The following interview is a conversation we had with Matthew Wright, CEO and Founder of Specright, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $45 Million Raised to Build the Specification Data Management Category

Matthew Wright
Great, thanks. Nice to be on here with you, Brett. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, before we begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, no problem. I’m the Founder and CEO of Specright, but kind of going back before that, obviously I had a life before Spec right. So had a great opportunity to move around the country as a child and got to see a lot of different things in places, which was a pretty cool experience growing up, and then ultimately got in the packaging business, what I always call accidentally needed a job. It sounded interesting. And so I started actually in New York City in my early twenty s and rose through the ranks of kind of several large, big packaging companies and then ultimately landed out west here. And so again had kind of a great colorful background and a great career to this point. 

Brett
And what was it about packaging that drew you in? I’m guessing when you were a ten year old or an eight year old, you weren’t dreaming of the packaging industry. So where did that come from? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, I don’t think anybody did back then. I think that’s changing for the good today. It’s funny, I have an early picture of me as a child with my first box, so maybe I did care about boxes. But what interested me about it, and it still does, is it’s always moving, it’s fast paced, it’s changing every day, which is something I need. I’m kind of always a restless soul, so I always need a new challenge, a new opportunity in front of me and really to see really cool things made. And I’ve had a chance to be in kind of over 300 factories in my life, and I always see everything from chickens processed to missiles made. So I’d be honest with you, Brett, I was accidentally lucky, fell into a packaging business and a business that I just still today love dearly. 

Brett
If you had to pick one thing, what’s the craziest thing you’ve seen in a factory? 

Matthew Wright
I’m always careful here because everybody’s around me starts to limit their diet and doesn’t want to hear about how all things have been made in the past. But I tell you, the coolest factory I’ve ever been in was SpaceX. And obviously you would think that, but just by the name and what they’re doing. But really cool to see manufacturing at that degree and that level and really to see what they were trying to do to change the way that space travels had and not commoditize it, but make it really more accessible. And so that’s probably one of the coolest factors I’ve been in. But I put up their Volkswagen outside of Pueblo, mexico was an amazing facility. So just seeing a lot, seeing the baby carrots produced and made not too far from you. So that’s been super exciting to kind of see all things made. 

Brett
And is there a specific food item that you personally don’t eat because of what you’ve seen? Or what would you recommend that I generally avoid eating? Any tips? 

Matthew Wright
I want to be careful because some might be clients. I would just tell you further. And really refined and processed food is a little challenging. I tend to be a very simplest eater, eat kind of very simple food anyway, so I’ve narrowed down my thing. I tell you interesting places to go, watch things be made. Hot dog factories are interesting. Soup factories. Really does make you understand how all it comes together. But in general, great companies, great people trying to get product to market. But certainly exciting and interesting. 

Brett
Nice. I love it. And now two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a CEO and as an entrepreneur. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

Matthew Wright
I think know if I look at founders, people who started something and everybody knows me around me knows this answer is coming. But Steve Jobs, you know, I think from a couple different perspectives, and there’s a ton of them out there, but Steve was a know. And the other interesting thing about Steve is he’s done it twice. Right? He redefined two different spaces, but really just focused on kind of his Apple legacy. And I think just how he leaned in on really smart people and expected great things is interesting. I think how he himself had high expectations, how he drove innovation, not being asked to be innovative, but trying to come up with things that people felt was really life changing. And I look at he didn’t invent the phone, but he sure as heck changed the way we interface with it, right? So always kind of the one go to that I have from an admiring perspective. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And there’s so much to admire about him. And really just the products that he’s built. To me, every now and then, I just think about how crazy it is that he’s been dead for what, more than ten years now, and the products are still so good. Every Apple product I have. I just love I don’t know why, but I just love it. And they’ve just done such a good job and it’s really impressive that they’ve been able to maintain that long after he’s gone. I just really am impressed by that. 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, no, 100%. And it’s funny they say that they need to keep innovating. They’ve innovated so well so early, they’re so far ahead still, even with his passing. And I remember being having computers or personal computers, it literally took a day to download software on to connect it and I was just mesmerized by my first Apple PC and go, oh my God, you just turn it on and it works. And so just all that innovation through the years has been great to watch. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And what about books? So we can’t say the Steve Jobs book here or an Apple book, we got to go outside that. But is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you? And this can be one of the classic business books, but the ones that I typically find the most interesting to hear about are the books that really shape your worldview. I stole this from someone else, but they call them a Quake book where it really just rocks how you view the world. Do you have any Quake books? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, I do have one on business, but it’s just as funny aside, we’re a big music company, so I read too many biographical stories on rock musicians and stuff, so those are my first go to books. I have a whole collection, but on the business side, one that really resonated with me many years ago, it’s a pretty old book, is good to great and how it impacted me. I was early in my career and early in my journey of management, I was one of the youngest general managers and so I was trying to figure out how to do all this. And what really resonated with me is that it’s actually the leadership that shapes the culture of a company and how critical that is. And it really did have tremendous impact on how I envision what a company is, what a company can be. And so again, it’s a legacy book and kind of probably far in the tooth but really impacted the way I managed and have for years. 

