Matt Hunckler 00:00
Welcome to the powderkeg podcast pitch edition. Today you’ll learn all about customer acquisition software, and one in particular that has raised more than $14 million and has won numerous awards for its innovations. I’m your host, Matt Hunckler. And this is the powderkeg podcast, the show that plugs you into the massive opportunities in startups and innovation in tech hubs beyond Silicon Valley that are exploding with potential. In today’s powderkeg pitch episode, we’re sharing a five minute live startup pitch between an entrepreneur and an expert panel of investors and advisors. If you’d like the show, the show Shark Tank, I think you’re going to really like this. In today’s episode, you’ll be hearing from Sean swagman, the co founder and chief strategy officer at demand jump based in Indianapolis, Indiana. On today’s show, Shawn pitches demand jump it customer acquisition software that shows marketers new sources of growth online. It’s a great pitch from a live event that we hosted this past February just before this crazy pandemic. And the event was called marketing in tech in the roaring 20s. Here’s how this thing works. Shawn has just five minutes to pitch demand jump and specifically in this episode, it is a new version of demand jump to a live panel of investors and industry experts. In fact, Shawn launched this new version of demand job at powderkeg. It was super exciting, and I’m glad to get to listen to it here on the podcast. The panel is going to hit Shawn with a few hard hitting and rapid fire questions. Shawn responds very well on his toes as an entrepreneur tends to do. We’ve got some amazing panelists and advisors who are asking questions on this particular panel. The first is Shawn Nair, who’s the Executive Vice President of Technology at Salesforce marketing cloud. We’ll have Maloney madonn, who at the time was private equity technology investor at Warburg Pincus Aaron Gillum, who’s a Senior Vice President at 50, South capital, and Lindsey gripper president at blast media. Today’s presenter is Sean Swagman. As I mentioned previously, the co founder and chief strategy officer at demand jump Shawn is a professional entrepreneur who has been heavily involved with more than a dozen startup companies over the last two decades. In fact, he and I crossed paths at our last at the last funded company that I was a part of and had a chance to work closely with Sean, super sharp marketer. He knows all about marketing, tech strategy operations, especially for startups and scale ups and sort of the early and high growth stages. So here is Shan Shan segment with demand jump.

02:54
All right, 45 slides in five minutes. Here we go. Marketers have blind spots, we guess. And we gamble. We gamble with our marketing budget in the hopes of winning customers qualified leads. And the truth is we’re gambling because we don’t understand customer behavior. It’s changing too fast. We gamble about what content to create what keywords to bet on what ads are going to work, what websites to advertise on, we guess and we gamble, we gamble and we guess about how she buys. We’ve been gambling for centuries, you all have seen the quote, you all know this. You also probably already know that 90% of startup companies fail and no matter what you look at whatever stat you read, they fail because they’ve spent too much cash they they blew their marketing budget or they’re not aligned to consumer behavior. Is that a small company problem? No. More money, more problems, right? The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Unfortunately, in 2019, these companies fell. All of them went bankrupt. There were over 9000 stores that closed. The largest areas of corporate waste are around marketing, no matter what’s that you read. Billions of digital marketing dollars are being wasted. And they’re being wasted because they don’t know how to target their audience and the audience data that we have is bad. To make matters even worse, the rate of change is faster right now than it has ever been. And today is this lowest it’s ever going to be 90% of accessible data was created in the last 24 months. over 2 trillion searches per year. And 20% of those searches are net new brand new, 2 billion websites on the planet, and 4.4 million blogs produced every single day. And where do we turn for answers the 7000 marketing tools that don’t answer the problem and keep us gambling. It’s now a matter of life and death. It’s bankrupting companies, investors are losing a fortune. And it’s costing marketers their jobs. Cmo has the shortest tenure of any C level executive. And it’s getting worse and the problem has never been solved. We think until now, demand jump helps eliminate blind spots. So you can win customers. And we do that by showing you what your consumers are actually doing, what your competitors are doing, and what you should be doing next. Today, we’re launching consumer insights. I’m gonna show you a little about about this product, really through a couple of case studies. But it’s an instant customer journey map, you never have to guess again. So let’s look at a couple of use cases. We’ll start with demand from 107 blog posts over four years. horrible results. And we wanted to write about customer acquisition costs. We turned to our platform, who gave us a prescriptive map. We went number one in Google. In two weeks, we better beat out companies like HubSpot, Neil Patel, like how’s that even possible? Our platform provided a prescriptive map, an outline all of the data that we needed to write a phenomenal article, one blog post changed the trajectory of our company 30 qualified leads every single month, imagine what this would do for your business if every blog generated results like that. But there’s more Insights for Search. Express, y’all know Express, invested in a company called homage one of our customers, they need a national expansion on a limited budget. All of that green are keywords that they weren’t ranking for before. Now 22% lift in organic search every month, and it took only six weeks. What about display ads, the cookie is crumbling.

07:23
Cummins wanted to acquire customers and improve their ROI. They turned to us to get AI powered consumer behavior insights for their display ads. And they got 150% lift in CTR and a 62% drop in conversion cost and their conversions increased. You never have to guess again, and sync consumer insights. And we’ve run 2000 In three months for our customers. And now we’re opening it up for $99 a month. And we’re giving it away for free for you. Coupon Code powderkeg for one month.

