I joined Brand24 in September 2014. Before Brand24, I was Sales Director at GetResponse Email Marketing for 6 years. Before this, I basically took on any job that involved sales. I sold recruitment solutions, affiliate marketing tools, printer cartridge recycling bins, and even ice cream
What is your SaaS called? Brand24
Founded: 2010
How many people are on the team right now? 52
What are you based on? Poland
Did you raise money? Yes
Can you tell us what Brand24 is and how it makes money?
Brand24 is an internet monitoring solution. We help our clients collect mentions of any phrase or keyword from all over the web. Essentially, our clients track their own brands so they can engage mexican phone numbersconversations and have an online presence. But clients are now branching out and tracking their competition, their industry, their opinion leaders, and are even collecting sales leads.
We earn revenue by allowing our users to collect and store that data for analysis in our tool. Essentially, we save them time and effort by knowing what is being said about them online.
Brand24 Homepage
Brand24 Homepage
How did you come up with this idea?
I think like 90% of startups. We value what people say about us online and we just couldn't find a tool that fit our spending capacity. So we wanted to fill that gap in the market.
How long did you work on it before launching? When did you see your first dollar?
We worked from mid-2010 until the private beta in mid-2011. The commercial launch was in October 2011 and we had day 1 of sales.
Number of paying customers: 1900+
Conversion rate from free trial to paying user: 3.4%
Who are your customers? What is your target market?
Our target audience is SME companies and agencies. Internet monitoring is not a new technology, but for years it was only available to enterprise customers with deep pockets. We have a strong presence in both the SaaS and Startup space. We have clients of all sizes, from MIT and BriteVerify to IKEA and Landingi.
ARPU: $104 USD
How did you get your first 100 customers?
We started locally. We drove a lot of miles in our cars and sneakers and networked. It paid off in spades and we were able to not only build a solid customer base, but also become thought leaders nationally. As those companies expanded internationally, they took us with them and our base grew organically.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that work best for you? Which channel didn't work for you?
Aside from paid advertising, our best channels are community marketing in spaces where we aim to be digital thought leaders (quora, reddit, SaaS Growth Hackers on FB, etc.) and influencer marketing. We spend a lot of time connecting with both people and businesses in our space that we try to add value with and in turn get mutually beneficial outcomes.
The channel that didn't work "yet" but we didn't lose hope is third-party affiliate networks. When you're small and starting your affiliate program, you want to be part of an affiliate network, that's why we joined ShareASale and they don't convert well compared to our organic traffic. However, we now have our own community of Brand3 users and new SaaS-oriented networks like Growsumo are starting, this is a channel we hope will improve.
Mick, as Chief Revenue Officer at Brand24, what does your workday look like?
Basically, my typical day consists of reviewing our customer journey funnel and conversion within that funnel. Of course, I'll start with our test-to-upgrade conversions. But also lead scoring averages, the performance of our marketing automation, and platform usage. Tools like Intercom, Google Analytics, and Heap Analytics take up the majority of my day.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you encountered recently and how you managed to solve them.
From my specific perspective of focusing on our revenue and business plan, one constant challenge is ensuring we stick to our core audience. A good example of this is that we no longer solicit bids or RFP processes. As much as we would like to land those mountainous deals, our goal is to scale quickly as a self-service platform. The time my sales team was taking on RFPs was simply counterproductive to our goal. The same goes for custom requests for new features, etc. We need to ensure that the feature benefits our entire audience, even if a customer is willing to cover the development costs.
Simply put, we need to be better at translating short-term revenue gains into long-term product direction.
Some tasks are not worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
Until recently we outsourced all of our performance marketing projects. Our retargeting and CPC campaigns were designed in-house, but then our agency managed the setup and tracking of the campaigns. Next month we will be adding a Performance Manager to our team. We have outsourced content creation, design work, and HR development and will most likely continue to do so.