Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was that insight?

Josh Manion: No matter what we did with those customers, the amount of value that they were able to realize was this tiny fraction of the potential value of all the different technologies that they would use. You could think of it this way. The vendors of this time told a wonderful story about the Holy Grail of marketing. Our technology will allow you to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. None of it actually worked or none of it was actually possible in the real world. That was because the enterprises that we worked with had no ability to take an action on their website, on their mobile app, or on the social media platform without going through this laborious process of working with their IT department to define the changes and get something out in a release. All of it was massively fragmented. The net result was that the data that was being produced were all being stored in a format that the enterprise didn’t have direct access to. It wasn’t first priority to them. They didn’t own the data. It was generally owned by the vendor that they used. That data could be not possibly be associated with each other because of the format it was stored in. You end up with this fragmented view of the customer.

In digital marketing, the company that’s marketing to you has short-term memory loss and they cannot remember who you are. When you come to their website, they treat you one way. When they serve you a display ad, they have a completely different set of facts that might be completely contradictory to how they just treated you. Every touch point that you have with that company tends to result in a completely varied experience about who you actually are.

Sramana Mitra: Are you talking primarily about customers who are catering to consumers? Are you talking about B2B as well?

Josh Manion: Generally, our sweet spot are people who are catering to consumers. We definitely have B2B customers. The way I frequently describe the dynamics of our business is that the bigger and more sophisticated you are and the larger your business is, the greater the ROI we can generate for you. If we are to optimize your experience with 10,000 customers, that’s great and that will generate a really compelling ROI for you. If you have 10 million customers, it’s going to be that much bigger.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion
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