Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If this is not too much proprietary information, what were the keywords that you were able to get a lead on? You said that buyers were the same with the web analytics buyers. Were you then advertising on the web analytics keywords?

Ali Behnam: No, we weren’t. By 2012, which is when we started doing marketing, people were starting to look for tag management solutions.

Sramana Mitra: They were actually looking for tag management solutions? There was actually keyword search volume around tag management solutions.

Ali Behnam: The category was really starting to take shape by that point.

Sramana Mitra: That makes life a lot easier.

Ali Behnam: It does.

Sramana Mitra: When a category starts to take shape, that’s also the time when there’s competition.

Ali Behnam: Absolutely, especially when you’re in a new space. I think one of the best things that could happen to you is competition. A lot of people think competition is bad but the reality is, competition is good because it helps the category take shape. Ultimately, your job is basically to distinguish yourself from competition by having a better product.

Sramana Mitra: You got the category going. There was competition. What was the competitive landscape like?

Ali Behnam: The competitive landscape is very similar to what we have today. Right now, we have four companies that are competing in this space. There’s a company called TagMan, Ensighten, and BrightTag. Today, we’re still seeing those three other companies competing for most of the business out there.

We were not the first company with the product in the space. A lot of those companies that I just mentioned had a product before we did. We had an advantage of being able to see what the market needed and to look at some of the different methodologies used when building various solutions, and we actually ended up adopting the best-of-breed solution as far as methodology is concerned. That worked out to our advantage. By the time we had the product in place, we also had the category that was starting to take shape.

Sramana Mitra: How did 2012 go? What kind of revenue were you able to do and how many customers were you able to get?

Ali Behnam: Every quarter has been a record quarter for us in terms of bookings and the number of deals closed. We ended up doing around 200% growth over the previous year. It was a tremendous year. 2013 was another great year. We had 140% growth over 2012. 2012, in my opinion, is the year where a lot of people were looking for Tealium on the list of vendors to consider.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam
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