A conversation with Tracksuit co-founder Connor Archbold
After a mammoth Series B raise - what's next?
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One of the absolute shining startup success stories of the past year is been Tracksuit, the always-on brand tracking platform that helps marketers and agencies measure and communicate the value of brand-building.
They recently announced a $42 million Series B funding round – one of the largest to ever Series B rounds to be raised by a Kiwi business. The round was led by commerce enablement and consumer brand investor VMG Partners, with participation from existing backers Blackbird, Icehouse Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Footwork.
I had the pleasure of catching up with co-founder Connor Archbold recently as he reflected on Tracksuit’s success and what comes next.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length
How are you feeling post the Series B raise?
I feel grateful for the team and pretty honored to be able to lead it. It’s really exciting to lean into this opportunity even more.
What does this Series B mean for Tracksuit? What does it unlock?
It’s really just about adding more value for our customers, to be honest. In four years, we’ve now got about a thousand customers, a thousand brands globally, and we see an opportunity to double down on that momentum. We want to build out a richer dataset and then surface those insights to our customers with a wider product footprint. Essentially, we want to cement ourselves as the gold standard for brand metrics globally.
What does it mean to be the gold standard for brand metrics globally, and what core problem does Tracksuit solve?
Our vision is to get Tracksuit data into every boardroom in the world. To do that, we have to be the common language that anyone uses to measure and communicate the value of brand. We have to be the world's best brand tracker, but we also have to unlock new value and new use cases to get value out of that data. Anytime someone is referring to awareness, top-of-funnel measurement, or long-term brand building, they should be referencing the common language, which we want and hope will be Tracksuit.
What was outdated with current systems before Tracksuit’s approach? What were the pain points with measuring brand value?
When we started Tracksuit, the tagline "beautiful, affordable, always on" was the antithesis of what existing brand tracking was, which was hard to use, pretty expensive, and not always on, but rather whatever cadence people could pay for. By making it beautiful, affordable, and always on, and making it available to any business, we enabled it to be a common language rather than something sequestered behind enterprise value.
How did you determine the metrics that represent brand value? How subjective is that concept?
Brand tracking is an old form of market research; it’s been around for a long time. We haven’t reinvented anything about what standard brand tracking is. We just reinvented how you automate data capture and how you automate drawing insights out of that data, making it easier for marketers to use. You ask standard questions like awareness, consideration, preference, usage, brand sentiment, and brand statements, like, "Is this a brand that people trust?" That’s how it's always been done. We didn’t reinvent the wheel. We didn't come up with some crazy black box. We just ask folks if they’re aware of the brand, and then tell the marketer how many folks are aware of the brand. Marketers love that because we didn't try to come up with a new metric or a new thing they have to get buy-in for. We just do it the old-school way, but make it possible for them to have those metrics.
Is there a risk of getting carried away with new metrics, especially with the emergence of AI tools? How do you avoid straying from your core mission?
We’ve always been maniacally focused. It’s one of the things about my and Matt’s leadership: we’ve put the blinders on and just driven forward, because even within market research, there are so many different things you can do. Just being the world’s best brand tracker has always allowed us to focus on delivering those core metrics, delivering them well, and deriving value and insights from them. The problem we’re solving for marketers is that they need credibility in the boardroom to showcase the value of brand spend and brand marketing. That’s basically long-term thinking. They need to be able to show something that is not clicks and revenue to show that their marketing is working to build awareness and brand sentiment. We help them do that, and keeping it simple is one of the most important things. If it gets overcomplicated, it's very hard to explain to a CEO or CFO. Maintaining simplicity has been core to achieving our goal: to help marketers showcase brand value.
What is your North Star measurement of success for Tracksuit?
We look at a few things. Because we started as a bootstrapped business, we still hold efficiency very high, so annual recurring revenue (ARR) per employee is important. We look at gross revenue retention and net revenue retention as very important key SaaS metrics. And then we look at whether the data is being used in boardrooms. Our goal is to have the data in every boardroom, so we measure how often it is being used in boardrooms. Are people pulling it down into reports? Are marketers achieving their goals with Tracksuit data?
Would it be accurate to say your one-sentence North Star vision is: "Is this thing we’re measuring in service of it being in every boardroom in the world?"
Yes, and helping their brand actually grow. Any brand that is a Tracksuit customer, their brand should be growing more than brands that are not Tracksuit customers. So, people will actually be helping their brands grow.
What has been the biggest challenge in the last couple of months leading up to this Series B moment?
