Mutiny creates personalized plans for B2B marketing

Published October 2, 2019

Mutiny, a personalized marketing startup for businesses that sell to other businesses, is taking the stage today at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where it’s announcing new funding and new features.

CEO Jaleh Rezaei told me that she and co-founder Nikhil Mathew created Mutiny to solve a problem they saw as early employees at HR services company Gusto — trying to personalize their messages to different sales prospects.

With Mutiny, they’ve built easy-to-use tools allowing marketers to show different landing pages to different customers. To do this, the product draws on pre-built data integrations to identify customer segments, then allows customers to use a visual editor to build different versions of landing pages for those segments.

“When we think about the B2B journey, it has changed quite a bit,” Rezaei said. “Today, 67% of that B2B buyer’s journey is online. Without engineering, it’s really hard to change that journey and have an impact. What’s exciting about Mutiny is we empower these great marketers to improve their customer experience without that constant dependence on technical teams.”

Mutiny was part of the Summer 2018 class at accelerator Y Combinator. Rezaei said that shortly after demo day, the startup raised $3 million in funding from Cowboy Ventures, Uncork Capital and various angel investors.

It’s since added features to support targeted, account-based marketing. Rezaei said Mutiny pulls account data from Salesforce, cleaning it up and surfacing it, so that when a prospective customer responds to your marketing, they could end up on a landing page showing their own name, title and company.

For example, Brex is creating landing pages for its email marketing campaigns, where each page shows the recipient’s name and company; Gusto is tailoring landing pages based on the AdWords search terms that brought a prospective customer to that page; and Amplitude is customizing landing pages based on company size and other attributes.

As a result, Mutiny says Brex has seen a 200% lift in outbound leads, while Amplitude has increased all inbound leads by more than 40%. (Other customers include Segment, Carta, TripActions and Elastic.)

Today, Mutiny is also announcing that it will offer personalized recommendations to marketers. So if all these ideas are new to you, the product can recommend specific customer segments that you should consider personalizing for based on things like your traffic data and conversion data.

Mutiny can also create entire “playbooks,” recommending not just the segment to personalize, but what that personalized experience should look like for that segment.

“The goal of Mutiny is always to make personalization really easy and really guided,” Rezaei said.

YC-backed Mutiny helps B2B business personalize their website for each visitor

Published August 17, 2018

Mutiny, which is part of the current batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website.

Co-founder and CEO Jaleh Rezaei said this concept is alive and well in the analog world: When she was at VMware, sales reps were given materials to help them tailor their pitch for each prospective customer. Then, when she was one of the early employees at HR services startup Gusto, she tried to do something similar online, only to find that existing software wasn’t quite up to the task.

There are landing page optimization tools, but Rezaei asked, “Who wants to create a thousand versions of your website?” And there are A/B testing tools, but Rezaei argued that they’re really designed to test “generic content” and use “very little audience intelligence.” And as for creating your own personalization tools, many companies will find that it requires “way too much engineering effort.”

That’s where Mutiny comes in. It integrates with existing data sources to allow businesses to divide their customers into segments. Then they can use Mutiny’s graphical interface to create personalized elements of the webpage for each segment.

For example, when you visit the homepage of Mutiny customer Amplitude, things like the customer testimonials and the call to action will change depending on the size of your company. Or when Brex customers click through from an email marketing campaign, they’ll see a credit card offer tailored to their name and company.

Brex -- personalized with Mutiny

These kinds of changes might not seem all that significant, but Rezaei said that when someone visits a B2B website, they’re probably interested in the product or service already. If they’re not converting, it’s probably because “they didn’t find what they wanted right away.” Mutiny can help surface the right content or the right message for the right customer.

The startup will also compare the personalized results to the generic webpage to help determine what does and doesn’t improve the bottom line. Rezaei said some of Mutiny’s early customers (who include Gusto, Infusionsoft and Brex) have seen conversion rates improve by 20 to 180 percent.

“That’s not to say that every test performs better, but the nice thing here is that you immediately see how something is performing,” she added.

Eventually, Rezaei is hoping to expand Mutiny’s technology so that it can personalize every aspect of the B2B purchase experience, including email and ad retargeting.

“Our passion as a founding team is growth,” she said. “Progress occurs not when you just build something, but when that product makes it into the hands of the person for whom it was intended to help.”