to Zapier, to Canva and many more, helping craft effective earned media strategies in one of the most difficult areas of all: B2B SaaS.
Image Credits: Rsquared Communications
Rebecca is also a founder herself, having built her communications company Rsquared from the ground up into an international business spanning the U.S. and Canada. Rsquared’s clients included startups at all stages of growth, from their very beginnings through to successful exits, including public market debuts, so she’s run effective communications campaigns at every point on the growth spectrum. Then in 2019, Rsquared had its own exit, with an acquisition by global communications firm Archetype.
We’ll hear tips from Rebecca on how earned media contributes to an effective overall communications strategy, and how you go about earning that media — including how to pitch media, and how to build successful long-term relationships with key reporters and publications in your industry.
Tickets for TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising are available until this Friday at the early bird rate which gives you an instant $100 savings! Secure your seat before this weekend!
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With Workfront, Adobe combines automated workflow with customer experience
Five months ago, Adobe purchased (for $1.5 billion) Workfront, a company that helps build marketing department workflows. Today the company is officially announcing how it intends to use it. As marketing executives try to balance mapping strategy to the creative process while building customized experiences, a marketing workflow tool would fit neatly into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and that’s where it has landed.
Alex Shootman, who was CEO at Workfront and is now VP and GM of Adobe Workfront, told me they see the tool as the system of record for the marketing department inside of AEM. While there is more than a hint of marketing in that explanation, the data from Workfront’s workflows acts as a record of the creative process.
As part of Adobe, the company has built hooks into Experience Manager and Creative Cloud to enable marketing’s creative work to move through an organized and auditable process, leaving a data trail that lets management know exactly what happened — a marketing system of record.
Shootman says having this system of record in place allows marketing teams to do several things. For starters, it lets them connect strategy to execution. “If you think about a CMO, he or she and their team is developing the key priorities for decisions for the year or for the quarter [and this helps them] take those key priorities and make sure that they are driving the activities within the marketing organization,” he said.
He says that involves connecting the people, processes and data within marketing into a single system where teams can iteratively plan on the work as changes arise. That’s where Workfront comes into play.
Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials, says the approach makes a great deal of sense. “Creating enough personalized content at scale to stay connected with customers as their needs evolve over time is a team sport. That calls for tighter collaboration throughout the creation process, and Workfront within the AEM brings a sophisticated project management capability to the creative process,” Leary said.
During the pandemic, that became imperative as the majority of sales moved online. That increased the need for speed and agility. Having this workflow tool in place inside the Adobe Experience Manager means it’s not only allowing marketing to build customized experiences for its customers, it also enables them to automate the workflows behind those customizations.
The way this could work in practice is a marketing team creates a campaign and maps it out in Workfront. From there, creatives get assigned tasks and these tasks show up in Creative Cloud. When they complete the assignment, it automatically goes back into Workfront where it will be reviewed, eventually get approved and get published to the Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool where it will be available for use by the entire marketing team.
When it comes to acquisitions, it’s hard to know how well they’ll turn out, but Workfront seems particularly well suited to the Adobe ecosystem, a tool that can help bring a missing workflow automation component to the entire creative process, while allowing marketing execs to see exactly how their strategy played out.
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4 ways martech will shift in 2021
The tidal wave of growth is upon us — an unprecedented economic boom that will manifest later this year, bringing significant investments, acquisitions and customer growth. But most tech companies and startups are not adequately prepared to capitalize on the opportunity that lies ahead.
Here’s how marketing in tech will shift — and what you need to know to reach more customers and accelerate growth in 2021.
First and foremost, differentiation is going to be imperative. It’s already hard enough to stand out and get noticed, and it’s about to get much more difficult as new companies emerge and investments and budgets balloon in the latter half of the year. Virtually all major companies are increasing budgets to pre-pandemic levels, but will delay those investments until the second half of the year. This will result in an increased intensity of competition that will drown out any undifferentiated players.
The second half of 2021 will bring incredible growth, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time.
Additionally, tech companies need to be mindful not to ignore the most important part of the ecosystem: people. Technology will only take you so far, and it’s not going to be enough to survive the competition. Marketing is about people, including your customers, team, partners, investors and the broader community.
Understanding who your people are and how you can use their help to build a strong foundation and drive exponential growth is essential.
Tactically, the most successful tech companies will embrace video and experimentation in their marketing — two components that will catapult them ahead of the competition.
Ignoring these predictions, backed by empirical evidence, will be detrimental and devastating. Fasten your seatbelts: 2021 is going to be a turbocharged year of growth opportunities for marketing in tech.
Differentiation is crucial
The explosion of tech companies and startups seeking to be the next big thing isn’t over yet. However, many of them are indistinguishable from each other and lack a compelling value proposition. Just one look at the websites of new and existing tech companies will reveal a proliferation of buzzwords and conceptual illustrations, leaving them all looking and sounding alike.
The tech companies that succeed are those that embrace one of the fundamentals of effective marketing — positioning.
In the ’80s, Al Ries and Jack Trout published “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” and coined the term, which documented the best-known approach to standing out in a noisy marketplace. As the market heats up, companies will realize the need to sharpen their positioning and dial in their focus to break through the noise.