Brett
And is there a music book that you’d recommend? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, I knew were going to ask that. I have a ton of them and last one I read was Dave Grohl’s. Loved it. I love Dave Grohl. That was an exciting one. And a couple other ones that been kind of trying to get through recently but definitely love that type of book. 

Brett
Nice. Have you watched the documentary? The defiant Ones? 

Matthew Wright
Yep. Yep. There’s probably most documentaries around that genre of music I haven’t watched, but yeah, that was interesting for sure. 

Brett
Yeah, I just watched that a few weekends ago and it’s so good jimmy Ivine is so epic. He’s another entrepreneur that I think is fascinating. 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, no doubt that’s a great one. 

Brett
Now let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about spec. Right? So take me back to the early days and let’s talk about the origin story. 

Matthew Wright
Yeah so it kind of stems through what I shared from my early days in my career in packaging. What’s interesting in that career is you really are horizontal industry and so what do I mean by that you deal with I just said like chicken processing plants to automotive plants so you see all things made and other thing I didn’t share as a child and continue to be highly organized. Clutter drives me insane. And I like organization and kind of simplicity and logic and what I noticed through industry my whole career and just kind of fell into doing it this way because everybody does this is chaotic nature of which everybody shares stuff and gets stuff done. And so 20 plus years of watching that, I had an opportunity to buy and grow my own packaging company and sell it and had a chance, still relatively early point in my career to say, what do I want to do next? 

Matthew Wright
And I decided, hey, I’m going to go solve this organizational problem industry. It seemed like really easy to do and sat back for a good period of time and tried to figure out what’s missing, what’s causing this chaos. You have amazing people, amazing companies, great products. So why is there so much chaos and slow to get stuff to market, mistakes made and what I realized is the most important data set, which is the specification, it’s what something’s made of and how it’s made was missing. It was dysfunctional, it wasn’t managed correctly. And so I started upon developing what today is now specification data management category is defining what a specification is and creating that platform to start with. Obviously we grown a lot from there but that’s where it came from and that’s kind of the first step in the journey. 

Brett
Now let’s talk about those category creation efforts. So what was that process like for you to just get to the point that you had that term specification data management? What happened between thinking you should create a category and saying here’s the term that we’re going to go with? 

Matthew Wright
I can tell you it’s a very challenging journey, one that fortunately I didn’t think it would be so challenging to start with. I think I still would have done it but it’s kind of that naive blundering through something that oh, it can’t be that hard. And what I didn’t realize in all honesty is at the time as I was creating the category, what I was trying to do was solve kind of a real world problem. I saw and then about four and a half, five years ago had a great partner of the business join Laura Fody. She’s CMO of the company today and a couple other advisors and really started to formulate what is it that we’re doing and how it is, how should it be defined. And so the early days of that was like you just said, defining the category specification, data management and we can talk about some steps to continue to mature that, but that was the foundational belief in the beginning. 

Matthew Wright
Is it’s just something net different, something not better than incrementally different, it’s a fundamentally different approach and if you get the Specright, the rest follows. And that was the origin of kind of this belief that we could create a category nice. 

