so Hello Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you? Good. Good to meet you.
Yes, me too. Sherry's just not hearing us, join me in a second.
Yeah, no problem. It's one of those days where the AI show up first before the people. Totally. Hey, Allie. Hello. Hello, good to meet you.
Sherry's AI is always... It's always first and sometimes she's not there and it's just...
Just for AI.
They're in the background.
Where are you all based out of?
Sharon and I are in New York.
Nice. Me too. I'm in Brooklyn.
I'm in Boston. We have some folks in Denver as well. So, but... pretty distributed team with a few Outposts.
Nice. I think we're out of like four states and then... Eight countries now. I'm a big fan of remote. Hi, Sherry.
Hey, everyone. I was hearing you guys talk about my AI reporter while I was sitting in the room traveling to get on Zoom. It's so funny.
Well, good to meet you. Yeah, how did you all hear about us? Let's start there.
Yeah, we got a recommendation from this product marketing advisor that we work with who had heard about you guys and the work that you do with ramp and do script and other. I probably be something so yeah, I'll be reach out from there.
Awesome. Well, good to meet you. I'd love to maybe get started with why you're reaching out to begin with and I'm happy to walk you through Pear Mill and how we do the work. But yeah, I'd love to hear about the challenges you're dealing with. how we would fit in it.
I can go through my level and then let Sherry kind of drive the rest of it. But hey, I'm Mackenzie and maybe we can do quick round of intros too. But I'm... Co-founder and CEO of Ambrook. Ali, do you want to give a brief intro on how you work with growth marketing? Yes, nice to meet you. I'm Allie. I'm Ambrooke's creative director, but work heavily on the growth team, especially on performance marketing, making sure that we're representing our brand and messaging accurately.
Sort of collaborate. I also have a shit ton of creatives. Hopefully can find some ways to either automate that or, which I think Allie's done a lot of, or find a partner. kind of with the brand as well. And then I'm Sherry. I, um, Work on the growth team here at Ambrook. So kind of spans everything from marketing ops and sales ops to some of our partnerships, analytics work, and marketing. standing up our performance marketing agency that we've been working with.
Great.
Well, good to know.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead. No, I just said good to me. Go on.
So I think that the high level from us and the reason why we reached out is I think we work with a few. We don't have someone in-house who's full-time just on performance marketing. That is changing. We're hiring for that role. It's a tricky role to hire for in terms of folks that I think would meet our bar, but we actually have someone in pipeline we're quite excited about now. And so we're going to be having more of a point of contact there.
Otherwise, is a joint effort across the area and someone else on our team. I think because of that, we have also worked with agencies that have primarily just been working on D2C. And so we're one of their only B2B clients, which I see you're smiling. That is a difference, basically. And I think, for example, some things that are like, all of our campaigns are hyper, hyper focused on conversion-only events.
So there's a lot of different types of things like that. Um... Uh, Separately, we do actually find that for our initial audience, which is agriculture, when I talked to a lot of other AgTech founders, so we build like a QuickBooks competitor, eventually be sort of like a Sage or Netsuite competitor, but right now focus on targeting a lot of like owner operators in agriculture, farms, ranches, but also like it's a pretty broad, like our product is right under the hood and it's pretty horizontal.
And so we have like, Custom services, it just looks like someone who does a bunch of invoicing, right? It happens to be in like the overall community or have like ad clients. Or we have construction companies like meat processing, that kind of stuff. Farmer's markets, nonprofits. And so quite broad into the hood, but kind of persona-based marketing right now. When I talked to other ag tech founders about how they've got their first customers, the two that they said worked were Facebook ads and Outbound.
We are just now standing up Outbound. We're starting to see ACVs that are high enough for that. But initially, a lot of our early growth, and we're about 3 million ARR now. Early growth is a lot of that was meta driven, some of the Google, some of word of mouth, that kind of stuff. And so, um, Our audience is on Facebook. We're interested in both optimizing that and keeping that and then layering on as we kind of set up the outbound promotion and kind of thinking about that and also expanding to new verticals and different audiences as part of that.
But I think we're starting to see the limits of working with folks who are primarily D2C focused just in terms of the way that they work and the amount of spend that we actually, we're usually like on the upper end of the spend of the clients that they work with, for example. And I think we're just seeing that burn us a little bit. So I think that's the main reason. And then Louis, who is part of the marketer that we work with, recommended reaching out to you guys just in terms of the type of marketing I think that D2C does is a bit different than-we've learned a lot from D2C, but I think we're actually a good company.
