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For young startups, few benchmarks are more coveted and competitive than an accelerator program. If you can get in, it can mean venture capital, mentorship, workshops, demos, and a network of support for your business long after the program is over. With an acceptance rate of less than 5 percent, Y Combinator’s semi-annual program in Silicon Valley may be the mecca, but even Austin’s Capital Factory is getting crowded.
Fortunately for Austin startups, there’s a new accelerator in town, and its managing partners have figured out a way to make the deal even sweeter.
With help of a five-person team of developers and marketers, Brandon Gredler and Derick Thompson founded MarketingRunner, a program that specializes in developing scalable revenue engines for startups.
Thompson says many applicants to the program have a great idea or product, but haven’t yet found a repeatable and scalable method for attracting customers. That’s where MarketingRunner comes in, and so far their methods seem to be working.
They helped Treehouse, the sustainable home improvement store, rebuild their website and develop a consultative sales process instead of waiting for customers to call the store with one-off questions. With new leads and a reliable way to convert them to sales, Treehouse consistently began seeing month-over-month growth greater than 25 percent. The trajectory continued for three consecutive quarters, helping them raise $16 million in a recent funding round.
“We’re looking at a lot of things that are preventing companies from moving quickly,” Thompson said.
There are at least two major differences that separate MarketingRunner from other accelerators. First, their investment in the companies takes the form of a convertible note, allowing them to be circumspect about injecting capital until they’ve been working with the companies long enough to know whether they’re likely to grow.
The other differentiator is what Thompson calls MarketingRunner’s secret sauce: a software platform and marketing R & D process that gets right to the heart of a startup’s customer acquisition model and finds out how fast and long that heart will pump.
It’s this focus on marketing campaigns that determines whether companies have a market fit, Thompson said, and makes MarketingRunner actually complement other accelerators.
“Software is really at the core of what we’re doing,” he said. “And that’s what makes it scalable.”
Behind that software is a dedicated and growing team of marketing experts called The Marketing Concierge, who shepherd companies in the accelerator through the execution of their campaigns.
Gredler says the element of human expertise in marketing and growth hacking, combined with software, allows MarketingRunner to eliminate the usual roadblocks for companies, like poor website performance and broken e-commerce funnels.
“When you can’t see that, a lot of companies will just ignore it,” he said. “In reality that can hold a lot of the keys to your growth.”
“We’re a measurable marketer,” Thompson said. “That means getting rid of the phrase ‘I feel this,’ or ‘I think,’ and instead using data for all of your decision making when it comes to customer acquisition.”
MarketingRunner already has 15 applicants for their Fall 2015 program, but applications are still open.
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