Pulse

Joe Coll started his entrepreneurial journey at just 16, launching his first agency with a business partner. After three years, unsatisfied with the direction, he shut it down and started fresh at 19 with Oncore, his current marketing agency. Building a full-service creative powerhouse—handling paid ads, video production, animation, photography, and branding—Oncore grew rapidly, hitting over £1M in annual revenue with 25 full-time employees. But despite his success helping clients spend money on ads, Joe noticed a persistent problem: nobody could predict which creatives would actually perform before launching them. Brands and agencies were essentially throwing darts, hoping their ads would land.

In June 2020, Joe decided to systematize the creative prediction problem into a SaaS platform called Pulse. Rather than rely on external investors, he bet on himself, investing over £1.48 million of his own capital earned from the agency. The technology stack was ambitious: machine learning, computer vision, quantum computation elements, and natural language processing ("NLP on steroids," as Joe described it). The core innovation was analyzing hundreds of variables—hue, saturation, luminance, object identification, written copy sentiment—against petabytes of historical engagement data to predict how audiences would emotionally respond to content with 97% accuracy. By January 2022, Joe had assembled a 15-person team, including 7 full-time engineers, grinding away on a complex backend capable of handling massive data flows.

Joe's existing network in the agency world became his distribution advantage. He leveraged his connections through Oncore to get 50 beta users with early platform access, all drawn from the marketing and advertising agency space he already knew intimately. Rather than cold-pitching, his reputation as a successful agency owner gave him credibility, and word-of-mouth from other agencies created inbound interest. He priced strategically based on competitor analysis (noting that similar products like Talkwalker charge £6k/year) and his confidence that Pulse was substantially better. The pricing ranged from £500/month for smaller agencies to £5,500/month for larger operations, with a sweet spot around £2,000-£2,500 for mid-market agencies.

Joe's decision to stay deeply connected to his agency while building Pulse worked in his favor—not against it. Rather than forcing a choice between the two businesses, he recognized that every agency client who adopted Pulse created a higher net dollar retention because the agency helped them implement and optimize. He also didn't over-raise early; he took just £150k from strategic private investors while funding the rest himself, maintaining 95%+ equity. However, he kept quiet about a major strategic move happening in January, hinting that something "very significant" was about to reshape how the agency and Pulse related to each other—suggesting he was solving the distribution/SaaS tension in a novel way.

By early 2022, Pulse was poised for launch with 50 beta customers ready to convert to paid plans. Joe planned to run a live beta phase for a few months before raising a Series A round. The machine learning model had reached 97% accuracy on predicting emotional responses and engagement outcomes. With 100+ agencies lined up to adopt the platform on day one of revenue launch, and pricing validated against competitor benchmarks, Pulse was ready to transform how creative teams approached ad testing. Meanwhile, Oncore continued scaling rapidly with plans to expand beyond 25 full-time employees, and Joe—despite working four to six hours of sleep on weekdays—remained laser-focused on building something that could systematize the creative prediction problem for the entire industry.