The following interview is a conversation we had with Lars Grønnegaard Hansen,CEO of Dreamdata, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $12M Raised to Build the Future of B2B Revenue Attribution
Lars Grønnegaard
So, yeah, I’m Han Copenhagen. Looking forward to the interview. I think it’s going to be great.
Brett
So to start things off, I did butcher your middle name there. So if you can go ahead and correct the record, how do we say your name?
Lars Grønnegaard
I think it did very well there. So it’s clinical. Yeah. I think credit card is what I get from most americans think that was very good.
Brett
Okay, we did our best. I didn’t insult you. And we can start off here on a positive note. That’s good. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a little bit more about your background and your journey and what you were doing before you founded Dreamdata.
Lars Grønnegaard
Yeah, let’s start with that. So I came from a company called Trustpilot prior to doing this venture. So me and one of the other co-founders worked there as head of product and head of engineering. So that’s sort of the immediate background for this. Before that, I spent a lot of time in user experience also before it was actually a discipline that existed. So we pioneered it in Copenhagen. Were like some of the first people doing ux consulting here.
Brett
I didn’t realize that trustpilot was from Copenhagen.
Lars Grønnegaard
Theres a handful of companies that you’d be surprised, are danish. You might know which wine app where you can scan wine labels. Thats danish. Theres a handful of unicorns out of.
Brett
Copenhagen who’s like the biggest company that people talk about. Like in Sweden, they have their klarna. Like, who’s your klarna? But maybe a good way to ask it.
Lars Grønnegaard
There are companies that nobody knows, and then they’re the ones that people very much know, especially in the SaaS communities, or Sendesk. It’s found in Copenhagen. I think everybody knows Sendesk. That’s probably the biggest one.
Brett
Nice. Very cool. How have you seen the Copenhagen tech scene evolve over the last maybe ten years?
Lars Grønnegaard
So I think it’s very good, especially, like, some of those companies that were successful during sort of the late, like 15 to 20 that has sparked off a nice trickle of new ventures, like, let’s say dream. That is one of them. There are a bunch of really nice companies coming out of Copenhagen now. Some of them are not in the states yet, but there are some very nice companies here. So there’s a nice scene here. You also go to Sweden, Stockholm. Stockholm is a bit, I would say they’re kind of one generation ahead of us. They had Spotify. Skype was sort of a part danish. Like, if you’re danish, you say Skype is danish. If you’re swedish, you say swedish. But those two ventures definitely also spun off a lot of new ventures after that.
Brett
Trey, lets switch gears and lets dive into Dreamdata. Everything that you’re doing today at a high level. How do you describe the problem that you’re solving?
Lars Grønnegaard
Basically, I would say high level, were helping b, two b marketers be revenue centric. I think thats an age old problem. When we founded the company, people have been trying to do that for five years. It wasn’t new, but were solving it in a very data centric way. I think thats whats unique about our approach.
Brett
And for context setting, when it comes to your market category, how are you positioned? What is the market category?
Lars Grønnegaard
If you look at us in the market, we have b, two b revenue attribution platform.
Brett
Whats that category look like, and how are you positioned in that category against.
Lars Grønnegaard
The, I would say because attribution is basically a feature, you can say its just imagine you have all the data about all the behaviors of people that are in your world, and then you have the outcomes, typically like pipeline or new business results, and you have all the spend. Put all that together, and attribution is just the algorithm of sort of attaching the revenue to the different tactics and things that happened in the customer journey. So that’s what attribution is. So that, I would say, is what the category is like products that do that. So pioneers of the category would be a company called Bizzabel. They had later acquired by Adobe through Marketo. So they acquired first by Marketo and then Adobe. The category now is, I would say, of course, with the category leaders.
Lars Grønnegaard
And then there are a couple of other small companies, a category as well.
Brett
What’s your point of view on the attribution category?
Lars Grønnegaard
I think the big thing we came into this at a point when the whole modern data stack was happening, we wanted something that worked with that for sure. We wanted ability to integrate into data warehouses, integrate with modern tracking solutions. That’s one big piece of it. And the other big piece is that attribution is sort of like at one end it’s about credit, like who gets credit for what. And that in itself is like a super, it doesn’t bring anything good to any company. Like if you meet someone who thinks attribution is about assigning credit to marketing and getting credit to what marketing does, typically not a very good situation because it signals that you are sort of antagonistic relationship between sales and marketing. I think the great companies that use attribution, they see it as an optimization tool.
Lars Grønnegaard
So basically you look at what you’re doing and you look at the outcomes a bit like if you’re doing say product analytics, you’ll do funnels from on your sign up page of the people who signed up. How many got started in the product? Well, want to do the same for marketing. I spent some money of that money. How much opportunity did we actually create? How much new business did we create? So I think our approach is this optimization approach and then also very much one of automation. I think if you imagine larger companies, you might have hundreds, even thousands of campaigns running at the same time. And if you ask someone to sit and optimize that by hand, kind of doesn’t work.
Lars Grønnegaard
You really want something that do a bit like what you’ve been seeing in b two c for the last 1520 years, sort of automatic optimization. So that’s our big take on it.
