We are excited to announce our investment in Brew.
In building this company, co-founders Maayan Levy, Raviv Ventura and Gabriel Amram set off to do something incredibly difficult from both a technical and product perspective. They are building “true marketing software.”
How can they claim to be the first to build “marketing software”? How can they claim that their software is really that different from anything else out there?
We have to start by re-examining what we mean by “marketing”.
So much of what today is labeled “marketing software” is actually top-of-the-funnel sales software. Solutions for email automation, content creation, lead lists and the like are often branded as marketing solutions — and in a sense they are — but, more fundamentally, they are tools for generating MQLs and converting SQLs into closed deals.
An inclusive, holistic view of “marketing” includes the complex relationship between a company’s assets/products/positioning/strategy and the hard-to-measure, multifaceted real world. In light of that — “true marketing software” should continuously interpret the competitive landscape and cultural zeitgeist, to optimize and refine a company’s operations. It should interpret aesthetics, psychology and creativity from the lens of data science.
For instance, a “true marketing software” should show you whether to invest in podcasts in French or German, across what categories and cultural regions, what to talk about (and not talk about), why, and what the expected results should be. It should tell you whether to stop investing in paid acquisition for the sake of investing in broader branding narratives; it should conditionally recommend focusing on or avoiding a particular demographic, sub-brand or user cohort; etc.
And, of course, it should give you a slightly different answer every single day, as the world is always evolving.
After over a year of painstaking work, Brew have actually(!) built the above product. Their customers love it, from small companies to mature operations such as Checkout.com and Houlihan Lokey. Though they have only been selling for a couple of quarters, the business is exploding, based completely off of inbound demand.
This is headspinningly difficult to do. Not only do you need to build a massive data processing platform for monitoring, normalizing and analyzing all public and accessible data; you need to solve for a product experience that works equally well for marketing executives, contributors and the broader organization’s needs as well.
The founding team at Brew was uncompromising in building this complex and challenging product in the most correct, first principles-driven way possible. They declined several opportunities to start selling the solution when it was less mature, in favor of finessing both the offering, the go-to-market operation into a well-oiled inbound driven machine. After a tremendous amount of work and personal challenges, they have begun succeeding, and it is inspiring to watch.
Congratulations Brew, on this exciting milestone!