Best Startup
Rockee is a B2B content feedback platform that helps marketers to make better content. It’s the fastest and easiest way to understand the influence your content has had on your target audience.
Tell us about yourself?
Reasonably humble, I didn’t do too great at school and left with very average grades. After college I worked in both door to door and telesales, and enjoyed it to an extent.
It was very valuable experience for me, and the thrill of a sale has never left me. It gave me focus though, to do something more – so I went to Uni a bit later than most at 22. I studied marketing and psychology and I think it unlocked a passion in me.
After Uni, I was given a chance by a company called Morelli Group – to run their digital activity. I learned an immense amount here in a short time. Building two e-commerce business for them, with plenty of mistakes on the way.
The second one, Slim’s Detailing is a brand now that turns over £2 million+ a year and I’m immensely proud what we achieved there.
The last few years I’ve worked in B2B at an agency called TMW, as a strategist and later on as Performance Marketing Director. I really love B2B and the complexity that comes with it, and that’s where I’ve gravitated towards with my start-up.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
You should have started sooner. I’ve always wanted to setup and run a business, and I was fortunate in that I got a taste of that early on working for a company who took a chance on me when I just left Uni.
Since then, I’ve worked in a few agency roles, really enjoyed them – but always had an eye on the bigger picture and a fascination with building something.
What problem does your business solve?
Speaking with marketing leaders and creative teams in B2B, I’ve established that we struggle to measure the impact of our content.
We make loads of it, the market is now worth billions – but we still agonise over metrics in Google Analytics (dwell time, bounce rate, scroll rate etc), or make assumptions from Marketing Automation data (email open, click rate etc). This means we’re all ‘guessing’ to the best ability we can.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I think there’s a big opportunity in a start-up focusing all their energy on defining the metrics and data behind what really good content actually looks like.
As an industry, we don’t do a good job of measuring it – and those that do it well, often build complex systems from multiple solutions to show the impact.
This might be a micro-market now for those who want to go further – but with the continued increase in content investment, it’s vital a tool can come along and show content impact.
What is your magic sauce?
Our secret source is – asking the audience. We collect information on their role and seniority, to help Rockee users identify the personas they are targeting. We then use logic based ratings and questions to understand what people are thinking when they read the content.
This gives us the answer so much quicker than guessing from analytics/crm data – and allows B2B businesses, to establish a robust feedback loop between content planning, creation and performance.
All presented in neatly laid out dashboards, we hold the insights and audience intelligence that marketing leaders have been crying out for.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We’re still relatively early on in our journey. So we’re working closely at the moment with BETA users on what works, and what doesn’t.
This is helping shape our product roadmap for a bigger push to market. In the next few months, we’ll look to raise a seed round and begin to scale the business and establish our position in the market as the ‘must have’ tool for content performance and effectiveness.
From here, once we nail product/market fit – we look to scale.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
For me, I’ve started this business as a solo founder. Which is against every rule in the ‘start-up’ book. Luckily I’ve surrounded myself with incredible advisors and mentors – but early on, the decision making/debating with just yourself is certainly a challenge!
In that time we’ve made a couple of pivots, but thankfully we’re seeing positive signs and customer feedback which has validated the decisions.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We would love to collaborate with content creators, strategists and marketing leaders.
We are in a niche space, and we really want to speak to those early-adopters who want to push things further, to understand the DNA of amazing content and work with us to get there too.
