QZM

Brendan Sieko came to QZM's mission through an unexpected path. After spending years building technology since age 11 and running a successful agency working with major music and entertainment brands like The Rolling Stones, Katy Perry, and Slash, he took on an inquiry from a cultural institution in New York City that perfectly aligned with his growing personal interests in art and design. Walking into the museum, he immediately saw the problem: "I just quickly saw how painful and frustrating all of the technology that they had at their disposal was." That friction became his opportunity.

Brendan formally launched QZM in August 2014 and spent the first year raising capital and refining his vision. In 2015, he received critical validation when Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, made the first investment in the company—"which really gave us the first vote of confidence that we had something to bring to market." That same summer, QZM joined Tech Stars and took the company from 3-4 pilot customers to 30. The core product was a digital tour guide system that replaced clunky legacy audio guides with mobile-first experiences that let visitors navigate museums, access content, make donations, and become members. A second product—digital membership solutions—was added later to drive additional revenue.

Brendan's first customers came through warm introductions in his Boston community. The Boston Atheneum (one of North America's oldest cultural institutions) and the MIT List Visual Arts Center became his anchor customers. "Through warm introductions of people who champion you from the ugly duckling phase, you're able to really sell the vision and the idea," Brendan explained. These pilot relationships proved the technology and informed what actually mattered to museums. However, Brendan quickly learned that selling to nonprofits and cultural institutions meant accepting a very different sales dynamic than he was used to in entertainment—typical sales cycles stretched over a year from first touch to contract signature, compared to a week in his previous industry.

By the time of this interview, QZM had scaled to 175 paying customers, generating $105k in monthly revenue—more than triple the $35k monthly run rate from a year earlier. Brendan attributed growth to a mix of landing new customers and upselling existing ones with new product lines. His playbook was pure outreach: "Most of our acquisition channels have been pulled outreach sales. We've done very, very little with regards to social media marketing or traditional marketing avenues." Instead, he relied on "emails and the calls and the conferences." Critically, his long sales cycle actually became a moat—once museums committed, they stayed. Annual revenue churn was less than 5%, and net revenue retention exceeded 100%, meaning existing customers were expanding faster than the company was losing accounts. This allowed QZM to be "cashflow positive for about a year" despite the long sale cycle, because customers paid multi-year contracts upfront.

With 8 people split between Boston (sales, marketing, operations) and Europe (product development), and $1.5M raised from Tech Stars, Founder Group, and Accomplice, Brendan was deliberately staying lean while proving the model. He noted that many of his enterprise buyers—nonprofits and higher education institutions with century-old budgets—wanted to see a company had been around 2-3 years before committing. In early 2019, Brendan was weighing options: raise a Series A to chase "10x long-term big growth" or take a witty approach like buying out investors with debt. Most notably, he was starting to test new channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn ads—acknowledging that the company's early success was built on founder-led sales, but scaling would require systematic paid acquisition.