Brett
I saw you recently released a report on the eight B2B benchmarks you need to know for driving efficient growth. Can you share a couple of those benchmarks and talk through the findings from that survey or the research?
Lars Grønnegaard
I should say yeah. So I think none of this is surprising, but I think what, a lot of people just don’t have evidence for it. So what we did, we have a free product. So that means we get a lot of data from a lot of companies and we can see. So what is the actual, everybody knows that sales cycle. So you enter the sales pipeline, you exit it, everybody knows that. But what about all the stuff that happened before? That’s one of the big things. Like one of the aid benchmarks was around, like how long is that? Actually? I think it came out at like more than 200 days.
Lars Grønnegaard
Of course it can be a lot longer for some and shorter for others, but there’s having evidence around like what does it actually take to take a b, two b customer from nothing to being a customer? That was an eye opener for many.
Brett
How would you summarize your own marketing approach and your own marketing philosophy?
Lars Grønnegaard
So I think our go to market is like, at one end, we’re very much a marketing led approach with three co-founders. Two came from product, one came from marketing, and Stefan, who is the marketing guy, he is a very strong marketer, and that brought us to this. You can also hear with three founders, one product, one engineer, and a marketing guy. So no sales guy. So I think our approach is definitely marketing led. So everything is brought in through various marketing tactics, ranging from, we do a lot of organic social, we also do some paid, of course, and then, yeah, we’re product people. We can sort of escape that. So we have, I wouldn’t call it product led growth, but it’s very much product assisted sales motion. So everybody will go through a trial. We also have a free product.
Lars Grønnegaard
So we do sort of have people entering, doing either the free product or free trial and upgrading. So that does happen. But we’re not miro or some of the real, like, true PlG companies. We’re not like that.
Brett
What about your podcast? I see that you have the attributed podcast.
Lars Grønnegaard
Yes. The podcast, I think, is part of this organic social strategy. So we have a strong presence on LinkedIn. We sell to marketers B2B marketers, they love LinkedIn and they live their life there. So it’s a very good place for us to exist and be like, we connect with the market there. And podcast is another way of doing that. So basically we run, we call it podcast, but what we actually do is we do a lot of LinkedIn lives. I guess it’s more tech. What is it? So we do LinkedIn lives with like, strong names in the industry, customers that have great results, etcetera. So that’s also part of the strategy, for sure.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. What’s a good LinkedIn live for you? Are you happy if you get like 200 people there? Like, what’s a good LinkedIn live for you.
Lars Grønnegaard
I can tell you that it maxes out at 600 because that’s what the platform can take. So if we get to 600, we’re very happy. It sounds like think about 600 people listening to usually, actually not what we are saying. Usually the 600 people will mostly be listening to the person that we brought on. We had Chris Walker recently that maxed out at 600 for sure. That was a great LinkedIn live. Yeah. So 600, that’s fantastic for us.
Brett
Is there anything from a marketing perspective that you’ve stopped doing that you were previously doing? Maybe it was working before and you’ve just seen it decline and stop working?
Lars Grønnegaard
No, not really. I think we’re building small things on to the motion. We do some sort of, you can say we do physical events now. We don’t buy a booth or anything, but we’ll join and sort of do guerrilla and go and talk to people, especially like meet people that we are trying to sell, to meet people that our customers there. I wouldnt say that we stopped doing anything. No.
Brett
Whats the strategy with analyst firms like Gartner?
Lars Grønnegaard
Yeah, analysts. So we haven’t done that. So thats a big question mark, whether we should do that. I would say its also to do with how we approach the market. We came from this an idea of scalability. So we started, I would say, at small business. So the bottom of SMB. So maybe 50 to a couple of hundred people. And they don’t use analyst like, they don’t use Gartner, they don’t use forest. They get that type of companies like our company, we don’t use it. When we’re researching a new product, we’ll be on g two, we’ll be on LinkedIn. We’ll be asking. So we haven’t really gone that route. As we sort of, like everybody else, we’re pushing up market gradually, sort of expanding towards upper mid market, smaller enterprises.
Lars Grønnegaard
And thats definitely, as we progress into that space, it might be something that we look into.
Brett
What have you learned from that push up market? Like you said, everyones trying to do that. Thats the aspiration of every team. What have you learned from that push? Because its not easy.
Lars Grønnegaard
Its definitely not easy. I think we had realistic ideas about what it would take. So, yeah, I can say, okay, I can share some of the failures here. So initially, after like five customers or something, we actually landed two companies I define as enterprise. And I can say that wasn’t a good idea because at that stage, the product was not even a product, I would say it was more like a prototype and a ton of duct tape and lots of PowerPoints. And that didn’t work. I mean, it could have worked if we had gotten sort of completely, almost professional services on them, but given that we wanted to build a product, it didn’t work. So the next attempt at larger companies, I think were much better prepared, and we had much more of a product.