Brett
I follow Laura on LinkedIn or I at least see a lot of Laura’s stuff that she posts on LinkedIn and she’s such a great marketer and has really interesting insights and perspectives on category design from what? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, she’ll be well known from here on out and does an amazing job in doing that. And we’re really fortunate to pull know. Early on I had dave Mullenhoff was one of the founders of salesforce help me on kind of the company creation. Early on then we’ve had Carter Cast help us with the category creation and we just had Mike Crowe, former CIO of Colgate, join us on the had just we’ve been very lucky to have some great people around us helping us. 

Brett
And where did that luck come from? How do you get in touch with the Co-Founder of Salesforce and Colgate? Or I think, would you say CIO colgate? How does that know? 

Matthew Wright
How do you get these know the beginnings of the journey is always exciting and also challenging and you’re just out there kind of naively talking to everybody. It’s contagion. And so I was literally talking to one of our early investors about this and he says, oh you got to meet this person, you got to meet that person and you get connected. And I think that energy you have that you should have when you start a company, never mind a category creator, both are challenging in of themselves is that you talk a lot. You just have to you have to try to connect a lot of dots and then find people that resonate, find people that can bring value. You got to have a lot of people have a lot of opinions that may or may not bring value, but you got to pick out the ones at the right of time and that’s how that worked. 

Matthew Wright
So I say lucky, but obviously it’s purposeful luck. And then recently the Mike Crowe story is a great one. Like two years ago I was asked to get on the phone with him when he was CIO of Colgate and I was pretty anxious because we had just landed Colgate and I was afraid he was going to change that opinion. And Mike was so smart just right away got what were doing, got how it fit into their tech stack, got how we could improve Colgate and just lucky enough to get to know him. And then when he retired recently, was literally weeks later, we started chatting and said, hey, this makes perfect sense that we formalize this relationship. So talk a lot, get a lot of experience, listen, know what you need and then engage with the right people and good people. 

Brett
And you mentioned there that there are some steps that you’re taking to really mature that category. Can you talk us through what those steps look like and what you’re doing to mature the category? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, the first thing is, and again, I’ll take the playbook more for more, but is to be the resident expert, talk about it and you’ll see I’m constantly talking internal to the company because it’s also a new category for people that work at the company. So really talk a lot about what it is. Be the thought leader in the space of specification management. Do not wane, do not waver. It’s easy and it’s very natural to try to morph into something that everybody understands but stand strong against that and then kind of some functional pieces is Laura convinced me to engage Gartner early on today. That is where they are defining that we are the category creator and we are the leader in the space. So you have that third party validation. We wrote the book or I wrote the book about the kind of the category and how it came about and then ultimately winning awards around the fact that this works and using our customer base who are amazing people that love what we do to amplify that this is a thing and it’s solving real world problems. 

Matthew Wright
And so there’s kind of an order to those as I went through. But in general, the challenging part is you got to do them all when you create a new category and don’t give up. And then lastly, we solidified it with a patent and some of our technology that really makes it work. And so you got to do it all. 

Brett
Unfortunately, this show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a 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 slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. And a lot of the founders that I speak to on the topic of category creation and a lot of the founders that come on, they are also apprehensive about working with the analyst firms like Gartner. So for you, where did that apprehension come from? And then how did you get across the line? Or what did laura do to get you across the line, to get you to speak with the analyst and to get bought into that general approach. 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, fortunately not always, but fortunately I have a management style that I hire really smart people around me and really just engage them and empower them to do what they think is right. And listen, we’re going to make some gambles and was lost. We’re going to make some that really do well. And so she knew she had pretty good company coming to me and knew I’d probably engage with her and trust her. I’m not a marketer, I haven’t created a category prior to this. So I trusted her and her mindset was right, which is our primary customers are enterprise or enterprise suppliers because of the high complexity and enterprise at some level has to have a filtering system of which to engage with things or not. And so while we did engage with G two and we’re publicized on that, our primary audience probably looks at Gartner and we’ll talk about our academia program in a minute. 

Matthew Wright
It was a no brainer, I would tell you. It spent two years of a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations to where it started to click and Gartner started to get what we’re doing and how it’s different. It’s not a magic quadrant yet, but we’ll see what happens in the future. But yeah, I think a lot of people do. But if you have enterprise customers and you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, I do think it’s an avenue you got to consider. 

Brett
And if you reflect on that category creation journey so far, what would you say is like the top one, two or three takeaways from that journey? 

