ATDC alum Springbot finished an eventful year on a high note, closing a $10 million Series B round led by Harbert Growth Partners. Focusing on small to medium-seized online retailers, the eCommerce marketing platform simplifies data and multi-channel marketing by combining marketing automation and analytics to help grow the retailer’s revenue.
This latest funding round was only one of many accomplishments for the Martech startup this year. The platform added multiple offerings including email personalization, web and social retargeting ads, coupon codes and the addition of Amazon Essential, a tie-in to the online retailer. The new funding will fuel additional hires on the development, marketing and customer success teams, plus new product developments.
Hypepotamus caught up with CEO Brooks Robinson to learn more about his plans for Springbot’s growth, maintaining its award-winning company culture and his number one funding lesson.
Tell me more about how you hope to leverage your Series B funding.
We’re expanding the office. We moved to Colony Square a couple years ago from the ATDC down at Georgia Tech. We’re staying in Colony Square. We’ll be expanding the office here, basically doubling the team. We’re excited about that. We’re at about 70 people today and we’re going to add about another 70 people over the next eighteen months or so.
We’ll be expanding in all parts of the business, including the sales and marketing side to continue the growth of the business. We’ll also be adding to our development team to help us build more features and expand the platform. And finally, we’ll be expanding our customer success team as well — our coaches. The team that helps our customers leverage our platform and use our software.
Any new products we should expect from Springbot as the platform grows?
As an e-commerce marketing platform that helps small and medium online retailers, we’ll be adding more features that only large companies have access to. One that’s coming out relatively soon is called the Springbot eCommerce Scorecard. This new feature will allow retailers to benchmark performance versus their peers. We’re very excited about that opportunity.
As you double your workforce, how do you hope to maintain your great workplace culture as you grow as a team?
We’ve recently been named Best Place to Work for the past two years now. We’re very excited about continuing that streak — maintaining core values of working together as a team and having a great place to work.
It starts with having common core values. That’s something the group that started the company, back four and a half years ago, discussed. We wrote out our four core values that you’ll see on our website. It’s very important to us that everyone that interviews new candidates coming into the company discuss our core values and make sure that there’s a good match. We celebrate what makes us unique. We ask people not to leave their personalities at the door. You don’t have to have a personal life and a work life personality. If you leave anything at the door, we’re only going to get half of your capabilities. I think it’s a great way for everyone to be themselves, and have fun, but work very hard in a very purposeful way.
If we’re not coming to work every day thinking how can we help our online retailers grow through technology, then we’re missing the boat. I think that’s the focus everyone has here every day is just to wake up every morning thinking how can we help them grow.
Let’s talk about Springbot’s recent success. What are some recent accomplishments?
The real core focus of the company has been to build the platform that helps our online retailers grow. We’ve added a lot of great features over the past four years to our platform. We now integrate with Magento, Shopify, and Big Commerce. Then on the marketing channel side — we have email integrations and social marketing integrations with Twitter and Facebook as well as Instagram. Then on the online side, we have very advanced retargeting capabilities. The ability to help retailers bring people back to their store. We’re very excited about all the features we’ve built over the past four years. Honestly, four years ago we started off with a handful of customers and today we have over 1,200 eCommerce brands using our platform.
How do you manage that rapid growth to make sure that you guys are on the right path as CEO?
Making sure the team has the right resources. That’s either in terms of additional people to join the team, or I think one of the areas we do quite well in is leveraging technology ourselves. We’ve taken advantage of a lot of the marketing automation tools and customer experience tools to help us work smarter with our customers and be able to be more efficient as we grow.
Any advice to other entrepreneurs trying to raise funds right now?
Something I’ve always done and I learned early in my career from a great mentor was to go tell investors what you’re going to do, go do it, and then come back and tell them what you did. It can take 9-12 months for that entire process, sometimes even longer. You’re building credibility and I think just going even just a few months before you need capital and starting to raise, it can be very difficult. I’ve always taken that approach and we raised this round in early December and that process frankly kicked off in 2015. You have to focus on execution in that period of time as well. It’s not just about your story and your current metrics, it’s about the past that got you there. I think that’s what investors actually want to see because they’re going to go on a journey with you for the next few years.
Looking to join Springbot’s thriving company culture? Check out their current open positions here.