So yeah, that's our-You can think of this as like a QuickBooks plus like a bit of like a Mercury. We don't yet have a credit card, but we do have a card, a debit card. Kind of like a found, I think is actually the closest. Yeah. Or like that, except we're a little bit more up. market them. They primarily work with these freelancers, sole props. We work with these like owner operator, you know, sweet spot is between like 250 K lowest and annual like spend of the business or like revenues of the business all the way up to like 20 million in revenues.
And so kind of that solid like S and B. Gotcha.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And then... So you used to be an ag tech only, but now there's all these other categories you're supporting?
About 20% of our customer base are non-farm. Either they were farming entities that brought on their non-farming entity, which is super common to have multiple entities, or your wife runs a coffee shop in town and want to have consolidated sort of reporting there. Some folks have just found us for the actual abstract value props that we have, which is that we essentially take some of these power features, multidimensionality or really good balance sheet where you would find in a Sage or NetSuite and we bring it down to affordability and accessibility in terms of the product.
Because we work primarily with folks, we work with folks who do not have in-house finance teams. So that's sort of the value prop as we make it a lot easier to do the type of FP&A stuff. But if you are like a farm wife who's never, who's never taken the town course. Um, so.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I wanna understand. So the ICP is like slightly clear, but also like these categories probably have different pain points and so on. How are you doing that work of figuring out how to speak to them? I mean, it sounds like you have a product marketing person, which is excellent. This is sort of like the type of person that would help us think through that. But the agriculture sector is very clear.
I think that's much easier to go after. What's working on meta right now?
I want to speak to like the two different types of depending on whether or not you're in the true fans category or just broad based in terms of what's resonating with our audience. Yeah.
Well, I guess I think one thing to start with is sort of like right now, or I feel like the last few months, like at least from a four-factor, what has worked has been UGC. But that's like... We've been able to sort of like achieve that persona of the busy housewife but really want to evolve beyond that but I think like the messy paperwork and stuff is very like visceral for a certain person.
audience And I think we've sort of had been...
challenged in evolving past that because it is like such an easy visual hook for folks is to see that messiness and understand that, oh, we're a solution for that and to be sort of engaged in the You know that there's a mobile app for that.
So I think that is I think that could be or is sort of a universal thing.
message in a way. I know my husband is a contractor and his van is a mess, for example, so I think there's some through line there and sort of getting having teams that are deskless and needing to get organized. I also think the message that resonated really early was sort of Um... We've kind of like... moved past this at this point, but sort of like quit QuickBooks or QuickBooks wasn't made for cowboys.
And a lot of that like resonated because I think folks were sort of feeling frustrated with the incumbent and wanting something else. And that did attract people, even though it was very clearly marketed towards agriculture and ranchers, it did sort of like attract people being like, yes, I don't like QuickBooks. So I think that's sort of like, people feeling frustrated with QuickBooks and like people understand this sort of like frustration Feeling like they can't get things organized in a way that makes sense to them.
Feel... pretty universal. I think the things that we're like trying to get folks engaged with. Now is sort of is like cost of production and understanding, you know, like if you're a contractor, you want to be able to track the profitability of a project. Right. Or if you are running, say, a bakery or some sort of like local processing, being able to say like, what's my cost per meal? like bread loaf or something, right?
Like being able to sort of, you're taking these inputs, you're transforming them into something new. And so there's sort of that like, you know, your family business is complex and you should be able to sort of track those things without it feeling like a burden. Um, And that's going to like help you, um, stay, improve your margins and stay independent and all those things. So I think that's like a message we're trying to get across to people, but I think that we've sort of been dominated.
by or sort of the like comparing ourselves to QuickBooks and sort of talking about a little bit of the like paper chaos has worked really well. And so getting people out of, not out of that, but sort of seeing that actually like that is sort of like, there's a layer on top of that. That's like the actual thing that's going to make, be a differentiator for your business. Yeah. I see. So like what's working as the hook versus the like real value of the product are still not fully aligned.
