Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 6)

Sramana: Adobe definately did not have this path in their original plans. They are a bunch of technologies bolted together.

Graham Cooke: Omniture bought a lot of companies before Adobe bought them. Then Adobe added all of the other things. Their vision is definitely correct but the execution is difficult to do.

Sramana: When you went into the market you decided that your positioning would be to target ecommerce companies and focus on conversions. Did you also benchmark a particular size of company?

Graham Cooke: We target ecommerce businesses with online revenues exceeding 10 million dollars. We help those businesses grow 20% per year. The customers on the platform are able to build new solutions into their site for different user segments. That allows them to drive conversions for each of these segments. It may not be 100% of all users, but they are able to drive conversion uplift in their segments.

Sramana: How many customers do you have now?

Graham Cooke: We have 85 enterprise customers.

Sramana: Are they all in Europe?

Graham Cooke: We have some US clients as well now. We opened our US office in New York two months ago. Our first US customer was Hammacher Schlemmer. We are going to be announcing some new US customers soon. We also have over 2,000 self-service customers who are using our tag management product. A lot of those customers are American clients.

Sramana: We are about to start the Fall of 2013. What are your next steps?

Graham Cooke: We have an exciting product launch for the fall. Since we focused the business on the areas that matter most we have taken the initiative to try and solve our customers biggest pain points. We are going to make it even easier for the marketer to do their job and be successful. They will have fewer complexities. We are very focused on that luanch.

We are also committed to expanding our US business. We are the market leader in the UK for our segment. We want to show US customers the same uplift that we have been driving in the UK market.

Sramana: What has the experience of building a company out of London been like?

Graham Cooke: With any technology business you want to find an unfair advantage to your competition. There was not a lot of competition in the UK. Ecommerce in the UK is pretty sophisticated. Spend per capita is 30% higher than in the US. The British people love to spend time and buy online.

We found that because of this penetration it created more competition which made more conversion rates at a higher acquisition cost. There was a greater need to drive conversions. Whiile America has been about ad and marketing technologies, there has not been a big need of conversion technologies. There has been a 58% increase in the need for conversion technology in the US. It is a massively growing market in the US. We have a huge advantage because we can take our learnings from the UK market and apply them to the US.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit
1 2 3 4 5 6 7