Matthew Wright
Well, one is again, I think it’s good that nobody knows how hard it is. I always say, hey listen, starting a company out of scratch is I’ve had a chance to run big corporations, I’ve had a chance to do my own company. It was in existence and doubled and tripled that business. This is my first start from zero business. I can tell you starting from zero is the hardest of the three, having done all three. So starting a company of itself is challenging. Then on top of that, trying to create a category is challenging. What the biggest thing you have to do is be very relentless in the definition of that category. What I think naturally happens is you have that gravitational pull to try to make you something that you’re not but fits something that people understand. And so I think just the wherewithal and the endurance to fight that battle and I do it today where somebody’s trying to define you in a space and then today what’s interesting is we’re having RFQs come in with specification management on them from major brands. 

Matthew Wright
We’re having another big technology companies starting to define this category. So today we’re having company which is not bad. So those pressures are different today than they were to start with. But really staying resolute to who you are as a category, I think, early on, is tough and really the thing you should do. Yeah. 

Brett
And everyone says you can’t have a category of one. So of course you need to welcome competition. But what’s the real story, like behind the scenes? As you start to see people use this term that you and your team invented and created, does that worry you a little bit? Like, do you ever have doubts of, what if we don’t end up owning this space, we put in all the work to create it, and then someone else just takes it and runs with it? Do you have any concerns like that? And if so, how do you convince yourself to not get distracted, acted by all that noise? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, it’s funny. I think you know this from interviewing enough people. Everybody has this opinion that entrepreneurs are these brazen, don’t worry people. It’s quite the opposite. So, step one, I worry all the time about everything. So that happens naturally. And so, yeah, you do. I think the key that I look at is let’s pay attention to somebody that has fundamentally changed the tech stack to more closely mirror us and then define them as a competitor and really define the others as ankle biters and kind of marketing changes. And so I think when you do that, you start to not pay attention to all the noise. You just pay attention to the right noise. And then ultimately the goal, and this is something Dave Moloff told me early on, is focus on the customer, please the customer, and kind of the rest follows. And we have a 98% retention rate. 

Matthew Wright
We don’t lose customers. And so that is a fanatical view that helps insulate us from current competitors or future competitors. And always kind of like back to Apple, always be thinking years ahead, where we’re headed, which we do. 

Brett
And I saw one of the testimonials the title Director of Packaging. So could you just tell us about the daily life of someone who’s the Director of Packaging at a massive Fortune 500 company? What’s their day to day like? And what are some of those challenges that they’re experiencing if they’re not using a platform like yours? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, first thing I tell you is busy. I think everybody’s busy. But packaging today has tremendous challenges upon it with supply chain issues, sustainability expectations, cost reduction expectations. And really, in my book, where I put products and packaging are harmonious today. So the packaging has to be great, has to be received well. So there’s a lot of things on their plate. One of the challenges, and one of the things I love about my job is that we are fundamentally giving them time back to do amazing things. That has always been my charter. And so today, unfortunately, they spend a lot of time answering requests, asking for data for some reason, maybe a sustainability report, asking for updates on cost savings reduction plans. They’re asking to try to solve the next retailer’s question about a new product and how they can get it to market with the right packaging and dealing with commodity fluctuations and changes in price and supply. 

Matthew Wright
And so I don’t want to demean it to the point where they’re just chasing around and trying to answer questions, but too much of their time is spent in those type of activities versus being proactive and being able to plan way ahead in the cycles. 

Brett
Interesting. And do you see that these people are typically open to new technologies like yours? Or is it difficult to get them to try new technology? 

Matthew Wright
Well, I think early on I’d say definitely more maybe resistance to that. But what I always call, I call the operator, the person who’s functionally using the tools. And our usability scores are very high. They’re in there all day using the tool. Very little resistance, understand the opportunity of it, they understand how it changes their life, gives them time back. One of our challenges is too many people want it and can’t get it done. The bigger challenge is bringing in a new way of doing things to an organization that may be siloed and then maybe have resistors at technology positions or others that don’t understand the criticality of a spec. And so what I call our Champions are our Champions and dear Champions, we still have our first customer. But it’s definitely, in fairness, a little bit of what’s around them that they have to deal with. 