Which makes sense. Okay. But I think those messages are like universal, right? Like I think that we've been like... Focusing on using ag imagery and like, you know, very clear things that like language that feels like agriculture, but I like as Mackenzie said, I think those things are relevant to other cultures.
audiences and the whole like the use cases make sense for other audiences it's just sort of like tailoring those things more specifically yeah and there's two there's two I think there's two main hypotheses we have right the first is that like to cut through marketing noise and B2B sass being hyper personalized if you can do it per persona like there's lots of reasons why like folks struggle with QuickBooks but they might not able to kind of like you mentioned the hook versus the value prop they might not be able to or they might not be down enough on like the marketer insight curve to basically oh it's actually because i'm a balance sheet having a business that has multiple pnls and therefore it's really hard for me to track my economics because like that's hard for anyone you know um instead like it's much like what we i think found cut through the noise was basically just saying clickbooks doesn't work for you because you're a farm and not having to like that just being the initial event and then it's like an initial resonance like of course It's because of our farm, you know, it's like, it's not like, you know, but they might not be going a layer deeper until they kind of see that, that kind of stuff.
They just believe that it's hard because farming is unique or something.
And, and so I think the thing that we're trying to test right now is like, is finding a good partner to help us test those new verticals and both the jobs to be done, value props that will resonate with any business. And like, how can we find the best of both worlds of hyper-personal, And this is resonant with anyone because we have never actually run just generic like targeted to all SMEs like As before, we have probably saturated a lot of the audience on Meta for agriculture, but it is extremely untapped what these other groups are.
And like we have... real estate businesses that love us. We have construction companies that love us. We have trucking companies that love us, right?
Like we have a lot of these other types of verticals, services businesses, right? But like, and that are happy under it that came initially for this hook.
Yeah? Which is that Ambrook makes money in three ways. We make money as a SaaS business, which is largely what we've grown so far.
Like most of our 3 million in revenue is just pure like, down and dirty, get these farms on the platform, you're paying $800 to $1,000 a year, you know, SaaS product. The second way we make money is through FinTech. You make money in four ways. We are, so you can imagine like we're a, We have invoicing, deposits, cards, and bill pay, as well as the accounting software. So it's a full ERP. And so we make money from invoicing spread.
We make money in interchange.
We make money on passive yield. And we make money on float for mail checks. Yeah. And we do have customers that are making us 10K a year on FinTech alone.
And then the last way that we make money is on services. And so we do have customers that are, and we're basically here at Ways to Productize as services under the hood because we have good margins on them, right? But like we have customers who are willing to pay $6,000 a year up to $30,000 a year on services. For us, that basically dedicated, management to close product gaps that we might otherwise have like multi entity reporting or consulting reporting, for example, like inventory management, sales data integration, that kind of stuff.
And so I think there's like, there's, I think that it's just a lot of raw opportunity in these segments that we have not actually targeted. The only thing that we've done for the past two years, just from a pure team bandwidth perspective is market the accounting software to agriculture primarily on Facebook. Yeah.
and give you an intro on how we work. I think it's gonna fit quite well with what you're looking for. I'm gonna share my screen here and just hop in. but please stop me to ask questions as I go through this. So, Pamela's been around for about five or six years or so. We came out of effectively like a failed YC company.
We're ex-tech founders originally and we started this agency to basically grab the product development lifecycle approach to marketing. And so what that looks like is basically an experimentation loop. We're trying really hard to be as rigorous as possible on grabbing all the levers that we have access to as growth marketers and trying to think of every single initiative as an experiment. And we follow what we call a, I'm going to hop over to this process here, but we call it the sprint process where we, every month we have a set of initiatives that we're trying out.
Could be things like trying out a new ICP definition, trying out a new event, trying out a landing page test, set of creatives that we may be running, so on and so forth. We put all those together with your team. So it's a super collaborative process. And then we go through execution throughout the month. And so that might be that we might run a campaign on meta or make changes to... the structure of the ad account itself or just add new creatives or test out new landing pages and so on.
And at the end of the process, we go back to the initial set of ideas and then update them with the learnings. And so this could be things like, well, we learned that optimizing for this type of event down funnel doesn't work because the volume is not high enough and so on. And the hope is that we have basically a set of learnings, either positive or negative, that can be built upon over time. Okay.
And so everything gets written down because of it. We use this process to do well across all sorts of industries so far. We did start in B2B SaaS originally, so I would say like 60, 70% of our spend still is in that category. And then the rest is now we have even DTC clients. We noticed that it was important for us to have DTC mix Because the creative aspects is just much harder in DTC and it ends up helping us on the B2B side.
So our creative team is probably better than you'd expect because we have exposure to DTC. Because it's just much more competitive on the creative side where what's competitive on B2B side is more on... picking the right event to optimize towards is really how I could distill it there. And the right event is really what is the definition of your ICP such that we can teach meta to target people better for you.