Matt Hunckler 08:12
In 45, slides in five minutes. That was that was, I think a new record. You got it, man. Thank you so much for that offer. That is awesome. I’m super excited to try it out. So where do they need to go?

08:27
Demand jump.com No Man’s m.com and our pricing page, you can start now $99 a month, you get one consumer insight. If you use this coupon code, it won’t cost you anything. You can cancel anytime. And if you give us feedback, I will personally grant at least two more consumer insight reports for free. All we want is your feedback. We need customers. And we’re hiring developers.

Matt Hunckler 08:57
I like what you did there. All right. Let’s get some questions from our advisors. Lindsay, do you mind kicking us off again?

09:04
Oh, sure. Thank you. Congratulations on five year anniversary for demand job. Thank you. Right. That’s a big milestone. Thank you so much. I like the pivot. Yes. From when we first met. That’s exciting. thing. I saw a couple of b2b brands up there, which is good to see. Right. I think my assumption was that this was maybe for consumer brands only. I spent a lot of time talking with marketers about what we call intent data, right or people’s intention to buy what are the behaviors that are associated with a person most likely to convert? Right. And that’s often associated with some sort of an ABM strategy. Do you guys plug into an ABM strategy? Do you lay on on top of an ABM platform or do you see this completely taking the place of any ABM technology?

09:53
It’s a great question. This is gonna sound really arrogant but we kind of are the ABM strategy meaning like not us but what we provide, if you think about Account Based Marketing, at the end of the day, who’s at the account people, people are the ones that buy and people are the ones that are what 67% of all purchase behavior occurs digitally now, right? And is decided digitally. We’re providing a roadmap for exactly that. So the largest growth we have is in b2b.

10:27
It’s totally arrogant.

10:30
I know, Aaron, congrats again on 45. slides in five minutes. Thank you.

10:37
So martech is a super crowded field, you touched on a couple of your customer success stories?

10:43
Could you maybe share a little bit more about what their specific pain point was before they came to demand job, and why they’re sticking with you?

10:51
Sure. So I would say Lindsay said it was a pivot, I would say what’s more of an addition. So we, we started kind of bottom up. But the five products that we really have are around first consumer insights now, which we just launched, after five years took us a while a little slow. The next is market intelligence. So competitive intelligence, right. And then we we solve cross channel analytics. So think horizontal layer across martec, connect every tool platform you have, then we solve marketing, attribution. And ultimately, data science needs data to science. This is the first platform that pulls all of that data in one spot, giving us an unparalleled advantage from an AI perspective. So most of our companies, or customers that we have now came to us for one of those other problems. But they’ve all pushed us in the consumer insight, direct direction. One customer went so far as to say, great competitive intelligence. But how do I know I’m not copying from the dumb kid in class? Why wasn’t in their class, but also they were right, right. Like you don’t know with competitors, you, you really only know from the consumer side. So that’s the latest thing that we solve for.

Matt Hunckler 12:15
I want to make sure we have time for two more quick questions. Maloney Do you mind?

12:20
Yeah, well, first of all, I really appreciated how you highlighted the gap in the market. Really great graphic interpretation of that. How do you think about as as the market evolves and your enterprise buyers evolve, remaining competitive with other folks out there getting into the analytics 22nd version?

12:41
So unfortunately, some companies I really respect Hitwise and jumpshot, which would be other consumer insight comp, Intel tools that are out there just went out of business. So companies are struggling to solve the problem that we just had a breakthrough on. And at the end of the day, trying reverse engineering it. It’s like Moneyball for marketing. Right? When you understand consumer behavior, everything else falls into place.

Matt Hunckler 13:08
Great question, Shawn. We want to bring home

13:10
yeah, it was nice to see one of my products listed there as a competitor to sorry. What?

13:20
What What would you tell CMOS? Oh, think about CDP as the magic pill for everything. I think CDP starts after you know who your customer is. Most customers are CDP plugs into loyalty rewards engagement, what you do after you acquire the customer. And that’s the biggest area of waste, right? We’re it’s like a shotgun versus a rifle shot. Right? Once you know who that customer is, becomes a lot easier to market to them and along their journey, but figuring out how to acquire new customers. That’s where pretty much everyone struggles and in this world, you’re constantly reacquiring

Matt Hunckler 13:58
Good job, Shawn. Great questions from our advisors. Let’s give it a shot at demand. That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for watching. And huge thank you to Shawn swagman of demand jump for links to social profiles for Sean and the other people, companies and resources mentioned in this episode, head on over to powder keg.com and check out the show notes there. We’re going to be doing a lot more pitch episodes, and also virtual versions of the events like the one that you just heard. So be sure to check those out at powder keg.com/events They’re absolutely free. And it’s a great opportunity to plug in with like minded peers, mentors, investors, entrepreneurs all over the world. So again, that’s powderkeg.com/events and to be among the first to hear about the stories of entrepreneurs, investors, and other leaders in tech between the coasts, head on over to powder keg.com And subscribe to us on iTunes at powder keg.com/itunes If you left us a review while you You were there I would be forever grateful and thank you if you have already done so. We will catch you next time on The powderkeg podcast.