Lars Grønnegaard
We also had a lot of what you would define as, like, enterprise readiness capabilities. And we did have answers to, like, single sign on, some answers to infosec, a lot of the things that are required in that space. So the thing, yeah, of course. Try it, but also be prepared to meet very different demands, of course, on what you see with an SMB customer.
Brett
One thing that I see people talk about a lot is this idea that developers are very hard to market to. I believe that marketers are very hard to market to because they can see you right through everything that you’re doing, and they’re very critical. What do you do to rise above all the noise, to capture the attention of B2B marketers and get them engaged in your product?
Lars Grønnegaard
Yeah. So I think it has been a key thing for us to have a strong marketer on the founding team, because you have somebody who has a lot of credibility in that community and knows how marketers think. So I think that has been a key thing for us in enabling us to talk to that community. And then I would say, if you’re marketing to marketers, I think you need to try things, whatever you do, but especially marketing to marketers, you can’t just do what everybody else does. You need some creativity in what you do. You need to be bold. You need to try some things that not everybody else is doing. So you need to develop new ways of interacting and be creative. Yeah.
Brett
What’s the most creative thing you’ve done so far in marketing?
Lars Grønnegaard
I think we’ve had many successes. I would say one of the things we did, I think this is also a bit back to approach. This wasn’t super intentional. So one of our salespeople was going to New York. Our CMO was also going, they were going to this conference. It was on Times Square. And she came to me and said, hey, Lars, can I buy a billboard on Times Square? I was like, how much is it? She’s like, $500. Like, okay, you can buy a billboard in Times Square. So she bought a billboard in Times Square for $500. And then our designer did some creative. I think it said our CMO wanted to spend this money on Google Ads, right. And then it was only showing like, I don’t know, 30 seconds, 1 minute every hour or something for 24 hours.
Lars Grønnegaard
So she got him out there. She was just going to surprise him and then just like interviewing him, pretending it’s something else, and then he can see the snowboard and then he has this like super nice reaction to it, just like he wasn’t expecting it. So it’s very funny. And then that just turns into a very nice piece of content. Right. So I think that was a great success from sort of a creative piece of advertising. It wasn’t super intentional, but if you do a lot of these nuts, very intentional things, and occasionally you hit on these little like, gold nuggets that will generate a lot of awareness in the market.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 12 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Lars Grønnegaard
Yeah, I think, what’s your ip like, what’s your ideal investor profile? That was one thing. I never raised venture capital before, so didn’t know anything about the market. I think if you haven’t stepping into this field, there are like thousands of funds and then they’re not all your ideal investor profile. So like find funds that fit your stage. If you’re very good, find ones that sort of fit and have knowledge if you market, or at least the business model you’re running. So ideal investor profile. I think that’s a key thing that I learned. I wasted tons of time talking to later stage investors very early on, and nothing will probably ever come of all those hours are wasted there.
Brett
What about go to market lessons for other companies that are trying to sell to b, two b marketers? Or maybe a better way to frame that. Let’s imagine that a Founder there in Copenhagen comes to you and they say, Lars, I want to build a product, or I have a product, I want to sell it to B, two b marketing teams. Whats the number one piece of go to market advice that you’d have for them based on everything you’ve learned?
Lars Grønnegaard
So my number one thing is I have a couple of things that I feel we learned along the way. So one was focus on more and then focus even more. When you think you’re focused, you’re not so narrow down. Like find a very narrow ICP when you start. And don’t mistake your initial ICP for your tam. Like your total addressable market is going to be large if you want to raise money and build a large company, but that’s not your ICP. Right. I think we did that mistake. We were kind of scared to go super narrow on the ICP and just say, look, we’re only going to go for B2B SaaS companies, 250 to 500 people that use segment.com and only target that. We were too scared to do that.
Lars Grønnegaard
And I think if we’d done that, we could have moved a bit faster. So don’t confuse your ICP with your tam. And then I have the other one, another learning, and I think that’s just from coming from product. You tend to think a lot about product when you’re a product person, and then everybody tells you need to find product market fit, and all you hear is product. That’s all you hear. So for a lot of product people, product market fit means, oh, fit the product to the market. But there’s a lot of things that can be done where you go the other way and you fit the market to the product. So you just find another, if it doesn’t work for that part of the market, go somewhere else. And I think that’s another big learning we had along the way.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Lars Grønnegaard
The big picture for us is this automation angle, because you’ve seen automation in B two C go to market for the last 20 years, and you’re definitely seeing it now in the B2B space as well. But we want to be a key platform for that. Something that enables B2B companies to run automated go to market at scale.
Brett
Love it. All right, we are up on time, and it’s what? 08:00 p.m. Almost Copenhagen time. So I’m not going to keep you any longer here on a Friday before we wrap, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, if there’s any marketers listening in that want to find out more about your product, where should they go?
Lars Grønnegaard
I think LinkedIn is the right place. So if you go and find Dreamdata on LinkedIn, you can find me as a CEO, connect with me. And then I usually say, if you travel to Copenhagen and you are in this space, I mean, definitely connect and we can figure something out.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Lars, thanks so much for taking the time.
Lars Grønnegaard
Great speaking to you today. Thank you.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Twitter
facebook
linkedin