To get attention and build traction, companies need to establish a position they can own. The mashup method — “Netflix but for coding lessons” — is not real positioning; it’s simply a lazy gimmick.
It is imperative to identify who your ideal customer is and not just who could use your product. Focusing on a segment of the market rather than the whole is, perhaps counterintuitively, the most effective approach to capturing the larger market.
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ActiveCampaign raises $240M at a $3B valuation as marketing and sales automation come into focus for SMBs
As businesses continue to adopt new digital tools to get their names out into the world, a startup that’s built a sales and marketing platform specifically for small and medium businesses is announcing a big round of funding. ActiveCampaign, which has built what it describes as a “customer experience automation” platform — providing a way not just to run digital campaigns but to follow up aspects of them automatically to make sales and marketing work more efficiently — has closed a $240 million round of funding. The Series C values the Chicago startup at over $3 billion.
The round is being led by a new, big-name investor, Tiger Global, with participation from another new backer Dragoneer, along with Susquehanna Growth Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners, which had both invested previously.
This funding round represents a huge leap for ActiveCampaign. It was only in January 2020 that it raised $100 million, and before that, the company, which was founded in 2003, had only raised $20 million.
But as we have seen in many other ways, the pandemic resulted in a surge of interest among businesses to do more — a lot more — online than ever before, not least because so many people were spending more time at home, carrying out their consumer lives over the internet. That led to ActiveCampaign growing to a customer base of 145,000 customers, up from 90,000 16 months ago.
That points not just to the company already growing at a decent clip before the pandemic, but how it capitalized on that at a time when companies were looking for more tools to run their businesses in the new world.
The growth was not about ActiveCampaign throwing more money into business development, founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom said in an interview. “It was the network effect of people finding success. Even today, organic word of mouth is our primary driver.”
The company’s tools fit into a wider overall trend in the world of business: automation, built on the back of new, cloud-based technology, is being adopted to carry out some of the less interesting and repetitive aspects of running a business.
In the case of sales, an example of what ActiveCampaign might provide is a way for an e-commerce business to identify when a logged-in customer (that is, a user who has an account already and is signed in) might have ‘abandoned’ a visit to a site before buying a product that had already been searched for, or clicked on, or even added to a cart. In these cases, it sends an email to customers reminding them of those items, with options for other follow-ups, in the event that the choice was due to being distracted or having second thoughts that might be persuaded otherwise.
Users can opt-out of these, but they can be useful given the genuine distraction exercise that is browsing online — with all of the unrelated notifications, plus other options for considering a purchase. Tellingly, ActiveCampaign integrates with 850 different apps, a measure of just how fragmented the online landscape is, and also how many ways your attention might be distracted, or snagged depending on your perspective.
Abandoned carts can cost a company, in aggregate, a lot of lost revenue, yet chasing those down is not the kind of task that a company would typically assign to a valuable employee to carry out. And that’s where companies like ActiveCampaign come in.
This, plus some 500 other actions like it around sales and marketing campaigns — VandeBoom calls them “recipes” — some of which have been contributed by ActiveCampaign’s own users, form the basis of the company’s platform.
The marketing and sales automation market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars today, and, thanks to the rise of social media and simply more places to spend time online (and more time spent online) is expected to be worth more than $8 billion by 2027, so it’s going after a lucrative and much-used tool for doing business online. (And others are looking at it as well, of couse, including newer entrants like Shopify coming from a different angle to the same problem. Shopify today is a valued partner of the company, VandeBoom said when I asked him about it.)
That gives ActiveCampaign not just a big opportunity to continue targeting, but possibly also makes it a target itself, for an acquisition.
The other key aspect of ActiveCampaign’s growth that is worth watching is related to its customers. While the company has a client base that includes recognized names like the Museum of Science and Industry based out of ActiveCampaign’s hometown, it also has some 145,000 others across nearly 200 countries with a big emphasis on small and medium businesses.
SMBs form the vast majority of all businesses globally, collectively representing a huge win for tech companies that can capture them as customers. But traditionally, they have proven to be a challenging sector, given that they cover so many different verticals, are in many ways more price-sensitive than their enterprise-sized counterparts, among other factors.
So for ActiveCampaign to have found successful traction with SMBs — including with pricing that works for many of them (using it starts at $9 for accounts with less than 500 contacts) — is likely another reason why the startup has caught the eye of investors keen to back winning horses.
While the company did not need to raise money, VandeBoom said he “saw it as an opportunity to bring in more partners, saying that investors like how it purposely went after the idea of customer experience not on vertical or locale.”
“We’ve been lucky enough to have a front row seat on this journey from early on – and it’s been pretty breathtaking,” said Todd MacLean, managing partner, Silversmith Capital Partners, in a statement to TechCrunch. “Even compared to other great growth companies, the momentum and capital efficiency are rare. But Jason is a rare entrepreneur and has built a team in his image. While there’s lots left to do, we believe we’ve only scratched the surface of this market opportunity and are excited to double-down on Jason and his vision.”
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