Trendkite

Eric Huddleston joined Trendkite as employee number seven in mid-2014, a year after the company was founded by a team that had gone through the DreamIt accelerator program. The startup had raised its initial seed round from Austin-based Silverton venture firm—with a notable catch: their investment was contingent on bringing in an external CEO. Eric, who had relationships with the Silverton partners dating back decades, was brought in to lead the company after already introducing them to a handful of customers who loved the product. Mercury Fund (then a DFJ affiliate) co-led that early round. Rather than creating friction, the transition was smooth because the company was still tiny and the founding team was "radically aligned" on the vision: to help brands and agencies understand the impact of PR across their media efforts.

The product itself wasn't built from scratch. Eric had previously run product for Sprinkler and helped bring to market a big data analytics platform (Docus Group) that analyzed social data to help brands optimize their paid, owned, and earned media tactics. When Sprinkler acquired Docus Group, the team had already built a map of roughly 50,000 companies and brands across geographies with deep benchmarking of their social performance. Trendkite took this DNA and focused it squarely on earned media—the high-credibility endorsements that come from third parties—which CMOs view as a distinct lever alongside paid, owned, and shared media.

With a product-market fit thesis already validated, Eric spent all of 2014 doing something he recommends every founder prioritize: figuring out unit economics. He wasn't chasing vanity metrics. Instead, he obsessed over the customer acquisition payback period, understanding both the revenue and cash basis of that metric (which can differ significantly depending on payment terms). This disciplined focus on unit economics guided all subsequent decisions about how to scale the sales engine. The company served large enterprise customers like Nike, who used Trendkite to understand how their brand image varied across geographies based on sports popularity, endorsers, and product trends in each region.

By the time of this podcast interview (2017), Trendkite had nailed a highly efficient direct sales playbook. With 200+ employees, roughly 75 of them were quota-carrying sales reps (BDRs, SDRs, inbound qualifiers, and prospectors). Eric implemented a "dynamic CAC allocation" system that tuned account allocations and sales support bi-weekly based on rep efficiency. Minimum contract values started at five figures (as low as $10K) and climbed into the six figures, with most customers paying "five figures to low six figures annually" or "conservatively $50K all the way up to well over $100K." The company achieved an 8-month payback period on a gross profit basis and maintained net retention rates in the north of 90%, though they were just beginning to crack negative net revenue churn. Expansion revenue became a serious lever in the last 12 months before this interview, driven by identifying geographic, brand, and business unit expansion opportunities within their install base, as well as launching two major products during that year.

By 2017, Trendkite had raised approximately $37M in total funding and grown to serve between 1,000 and 10,000 customers across virtually every vertical and geography—from two-person PR agencies to Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola. The company was headquartered in Austin with major offices in San Francisco and London. With a minimum ACV of $10K and a large customer base leaning toward six-figure deals, the company was running at well north of $10M ARR with triple-digit year-over-year growth rates. Eric was confident they'd maintain triple-digit growth through 2017 and 2018 before the "law of gravity" kicked in with 3x, 3x, 3x, then 2x, 2x, 2x progression toward an eventual IPO exit.