Yeah, we'll send it to you. But the core idea here was that basically defining your ICP and then targeting that through event optimization. So meta, you can ask them to optimize towards an event. And instead of just optimizing towards any lead, it was about optimizing towards the right ICP event. Later on, we went deeper than just ICP when they got to scale. So we could go all the way to SQL as the actual optimization event.
But earlier on, we had to go, You're in the funnel because the volume matters there. So we want the right volume at the highest quality that correlates with the right ICP event. Thank you. And creative side, I think that the thing that's important here is that similar to how we would want to run some explorative process on the audiences and the events, we want to run the same thing on creative. And in fact, creative is sort of related to audience on meta especially and Google these days where the algorithm, at least the first section of it running the ad, uses the ad as an input to figure out who to target first.
And so what we try to do is figure out how to... Target folks using an experimentation process. So the way we do it on Meta is we have a separate creative testing campaign where we basically are testing that either audiences or concepts and the audiences could be, we try to put together an ad that is speaking to the CFO or to the CEO or the founder. And we do this through mostly things like visuals, the words people use, the aesthetics of the ad itself and so on.
if that fine-tuned on the right persona or not. And on a per ad set basis, then we can get a sense of, are we able to target the right people with these sets of ads? Ultimately, that should be judged by like, what is the cost of an ICP? But the way the team thinks about it is in these terms. And so quite often we'll build some form of a matrix of here are the different personas we're trying to go after, here are the types of messaging and value crops Let's produce different creatives for this like combinatorial space and figure out which ones are going to work well for each of the categories, the personas in those categories and so on.
On DTC, a little bit is a little bit different. They care. They being the ad network almost cares for volume because the fatigue rate is much, much higher fatigue rates on B2B can be higher, but it takes way longer to get to that stage of like, you're really, running out of an audience. When you're going this horizontal way, at least. When you go to more niche, you have to build these creative funnels is what we call them, where we have lots of different creative approaches for the same audience.
Yeah, so there's two other things that we do. So we do the growth marketing creative. We also do conversion rate optimization. And so if you're trying to explore different industries, that would be something we would want to work with you on to create the different landing pages on a per industry basis to be able to speak to them clearly. On attribution, we will usually do an audit on what is currently happening.
Yeah, so we do basically two different layers. So if we're doing just pay-per-view, Paid marketing without the creative and CRR and so on, we usually charge a 15K flat fee effectively to manage up to two channels. So that would be like a Meta or a Google. Creative usually comes on top of that. That's somewhere between 10 or 15K depending on the volume we would expect. And then same with CRO that will come on top of that.
If we do all in, we can do discounts where it's like maybe 30K a month. And then that you get a basically a team of five. There's what we call a growth manager who is more of a broad marketer. We have like per channel performance managers. And then we have a creative strategist that's thinking about this problem of like, how do I speak to the different types of ICPs and so on. And then we assign a CRO lead that usually as a, like a Venn diagram of a designer and a CRO expert.
Okay, yeah, it'd be great to get a quote from you all on just everything that you outlined there. I think for us, like, We've heard a lot of promises on creative and been disappointed by all of them. And so I think that would be great just to know and give some samples of some of the creative your team actually put together versus like the creative that you ran on behalf of other teams would be great.
And then, and then otherwise we do have like meta attribution has been dogging us. I know it dogs a lot of people, but like we do see a pretty big discrepancy between like what meta claims and what we see in HubSpot. And so it'd be great. about that as well.
Like upwards of 50%. Delta between in platform being 50% higher than what we see.
Yeah. I mean, Hotspot sucks at attribution, so I don't... I don't even believe that there's a tracking issue there. It's just the platform is not really good. But yeah, I can work on a quote on that for you. And I can follow up. So one of the things we could do as a next step beyond the quote is also we can just audit your account and you'll get to meet people on the team. That'd be great, yeah. Okay.
Yeah, we charge like a flat 2.5K for that. Our team comes in, we do a presentation on all the findings and you can literally grab that and start running with it, which happens quite often in the startup world for us. Or you can hire us. So it's a pretty good next step, I think.
Okay, how much did you say it was? 4 to 5K? 2.5.
Yeah, just if you also wanted to just pass information along on how your designers or, you know, the production team likes to collaborate with. you know, whoever's in-house. Sorry, my child is talking to me now. But I think sort of, like, hearing what tools you're using and how the team likes to collaborate and maybe info on sort of, like, what's usually the schedule on iteration and, you know, you talked about sort of, like, going through learnings and all of that, whatever.