The team has done an amazing job building a great product and a great business, which makes capital raising easier and my job easier on the conversation side. We’re fortunate that we’ve built relationships with investors over a long period of time. We’ve known VMG for over a year now and have worked on what that relationship and partnership would be like over that entire period. My wife has been an absolute champion; our daughter arrived in January, so finding the time to be a good dad and a good husband while fundraising is always fun. It has been tough to remain focused and to do the most important jobs and not to… we’re reaching this 150-person mark with four offices. We’re starting to think about going multi-product, and as a company that has always been focused, it’s been very hard to remain focused when we feel like we’ve earned the right to do a bit more. That’s one of the challenges. Reaching this point of growth and scale while maintaining our culture is really important to us. We’re very proud of the culture we’ve built, and we want to make sure that sticks around through this next period of scaling. I feel grateful for this team having built a great product and hitting our metrics. The conversations are about how we’re partnering together, what value we’re creating, not "please partner with us."
What active steps do you take to maintain your vision and culture, especially as you scale? What can other founders learn from this?
Every time we take a little bit longer and are a little bit more intentional with decisions, we have success. Every time we shoot from the hip and do something quickly, it doesn't work as well anymore. When you had 60, 70 people, you could still be like, "Right, let’s change it. We’re all moving in this direction. Everyone knows the context. Let’s go." All of a sudden, I’m learning that you just have to take your time. Changes happen over a month-long period. You have to do it in the right way so that everyone gets the context and knows what the next steps are. It’s very rare for companies to break through this 150-person mark, the Dunbar’s number, because you have to shift how you lead, how you grow, and how you give context to people and tell them what success looks like. All that stuff changes. We’re learning that, and that’s the challenge of this next phase: to continue growing, continue scaling while learning a completely new way of growing the business and not having that change this magic culture and progress that we’ve managed to create.
How do you balance your demanding role as a founder with a rich personal life and a new child?
You have to make brave choices. It helps me to have really solid routines and a good therapist. Investing in those things makes sure that I can be the best CEO, but also the best dad and husband that I can be. I prioritize those things and stick to a routine: get up early, go swimming, get to the office by seven, do the business, get home by four or four-thirty, hang out with family. That tends to work for me. And having rules, like I never miss more than one weekend when I’m traveling. There are just things that I’m not willing to bend on. That helps me stay sane. Obviously, huge shout out to my wife and partner who does a lot of the heavy lifting at home as well. I’ve had episodes of burnout, and they’re not even necessarily points where I’m working incredibly hard. It’s because I’m trying to do it all—look after myself, look after the family, Tracksuit—and often, the self part falls away. A lot of my current work is to make sure that I can prioritize myself around those other very important things.
How is emerging technology, specifically AI tools, intersecting with Tracksuit and your vision? Where do you separate the froth from actual use?
I’m pretty allergic to froth as a human, just in general, so maybe just a healthy dose of skepticism. I tend to pick one or two things to roll out. It’s been useful having tools to help with my own personal efficiency, like recording meetings and then give me the script and then help me write emails and all that. And then you get used to that, and then you move on to the next thing rather than just, like, "no, I want to do it all." I think the stuff that I’ve been amazed at, obviously we use it a lot within the Tracksuit product in the back end: survey scripting, survey, and then, like, cleaning the data that comes in and also drawing out insights instead of just, like, forcing marketers to look at a bunch of graphs. You could say, "hey, don't do that anymore. Here's all the interesting things you need to know." That’s been great. And then the most impressive thing I've seen is, like, the engineering and product teams and how fast and nimble you can be. If you imagine five years ago, you might come up with a hypothesis of what a new feature might be. You would go talk to 10 customers to validate that. Then you might mock up something based on those conversations and then show another 10 customers those mock-ups, see how it changes, then develop something. And now you can kind of, like, build an MVP in a couple days and ship it in a way that you're getting feedback from people actually using it. And I find that to be much more valuable feedback. It allows you to move faster. And the month-long booking of conversations, talking, then creating a mock-up, then more talking, then MVP. It just shifts it around. So you start here, and you're actually scaling back rather than starting here and adding more to it.
What does the widespread adoption of Tracksuit, being used in every boardroom, unlock for the sectors using it?
I think you’ll see just more effective company building. Less flash-in-the-pan companies that create revenue very quickly and then die off. You’ll see brands investing in long-term brand building, which is essentially long-term company building. They’re creating that future demand. They’re creating value over time, and they’re not just basing their business in the kind of, like, slot machine of Google advertising, putting a dollar in and trying to get a dollar fifty back. You’re going to see better ads, better communities built. In the world of AI, brand and community are some of the best moats. It’s going to be very easy. The barrier to entry of creating a new product is going to be very low. And so, like, how you defend your business, one of the only ways you can do that is through brand and community. And so hopefully, the people that are using Tracksuit, that are within our community, are building these long-term defensible companies.