SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
729: Will Edelman Digital Creator Lead New AI Marketing World?
23 Jul 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
$15 million raised, serving under 500 customers.
Chapter 2: What insights does David Dunne share about AI in marketing?
Again, they're doing well more than $3 million per month. He won't admit that, but the big smile confirms it. Over 90% annual retention rate. Again, helping these agencies, these marketing folks, these analysts better understand how to capture, use, and gain insights, actionable insights from the data sets they're pouring over every day.
this is episode 729 coming up tomorrow morning we'll learn from cam miller and how he and his co-founder left a jp morgan job to sell 600 000 plus in baby clothes how'd they do it but first here's today's episode This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: How does Velocidi's technology empower analysts?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Hello, everybody. Nathan here. My guest today is David Dunn. He's the CEO and co-founder of Velocity, a marketing intelligence company that harnesses data for leading brands and agencies. In the seven years since founding, Velocity has enabled marketers to make data-driven decisions that optimize marketing spend.
Dunn is currently leading the firm's next chapter into artificial intelligence. David, are you ready to take us to the top?
Thanks, Nathan. Very nice to meet you. And thanks for taking the time.
You bet. So people throw around AI and artificial intelligence all the time right now because it's sexy. Why are you convinced that's the direction your agency needs to go in?
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did David face when founding Velocidi?
So as a company, we're focused on how artificial intelligence can speed up insights, path to insights. And so our technology has always been enabling that process.
But
Up until now, it's been analysts who derive the insights. And what we realize is the amount of data is just growing exponentially. So the need to help those analysts walk in the door in the morning to a set of insights that are based on the things they're looking for will greatly speed up their work and, in turn, speed up optimization.
Describe to me what one of these analysts might be doing. So first off, are they here or are they based overseas somewhere?
I think it's both, but there's a lot of high-end analysts and data science folks across the U.S.
Oh, I thought these were your own. You're talking about your customers. Correct.
Got it. Yeah. No, our platform is a technology platform that customers are licensed to use with the
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Chapter 5: How does Velocidi's pricing model work?
their data scientists, data analysts.
Okay. And is it a SAS model or an agency model? It's a SAS product and we license it.
And we do provide some managed services for certain customers who have very special needs, but for the most part, it's out of the box.
Can I transfer that to the ones that pay the most? Sure. All right, good. And what is the average kind of customer paying you?
Um,
Customers start at about $3,000 a month and varies greatly depending on if the customer has a global footprint. We have customers operating this in over 20 countries with a lot of brands, and so obviously that increases the cost significantly.
Before we go back to kind of the founding story and how you got into this, though, what would you say the average is across your entire customer base in terms of monthly ARPU?
I would probably say it's about $6,000 a month.
Okay, cool. And is that pricing, people pull different levers to get more, you know, get customers paying more based off utility. What are some of those levers you pull, like number of seats or additional products?
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Chapter 6: What strategies does David use for customer retention?
What are those levers?
Yeah, so unlike a lot of the folks in the industry who charge by the line of data or by seats, we choose not to do either of those things. Instead, we charge by the data stream. So how many sources of data and how many specific streams you might pull. So, for example, if you're pulling in Google data, you might have 20 brands. That would be 20 streams of data.
Same source, but 20 different streams for 20 different brands.
And why do a stream versus like an API call or number of seats or these other metrics?
Well, the API call is how we bring in the data. So we use API calls. Our customers can also manually upload the data, bring it in through email, bring it in from many other ways, FTP calls and whatnot.
But regardless of how you bring it in, it's the number of data streams determines the volume of data that you're ultimately going to have in the platform, how much is moving around, and therefore how much it should cost.
Got it. Now take us back to the founding story. You said seven years ago. So what was it, 2010, something like that?
Yeah, we started in my kitchen with sketching it out at the end of 2009, and then we launched in 2010.
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Chapter 7: How is Velocidi planning to innovate its product offerings?
And like a lot of young companies, we started with a very clear idea that we wanted to use data to make marketing smarter, better, faster. But we had to kind of find our way to the right product that the market would actually adopt. And the way we did that was to work very closely with customers over a period of years to actually develop a product that was tailor-made for them, really.
Who is WE, by the way? Do you have co-founders?
I have a couple of folks who've been here from the beginning. Jan Reg, who's a Norwegian chap. He's been here from the very beginning, and then a series of people came in in 2011 and 12.
You laughed when I asked that. Why? Yeah, well, we've been grinding the sausage for a long time together. Got it. Got it. What does that mean? Like, were you at your previous company together, or how'd you meet?
Chapter 8: What role does data play in enhancing creative marketing?
He and I worked together. I ran a global business prior to this for Edelman. I built their digital business from the ground up, and a couple of years prior to starting this business, young came in, we had bought a couple of businesses and merged and I merged three or four different businesses together over a very short period of time. He came in to help me to get everybody on the same machine.
That's so funny. And why, I mean, that sounds like a pretty sweet gig at Edelman. What was the final plug for you? Why give all that up?
Good question. I get asked that quite a lot. Yeah, it was a great gig. I loved it. I was there for 11 years. That was then and continues to be their fastest growing business. And it was a role in which I probably reinvented myself every couple of years. What was fascinating to me, however, was the way technology was going to change the way we conduct marketing.
And I felt at the time I'd helped a lot of young technology startup companies by being their first customer there. And companies like Buzzmetrics, Radiant Six, Buddy Media, others, we were literally among their first customers.
You should have took Equity.
Yeah.
Yeah, seriously. But as I was doing that and helping them build their businesses, the role they played was to help us to differentiate our services, right? So we used technology to really get a jump on the competition, and it worked very, very effectively for us. So at some point, I thought, you know, this would be really fun to do on my own.
And I had a couple of startups previously, so I thought, let me try that. And so that's how Velocity got born.
So how old were you when you left your Edelman job? Oh, we don't disclose age here. Oh, come on. Give me a range if you're not comfortable.
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