Customer-facing teams are constantly being bombarded with data from the many advertising networks and marketing platforms they may be using: Salesforce, Hubspot, MailChimp, Facebook, and so many more. It can quickly become difficult to sort through the data, standardize different metrics, and target important leads and healthy accounts. Like a superhero in the sky, Hull‘s platform funnels all of that customer data into one place — yes, all of it. Leads from events, online tools, meetings, and every contact in your database. The platform helps you manage contacts, segment into very specific groups, and target the accounts with the most viable leads.
“We’re investing a lot in continuing to serve the tech-savvy marketer and mid-market marketer, especially in the B2B industry,” says Stefan Koenig, Hull’s CEO and co-founder.
The customer data management platform raised $2.6 million in seed investment this past January. Their revenue growth is 300 percent over last year.
Here, Koenig talks all about data and shares more about Hull’s journey — including his opinion of Atlanta as the top East Coast hub for SaaS.
How did the idea for Hull come about?
We went through Techstars Boulder in 2013 as a Customer Engagement and Gamification platform. We ended up pivoting away from our original idea. We met with Guillaume Cabane in February 2016 while he still was at Mention.com. He saw what we were building (a real-time customer data store and segmentation engine for B2C) and quickly mentioned the idea of an “ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) for Marketers.”
Cabane immediately saw the value it would bring to be able to consolidate data from the multiple SaaS services he was using on a daily basis to build unified user segments and profiles and then leverage them everywhere. We understood that the problem of data silos between cloud services was bigger than ever. The business was in need for a reliable, multi-way synchronization engine to help move any bit of data from service to service, enriching and transforming it on the way and we set out to make this a reality.
How does Hull solve this problem?
Hull is automation with a brain, a smarter way to solve the problem of account and customer data management, segmentation and synchronization. Hull has access to the full account and customer profile at all times. Contrary to most automation solutions, it is not “fire and forget” anymore, it’s about evaluating the next step based on the entire event log of every action and bit of data about a given account & user.
Hull is also able to handle large scale data collection and to capture full event logs, account, and user profiles from many different sources including web traffic. The scale at which we operate: The ability to capture raw traffic at any volume from all services and consolidate it into one unified account & customer profile, condense this and ensure proper synchronization is achieved.
What are Hull’s most used features?
CRM enrichment: Combining your lead data with the person and company data (from 3rd parties) and usage data (what they’ve been doing in your product from analytics tools). Sort this and send to CRM. This directs the sales teams to ‘best fit’ potential customers. They can be entirely proactive in hunting only the most qualified accounts.
Trigger real-time personalized messaging: Combines data from multiple sources into one “master profile” about each person and account then sorts, segments, and syncs those profiles to other tools to trigger personalized emails, webpages, and messages from all your marketing messaging tools
Custom ad audiences: Combines data from multiple sources into one “master profile” about each person and account then sorts, segments, and syncs those profiles to other ad audiences to precisely target your ads to the right people throughout the entire customer acquisition cycle.
What’s your current funding situation?
We just completed a seed round at the beginning of this year. We were lucky enough to score great VCs. We haven’t taken a lot of funding. We’ve been happy to have customers since the early days, which are paying for the service. We have always been focused on revenue growth.
What’s your target market and revenue model?
Our focus is companies within the SaaS space. While we do have some B2C companies as customers, we’re purely B2B SaaS. We’re looking at B2B companies that are in the revenues of $5M and below $100M as well as employee sizes that are 30+ people. They all use Salesforce as a CRM system and have sales and marketing teams in place. If they’re having issues with scaling, we’re helping them grow faster by cutting through all of the noise and the data and help them focus purely on customer operations.
Our pricing model starts at $400/month, recurring. That subscription can grow very quickly as it depends on the number of events you have every month.
How does Atlanta and the Southeast weave into your story?
We have two offices as of today — Paris, France (where our engineering, product, and design teams live) and Atlanta, GA (where our marketing team lives), our headquarters. We’re still an engineering-driven company, but we are in the process of growing our go-to market team here in Atlanta. I’ve been with other European companies before that were successful in Atlanta. We compared New York, Boston, and Atlanta and it makes a significant difference in the cost of living as well as acquiring talent. I’m a big fan of Atlanta. I think we are the best hub on the East Coast for SaaS and Atlanta has a very driven economy.
