Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Cory, thanks so much for joining us.
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So we're going to talk about BlueConic, which is a company that is rapidly growing in the Boston tech scene. Your Series B was announced earlier this year. So there's a lot to talk about. So let's, let's talk about kind of the history of the company at BlueConic. Talk about kind of the origins.
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Sure. Thanks for having me. Again, it's awesome to be here. BlueConic is, indeed, as you say, Boston technology company. But we have a pretty interesting backstory in that our co-founders are Dutch, and they moved to Boston in 2014. They felt like it was a very European city out of the choices that they could have made a couple options in the United States. They took their series A that year, and I joined the company in January of 2015, so about six months later, and we still have a really significant, particularly engineering presence back in the Netherlands. And so that's a core kind of aspect of our business that we've thought a lot about. And the culture of the company is very European in a lot of ways. And we've grown the company from those early days from about 15 people to the 90 that we are now both kind of heavily in those two locations, but also a few remote folks as well. And likely increasingly a number of remote people as as the world continues to unfold this way so.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now BlueConic is one of is one of the hottest segments of marketing that you guys are building a customer data platform, or CDP is the acronym is known. So what does that mean actually?
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Yeah, so we, I think the best way to think about the CDP value proposition is in the context of the rest of the marketing technology stack. So it's sort of something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One of the challenges that marketers have long had, they have a lot of different tools, particularly in digital marketing, that sort of think about who their customer is, and the data that they store in ways that are unique to each of those systems. And they have a really difficult time stitching them together into that sort of elusive and cliche single view of the customer, 360 view of the customer. And the CDP is about bringing that data together. Yes, that unification aspect, but also really importantly, also about giving that data back to the marketer in a format that they can use to improve how they engage with consumers, how they do modeling and analytics, how they do segmentation, sort of core aspects of marketing need to be improved. And based on that richer, unified view, and then use it for activation in those contexts and the CDP fills in that unification activation, kind of gap is the linchpin between the breadth of the data and the breadth of the activation channels in one place.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Who are some of your customers that are currently using your platform?
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Yeah, we are so lucky, we have an incredible set of customers, more than 300 of them globally, and a lot of different industries. And something that actually is really important to us is that when we think about our consumer base, we think about them in terms of business model, rather than in terms of sort of traditional verticals. And the reason for that is that subscription based retail companies, for example, act a lot more like publishers than they do like a brick and mortar retailer. So those are really important nuances when we think about our world. But we work with customers that run the gamut. So Bob's discount furniture is going to be well known to the Boston folks, but also the Boston Globe. Franklin sports is another amazing customer of ours has been on for a long time, Gobo Sports, so we just have this really incredible group, even just within the Boston area, nevermind worldwide, that we've worked with over the last 5 to 10 years in some cases.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So I highlighted earlier that you raised your Series B round of funding earlier this year. So talk about the current state of the state of the company, number of employees, growth plans ahead.
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Sure, absolutely. So obviously that was a big milestone for us to get the B. And big growth plans ahead. The category is hugely hyped right now. We're super busy. And that's been really exciting. And then of course, we come three months into the year and we've got this Coronavirus experiences pandemic. So in some respects that has, you know, caused us to stop and just sort of evaluate and make sure that we're on the right track. But what we've seen and was really striking primarily among our customers, quite frankly, is how critical our solution has been to their adapting to Coronavirus and the pandemic. So subscription based businesses and publishers in particular, literally being able to change their strategies in a matter of hours and days and have that experience popped up so they didn't lose momentum for retailers all of a sudden needing to recognize we have to hold our consumers even tighter than before. What is the new insight? How do we get closer to this consumer data to really understand what the best path forward for our business is? That insight is right in our platform. So for us, you know the first couple of weeks and months of this, we wanted to see where things were shaking out. But it's become even more clear how critical our technology is to the customer. So that's good news for us as a business, of course. So we're about 90 employees today and getting back on track with hiring both here in Boston. But also one of the big virtues of everyone having to go remote, the silver lining is to prove that we can do that. And that our you know, we can still scale and operate at incredibly high level. And so that gives us also an opportunity to look at our hiring and where else that needs to happen, and how we can support people not just who want to come into an office five days a week, when we return to doing that. So whether it's customer success, a lot of again, customer facing professional services, types of roles to really help our customers get value. Those are the kind of the core areas and then of course, always product development, always looking for engineers and data scientists who want to come in help expand the platform, that's going to be the key kind of areas of growth for us over the next couple of quarters, certainly.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now what's the culture like working at BlueConic?
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
I always have a hard time answering this question, because this has been sort of my baby from the jump. And I spend a lot of time thinking about what our culture is, and making sure that the early seeds continued to flourish. And I think one of the things that's also really interesting about where we are now in sort of this scale up phase is that we're really intent on making sure that our culture is sort of more like an orchestra. Everyone can play their own different instrument, but it's still nice to sound good together. But that's really important, right, we don't just want a bunch of musicians who can play the same, the same instrument in our orchestra. And so being able to bring sort of that full, authentic self, that really started from the jump with the fact that we had to figure out how to bring together the Dutch part of our company, with the American part of our company, and how we communicate with one another. How we work are quite frankly different. And so figuring out the strengths of both to weave that together into something that really makes our company strong and really built on a strong foundation. And then that's continued to sort of evolve from there and in other ways, and bringing in different types of people, and backgrounds and experiences, etc, into the organization. And we have sort of a rallying cry around this idea of building the dream. And that came from me receiving a text message from our CEO, when I was getting ready to join the company that you know, hurry up and get here we've got a dream to build. And that's really been a throughput all along for every new hire, we tell that story to everybody during that process. And we really are inviting them in not just to build our dream. But to add their own aspect to that as well. I feel very strongly. And as someone who's interviewed probably everybody who's come through our door at some point, it's really important to me that blueconic is a place that even if you know you leave at some point, which I expect, quite frankly, most of us will, that you leave better than you came and that we are the kind of company that you're proud of the work that you've done, that you are a better employee wherever you go next. And that companies want to hire BlueConic alums, the Blue Crew, if you will, because of the kind of people that we we turnout. And so that's always been a big piece too, for us in terms of how we think about hiring and development of our folks, that we set them off into the world better than they came is really important to me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
That's a that's a great philosophy and a very, very powerful one too. Now why is now the ideal time to join BlueConic?
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
We just have so much work to do that everyone should be wanting to be a part of whether it's on the customer front sales and marketing. This category is incredibly hot right now, it's, you know, on the hype cycle from Gartner, analysts are writing about it, we've gotten more RFPs this year than we've got in years past combined. So everyone is recognizing the potential of this solution, and bringing that to bear. And so just kind of out externally, the time is right. But also internally, you mentioned the B of course. We've been at this for a very long time already. So we're not just a market leader in terms of the platform, but also in how long we've been at this. And so being able to join a team that knows what they're doing sees what we're you know, our opportunity is and wants to be a part of that. Now is the ideal time to get on this train is picking up speed, but it's not so much that you lose the impact that an individual person can have on the day to day. And to me that's just really exciting.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well if you are interested in exploring opportunities at blueconic, you need to go to their Bizzpage on VentureFizz and you'll find all their listings there go to venturefizz.com/blueconic and you'll see all their jobs listed. Cory, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at BlueConic.
Cory Munchbach, BlueConic
Thank you for having me.
