We are back! Amidst several events and trips, I missed last week. But, I still continue to have on the pipeline good startups to share with you. So here we go.
For those who are new, this series is dedicated to early stage startups that are under the radar – and have a good story to tell. I send it out every other Wednesday - and it is seperate from my traditional weekly newsletter. The basic criteria is a company that is not on the spotlight and is NOT actively raising proceeds. There is also no bias – apart from the fact that I like the story. I am not an investor or get any financial compensation to promote startups featured. This is intended for informational purposes only, using my solid base of subscribers to share intel of good people doing cool things.
Since launch, featured startups in aggregate were connected 54 times, to 28 different investors/strategic partners globally.
Finally, if you are a founder and want to be considered for this series - it is very simple:
Please fill out a one-pager, in English, about your company using the topics and themes outlined in the posts.
Reply to this e-mail with your one-pager attached.
I will review and reach out if I need more information.
It will be posted if I believe the startup fills the profile and audience of this newsletter.
Good Luck!!!!!!
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Opinions expressed here are solely my own and does not represent those of people, institutions, organizations that I may or may not be associated with in any capacity, unless explicitly stated.
PROBLEM:
Today, growing a digital company is more challenging than ever before.
Simply running paid campaigns is no longer enough to drive growth. Across the world, more than $900 billion is spent on advertising annually, but only 0.1% of it is used for testing its effectiveness. Just think about how much money goes down the drain…
The most successful companies have taken a data-driven approach to this problem – that's what big tech companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon have been doing for a while – but the reality for most companies is far different. Many of them don't have the resources to implement entire martech suites.
A growth stack usually has a dozen solutions that should work together seamlessly. However, with over 10,000 Martech choices out there, selecting the best options for your business can be a daunting task.
Just think about selecting 5 solutions out of a pool of 10,000 and effectively integrating them to function like a smoothly operating machine. All while keeping costs and time constraints in mind. How do you even begin to do that?
It takes them months or even years to put the whole thing together. Even companies with endless resources struggle to make it work, and without the right solution, many fail before they even see results.
On top of that, the cost of acquiring new customers keeps rising, especially in tech.
In the last five years, CAC has increased by over 90%. It's clear that companies need to find a way to make their growth sustainable and that paying more and more is not a long-term solution.
The big players have figured out that leveraging data is the key to sustainable growth. But what about the rest of us who don't have the same endless resources?
That is where Croct comes in.
The key to growth is customer satisfaction. Motivating customers to choose your products or services over competitors, return for future purchases, and recommend your business to others is the primary factor that determines growth and profitability.
The path to language-market fit passes through creative experimentation processes, and generating ideas and hypotheses comes naturally to growth teams. However, the real challenge lies in the process of experimentation and validation – not to mention the implementation phase with all its technical nuances.
Croct has built the go-to solution for a wide range of personalization and experimentation challenges. It empowers growth teams to quickly and affordably bring ideas and strategies to life as it takes care of everything they need so that they can focus on the strategy, not the tech.
A lean team can implement it in hours rather than months; it doesn't matter if you're a small company or an enterprise.
The secret for reducing time-to-market and increasing efficiency lies in packaging everything you need in one place and providing a well-defined workflow that can boost your team's productivity. This includes:
A data processing pipeline to fuel user insights
A CDP to break siloed data and leverage decision speed
A headless CMS to deliver the content
A personalization engine to give life to the magic
A Bayesian AB testing mechanism to validate hypotheses
A set of dashboards and data APIs to provide ready-to-read results.
Without complex integrations, the company stops worrying about implementation and can focus on the strategy with a seamless team workflow.
WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH CROCT:
Customers see very good results with the platform. Besides the average conversion rate increase of 20%, they value the ease of teamwork experimentation processes and the control they now have over their user experience.
The application of Croct goes wide, from simple use cases like personalizing the website offers based on the user's interests or location to advanced use cases that empower product teams to create flexible and customizable products in weeks rather than months.
These are some of the success stories within our customer base.
WHY IS IT BETTER?
One of the most important things Croct has learned is that having the developer on board is essential for any growth project to succeed. Current solutions don't offer technologies that can keep up with the modern developer stack, which leads to a lot of resistance from the tech team.
Just like Vercel, they’re taking a once complex problem for developers and simplifying it to a few lines of code. And they love it.
Putting this in a simple picture, this is how it compares with other solutions in terms of investments and product development:
Time to market: no need for lengthy sales meetings or technical demos. With a free plan and easy-to-follow documentation, users can quickly see the value of the product and start using it in their projects right away.
Once implemented, the growth team has everything they need to segment their users based on whatever criteria they need, define personalized strategies, manage their content, experiment with it, and analyze the final result with no need for extra integrations.
Croct combines multiple technologies to put growth and tech teams in the driver's seat. It stands out because the core objective is making personalization possible for businesses of all sizes. That's why their highest-value feature is allowing teams to collaborate in a simplified web optimization workflow. The short-term result of that is lower CAC. In the long run, building a more human-friendly web environment is the expected ultimate outcome.
STAGE:
In the pre-launch phase, the startup closed deals with the local unicorns.
Currently, they have one of the five largest banks in Latin America and the largest fintech for secured loans in Brazil. It also has media, beauty, e-commerce, and education customers.
From small businesses to some of the most valued companies in the region, they're getting results such as an average increase of 20% in conversion rate and savings of 25% in developer time.
In March 2023, Croct launched the free plan version to unlock the global PLG go-to-market strategy. In almost two months, the customer base increased 5x (versus last year) and the user base grew 2x.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Until now, the startup focused on building a solid product and acquiring the first customers to validate product-market fit. The next step is growth.
At the core of the vision are AI-driven components that can self-improve over time based on business goals and customer signals. It's like having countless data scientists in the room, constantly making hundreds of decisions per second to help the business grow.
For example, if you want more people to sign up from your home page, you can delegate your signup messaging to our AI layer. Our models are designed to deliver a message that resonates with your users and ultimately helps you achieve your goal of more signups.
No PhD or complex coding skills required. Really.
A beta customer used our model to predict the order of social media buttons that would maximize sharing. The model's objective was to prioritize the icons that users were more likely to use, such as Whatsapp, by placing them at the top of the list. After a few days in production, our model achieved an impressive 30% increase in shares without any human intervention. The potential is truly astounding.
WHO ARE THE FOUNDERS?
Marcos Passos and Juliana Amorim
WHO ARE THE INVESTORS?
Astella, Big Bets, among others.
Startups to Watch
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