You bought a Martech Company… So, now what?

Quotes

• “A little background about Verblio, we are a bootstrap company for about 10 years now so we have a very different approach from a VC-funded company where you have an M&A division that is constantly out there looking for things. At the same time we are trying to balance doing everything that we do. All the content that we scale for every niche gets better everyyear as part of our process but it’s very hard to stay strategically open and focus on where the industry is going.” -Steve“Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan said in a conference, ‘Video should be 50% of your content right now and he said that when I don’t think Hubspot even had a video product at the time so it was leading the industry of where we should be. You have to do what you’re doing much better and keep competing as you are but also keep your mind what else to do next.” -Steve“Our model is we use technology in order to lower the cost of creating that content but we believe that humans are critical to creating great content at every level and we thought that videos should follow the same way.” -Steve“It was a really quick evaluation process for usbecause our in-house team is already overwhelmed with product roadmaps that we brought on the last couple of years. One is we already have a lot of roadmap to build out and the second one is we didn’t have that video level of expertise. Acquiring is a really unique opportunity for us.” -Steve“They basically came to us and said that we are the company that they wanted to sell to. That we’ve been talking to them for a few years about partnering with them and testing with them and there was clear strategic fit. It was just easier when they came to us when we were already looking at video.” -Steve“It was the right size of company for a bootstrap company like us that is within the 6 million to 10 million dollar range of annual revenue. Without VC-funding we needed to go to somebody who is at thatpre-revenue stage. We also needed someone who didn’t have investors that we have to pay off as part of this.” -Steve“The good thing about acquiring a pre-revenue is there are less books to clean up. This company had a few unbelievable engineers and part of our evaluation was these guys were so damn smart.” -Steve“I think about pricing strategy when I think about evaluation for a company this big. We had a pricing strategy approach which is, there was a cost plus. How much do you take to produce it versus how much I want to charge afterwards, how much time these guys put in it versus how much we will pay them for it, versus the valuation side of how much do I actually think this is worth to us.” -Steve“We did not onboard the team because they didn’tcome with the acquisition, we just got the technology and not the people. But we needed their expertise in order to transition over so we had to find a way to get much of their time as necessary in order for my team of engineers/CTOs to get up to speed aswe could. We flew their top engineer out, and he took a lucrative position of AI at Facebook by the way, to basically just do a deep dive until my team was ready.” -Steve“We are a content creation company that really focuses on written content. We sellsubscriptions which means we are selling to people who understand that executing on your content strategy is the most important element to it and we are basically trying to match video into that.” -Steve“An M&A strategy to me is very similar to starting a new product in your company. Is the MVP truly the MVP? How long are you going to invest and what are the clear criteria? You also have to really be honest about yourself on how much time it takes in acquiring new and more clients.” -Steve“I think that is great advice. If there is one thing that as a marketer, I advise people that think about starting to think about marketing that you need to have patience. Cultivating great marketing takes time.” -Ben “The M&A process was quite the existential moment for us as a company. We had to figure out how we want to define ourselves internally and also what is our new strategic narrative.” -Steve“The flag that we put in the ground was that we are going to be a written content company first and the video is to enhance that written content and also to help promote it. Once we came to the understanding that is who we are going to be, it helped us to have a consistent belief system which was that our value proposition with our technology in SaaS platform that are verbally created is to lower the cost and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of written content creation and the video platform that we bought does the exact same thing.” -Steve“As a brand consultant, one of the first things that I do with myclient to sit down and talk about what their company is. Who they are and then we try to find the overlap between not only on who the company is but who their customers are and that’s how I really define someone’s brand.” -Ben