GrowSumo

Bryn Jones and his co-founder saw that software companies wanted to use influencers to promote their products, but the existing tools were built around traditional affiliate marketers. Influencers in their view included anyone from an accountant to a web development shop recommending products to clients. GrowSumo was built as a marketplace that let these influencers participate, which existing affiliate platforms did not allow.

GrowSumo launched in August 2015 with a very simple first version of the product. Jones said the team learned a lot from early customer feedback and went back to building. The company began commercializing in September 2016. Its pricing had two tiers: a $300 per month plan for early-stage companies that wanted to manage their own programs, and a $10,000 annual enterprise plan in which GrowSumo fully automated the program, sending weekly lists of influencers to invite and supplying outreach content. GrowSumo also took a 10% fee on payouts to influencers. Jones said roughly 80% of customers were on the $300 per month plan.

The Product Hunt launch was the key early moment. Jones said the team did not expect much, since they considered themselves an enterprise software company, but they shot up right away, ending the day around third place. Hundreds of companies signed up. Most were seed-stage founders and hackers, with some Series A companies, and only a small share were highly qualified. Still, some large enterprise accounts came through the launch and remain customers. Jones also said the platform had a viral component: when a company launched an influencer program, it emailed its customer list, and competitors on that list often joined. By the interview, GrowSumo had over 70 paying customers. Reply.io was cited as a customer that started on the early-stage plan to test the return before committing further.

GrowSumo said it was winning deals against Commission Junction, a large affiliate network, and against Influitive, an advocacy platform, mainly because it paid influencers cash rather than gift cards and automated the enterprise program. The company also said it qualified customers before signing them up, and would tell some early-stage companies to return in three to six months if they were not ready to invest in a marketing channel. Jones said this was meant to avoid taking money without delivering value. The interview did not establish how many unique new customers GrowSumo itself drove. The company said it had driven over $100,000 in monthly revenue for its customers, which describes customer results rather than GrowSumo's own revenue.

At the time of the interview, GrowSumo had eight people, planned to grow to about 20 over the following six months, and was based primarily in Toronto. It had gone through Y Combinator and raised a seed round, which it had not yet announced. The company planned to make larger announcements and push into new growth in 2017.