Why I’m joining the next great SaaS startup & How it came about.
I’ve joined MadKudu as Head of Brand Strategy & I’m helping to open our Paris office to help build out the engineering team (we’re hiring). How I got there is quite a story.
Back in January I announced my last day at Algolia, where I had spent the last 18 months as Brand Director. During that time, the company grew from 50 to 200 people, and the marketing & design team overhauled almost every facet of the brand, content & communication strategy - I got to learn a lot. In fact, my journey with MadKudu starts at Algolia.
Discovering MadKudu as a Customer.
Joining Algolia, I knew very little about SaaS, about being an employee, and about Brand. I came in with my experience building a media brand & my intuitions that the same methodology could be applied to a SaaS brand, but everything behind the scenes was foreign to me. I was introduced to Pardot for managing marketing data, to Livestorm for running webinars. I got the hang of Lever for recruiting new team members and I got the hang of Confluence for knowledge-sharing.
Then one day, my colleague Fanette says “we’re going to start using MadKudu for lead scoring.” Our previous iteration of lead scoring, built in-house inside Pardot, hadn’t really garnered much attention — the sales team didn’t trust it and the marketing team felt the impact of that. My understanding of lead scoring was conceptual, and since qualified leads are really the best bottom of funnel metric for brand, content & communications, I subscribed to #notif-madkudu on Slack and didn’t pay much attention beyond that.
Then the Slack messages came in.
Every day, great brands were signing up for our product, Fortune 500 companies were scheduling demos, and the marketing team had no idea. Within a few weeks, the sales team caught on as well — “How do I get the MadKudu leads routed to me?” they’d ask — as it turns out, since MadKudu plugs directly into Salesforce (where sales can see how its scores leads), leads can actually be dynamically routed based on the score — but I wouldn’t discover that until later.
What was interesting was that, of all of the marketing products we used, only MadKudu had garnered sales respect. That was a feat in and of itself.
Meeting in Dublin.
Later that year, Algolia was a sponsor for SaaStock, the premier European SaaS conference in Dublin. I went to support the Algolia team, and got to meet Guillaume Cabane in person for the first time. Some people call him “G” or “The Mad Scientist” — I wish I had come up with a nickname for my personal brand.
Guillaume’s a character deserving of his own article, but he’s also a big fan of MadKudu, and used them while he was VP Growth at Segment and uses them now while VP Growth at Drift. He talks about them everywhere he goes, which is why Francis, MadKudu’s Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer, as in Dublin that week.
Francis & I hung out at the tail-end of the SaaStock closing party, and I made a mental note to reach out to him next time I was in the Bay Area.
Breakfast @ Hobee’s
I missed MadKudu by about a minute when I was out in San Francisco last December. I had lunch with Ludovic Ulrich, who runs Salesforce’s Startup Relations as well as their Incubator in San Francisco. MadKudu had just moved out of the Salesforce tower when I met with Ludovic spoke highly of them — it had quickly becoming a trend that everyone who had interacted with them spoke highly of them.
My last trip out to San Francisco as an Algolia employee was in January — Francis & I grabbed breakfast at Hobee’s, where my Mom, my brother & I usually go for breakfast on the weekend. I learned about where MadKudu was at today, the problems they were facing, and I made a coy attempt to let Francis know that, whenever they should hire their first marketer, I’d be happy to discuss.
Francis was less coy. “We think Brand is key to success.” I hadn’t realized I was being interviewed until the eggs & hashbrowns arrived. I hardly touched them.
As Francis jumped in a car to run off to a customer meeting, he suggested I meet with Sam Levan, the co-founder & CEO, next time I’m in town. I wasn’t going to have a next time in town, so I suggested the next day. The next morning I met Sam, where I learned about where MadKudu was heading in 2018 and beyond. I also got to meet Hannah Mirza, one of the first non-founder employees whose passion for customers got me excited about customer advocacy and the potential to bring the customer voice front and center.
I learned that my experience at Algolia — MadKudu being brought in by marketing ops and slowly becoming a favorite of sales, marketing & growth — was typical, and that nearly every customer was brought in by a champion (usually after one of MadKudu’s existing customers recommended us) and then slowly became a favorite inside revenue teams.
That first week in January I really got to know the people behind MadKudu: kind, passionate, eager people who all seem to have found a common home in MadKudu. They are meticulously organized & focused — I can see already this will be a big hurdle for me — but they are also OK being authentic & honest about vulnerabilities. Short comings are shared, and plans to overcome them are set in motion. “Personal growth” is part of our daily team syncs, with each employee sharing about their latest gym efforts, hikes with dogs, handball match results or cooking session. There is an eagerness to have something good to share every day, and there is as much support in your professional accomplishments as personal.
Helping Build MadKudu.
The next trip to California was this past March, my onboarding as Head of Brand Strategy. Q1 was wrapping up and the decision had already been made to put our core engineering office in Paris. That I, a non-engineer, would be the first hire out of the Paris office wasn’t necessarily in the cards, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing either.
MadKudu has generated an insane amount of demand for the size they are, so I’m spending my first six months less focused on increasing signups and more focused on helping the Paris team be successful — I’m wearing a recruiter hat these days, speaking almost daily with some of Paris’ most talented Data Engineers.
At the same time, we’ve begun digging into who we are, who we’re talking to, and what kind of conversations we want to have with them. I’ll continue to write about my experiences & mistakes, and should have some more to share soon.
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If you’re curious what a Kudu is, you can read up here.