Brett
And are there any metrics that you’re okay with sharing that just highlight some of the growth and traction that you’re seeing with these customers? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, no, definitely. So our revenue for three years going has doubled. While we’re still early in revenue, we’re doubling our revenue every year. What’s fun is last year 50% of our net new revenue was expansions. So our customers not only land, but they keep staying with us. We talked about our net and gross retention. Obviously with that high of expansion, our retention is great. But even our year over year retention is at 98%. So world class kind of retention, our user counts continue to go up daily exponentially. We’ve doubled user counts in the last twelve months where it took us three years to do that prior. So definitely some really fun milestones and metrics of growth and usability of the system. And then our kind of usability score, which is a calculation of how much time and energy put into it, shows we’re close to social media. 

Matthew Wright
We’re a lot closer to social media than we are kind of industrial technology. So I really believe that industrial technology should be used like social technology. And so we’re getting there, we’re getting pretty close to that. So happy to share any of the metrics. Probably be 200 customers this year. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And last couple of questions here for you. First one is what excites you most about the work you get to do every day? So from talking to you, I can tell you’re very high energy. I can tell you’re excited about this stuff and you’re very just free flowing as you talk through all these questions. So where does that energy come from and what gives you energy and what excites you and motivates you? 

Matthew Wright
I believe in what we’re doing is right, and I do believe it’s fundamentally good for everybody. There’s nobody that’s not advantaged by this, whether it’s time back in the day, finding smarter ways to do things, answering questions of sustainability. Ultimately my vision is giving more awareness to the consumer, how things are made and where they’re made, et cetera. So I think it’s because I know it’s fundamentally different and it’s changing. The way things are made continues to create that excitement. And then recently, you always need a little win in the sales. So winning the third and the enterprise list for Fast Company was exciting. We just got the hard copies today. That happened a couple of weeks ago and some other exciting awards coming up. So you do need continued pushing. We have a great leadership team that always kind of buoys each other up. 

Matthew Wright
We spent 2 hours in a strategy session today that was both tiring and invigorating at the same time. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but kind of all those elements around me. 

Brett
Yeah, it definitely does. And that impresses me even more that you’re able to come to this interview with so much energy, considering you did a strategy meeting for 2 hours before it. 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, it was a good one too. Interesting stuff. 

Brett
I feel like those can be so draining sometimes. You walk out of there and you feel like you just ran a marathon. 

Matthew Wright
I think it absolutely feels like that. But it’s one of those after you run not haven’t run a full marathon, but after you run a marathon, you also are exhausted, but you’re happy you did it right. So it’s kind of the same thing. 

Brett
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Now, last question here. Let’s zoom out into the future. What’s the next three to five years look like for Specright. And let’s just talk about that future vision for the category. 

Matthew Wright
In general, it is all about network. It’s all about these companies who we’ve joined with kind of individually, one off, put them in this standardized methodology and letting them create great products and do great things with that data. Now take that to the next level, which we’re coming out of beta right now, and let these companies that do amazing things start sharing data, start sharing supply, start sharing specs together. And that may be a retailer that deals with a product producer, that deals with a packaging producer. Why have. Multiple sets of data. Let’s have one set of data that everybody can kind of come in and work from and so network, without a doubt, from a product company positioning is what excites me. And then the second piece is I always say this kind of half hazardly, but we’re using over 30 countries but bought in 15. 

Matthew Wright
And I would tell you 14 of those by accident. And so excited to see kind of a global rollout here in the next couple of years as we think through this is a global problem. Let’s take those 14 other countries and expand those, much like we’ve done here domestically. 

Brett
Amazing, Matthew. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap, which is a shame because I’d love to keep you here and just keep asking you questions, but we’ll have to save that for round two. So before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build this company and category, where should they go? 

Matthew Wright
Yeah, definitely find a real engaging website. specright.com is easy to find. We’re on LinkedIn, obviously. Specright, on LinkedIn. And as you mentioned, our team members are pretty easy to find. So happy to engage with anybody. It’s a journey, educational journey, and love to just share what we’re doing and get other partners involved. 

Brett
Amazing, matthew, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story, share the company’s story, talk about your category creation efforts and everything that you’re building. This has been a blast and super interesting what you’re doing and look forward to having you back on in the future. 

Matthew Wright
No, I look forward to it. Let’s do it. 

Brett
All right, take care. Keep in touch. 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. Sam.