The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Building a Data First B2B SaaS Startup - 141
In this episode of The D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso interviews Austin Harrison, CEO of NorthBeam, discussing the intersection of Gen Z entrepreneurship and data-driven marketing. Austin shares his journey from working in internet analytics to founding NorthBeam, a B2B SaaS company focused on first-party data for marketing profitability. The conversation delves into the challenges of building a SaaS company, the importance of data in marketing, and the complexities of attribution in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Austin emphasizes the need for businesses to differentiate themselves in crowded markets and the significance of understanding customer needs to drive growth.
Here's What You'll Learn:
❗The mental game of entrepreneurship is crucial.
❗Building a SaaS company requires trust in your team.
❗Data quality and integrity are paramount for customer success.
❗Attribution is a complex but essential aspect of marketing.
❗AI and machine learning are exciting but often overhyped.
❗Navigating the crowded market requires differentiation.
❗Understanding customer pain points is key to product development.
❗The future of media buying includes diversification of channels.
❗Small businesses should focus on learning before investing in complex solutions.
❗Continuous improvement is essential for product usability.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to the Gen Z Mindset in Business
01:26 Austin Harrison's Journey and Insights
03:27 Challenges of Building a B2B SaaS Company
06:15 The Role of Data in Marketing
10:30 Navigating the Complexities of Attribution
12:47 From Idea to Market: The Northbeam Journey
16:08 Future of Media Buying and Attribution
20:02 Identifying the Right Fit for Northbeam
Austin Harrison:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/maustinharrison/
Northbeam - https://www.northbeam.io/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, the former founder of Electric and now the co-founder of Scalist, and today I'm talking with Austin Harrison, who's the CEO at Northmeath, which is a first party data for future proofed marketing profitability. Thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:So before we dive into things here, can you give everybody a quick background on your journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you know, I also went to USC. Like you, I was really excited about the internet early on which, shockingly, not everyone was that excited early on and then ended up being lucky enough to work with um dave toth and tim meadows, who co-founded net ratings, which was the first rating system for the internet. Uh, think about it like just an audience panel analysis um, using random sampling, so I helped uh help them get started and build the first audience panel. That company went public and then was acquired by nielsen in 2007, I believe. The rest of the stock um, so always was interested in analytics, um slight detour in animation and then, um, I was really excited about ai, in the same way that I was excited about the internet early on.
Speaker 2:This is about seven years ago I was excited about AI machine learning, so just started rolling classes at Stanford and got, yeah, just really excited about it Met Dan Wang and here we go Now we're building Nordbeam.
Speaker 1:What have been some of the most exciting but also challenging parts of building a b2b sass company oh wow.
Speaker 2:Well, we help companies measure marketing, right, that's what we do at north beam, and so that's a complicated problem. So I guess everyone says that in their vertical right. Um, the hardest part is just focusing on making progress every day and not getting frustrated, as you probably know, right, because you've got a new startup right, something you're building, and you just got to be patient but impatient at the same time. And I think the biggest challenge is that mental game. You know the mental game you play with yourself every day. Why? How would you answer that?
Speaker 1:I think it depends on the type of business. The agency I found far easier because I had much greater control. It was services based, so, yeah, for pretty much the entirety of the business I could do everything that we were servicing. So if I had to work, you know, an 18 hour day, I could fill in the gaps where needed. With the software business, you know that's not the case at all. You know there's so many specialized, like niche roles within our team that I couldn't even begin to fully comprehend how to execute against that, and so it's putting a lot more trust, uh, in in in the team and like I'm not able to move, you know, the product forward as quickly as an independent contributor as I was at the agency, where everything was like you know SOPs and processes and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:That is, you know, the biggest difference I've found between the two, for me and for somebody who wants to move at a thousand miles a minute. It can be frustrating sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hear you. I mean, I was in the office yesterday getting dirty hands on keyboard. So yeah, I hear you. I try to get in on as granular basis as I can still even now Are you a technical founder.
Speaker 2:Nowhere near our CTO co-founder, but I did learn to do some basic engineering and in the machine learning space a little bit, just so I was, you know, understood the details. I'm kind of big on that, like I always want to at least get my hands dirty just a little. I won't have the proficiency of like our engineering team, but I I still like to understand the nuanced details.
Speaker 1:So, um, yeah, that's kind of how I fly yeah, like what's you know, having a high level concept of what's happening versus being able to actually you know code and produce it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I try to like yeah. I just like to know what's going on, you know?
Speaker 1:that's fair when it comes to building a team. Are you fully remote?
Speaker 2:No, we're not Actually. Actually, we've got a team in San Francisco, a team in Los Angeles, a team in New York, and so I was in the office yesterday in San Francisco, right? So we?
Speaker 1:like to get in there once in a while and mix it up. I find that to be a lot better than remote personally, but it still feels like so many people are clinging on to remote for for dear life. Well, what are you doing with your team? Well, just because we have to, right now, it is remote.
Speaker 1:You, know, so you're fully remote right now yeah, from a from a cost perspective at our stage it doesn't well, it's not even financially feasible for me to have 16 developers, or whatever we have at this point, based in the US. So we have three here in the States and then about 13 in Brazil and in Europe. So that has been an interesting thing to tackle is the time zone difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It's pretty tremendous from our VP of product? Who's out in San Diego and then our engineering lead? Who's in Romania? Who used to work at a deal. Oh yeah, I think it's like nine hours or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, I like getting in the. I mean I was in the office till 8 pm last night with our engineering team hashing out stuff, right. And all together? Yeah, so, like you said, it's harder when you're dispersed to do it. What?
Speaker 1:do you think are like the? You know the biggest areas of opportunity within your platform and you know the e-commerce industry as a whole. With all this AI stuff that's coming out every single day, it seems like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's funny because our CTO did his honors thesis in AI in 2012, which is a lifetime ago in the ad, you know right and he's always hesitant to overpromise what AI can do people trying to profit and market themselves in the AI world without deep expertise so I think there's a tremendous amount of over-promising and over-hyping, as there always is with something new, right? That's like if you look in terms of cycles, that's a typical thing. So, yeah, my answer is I think it's exciting.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of. There will be a lot of innovation, but there's also a lot of smoke, a lot of maybe that's the wrong term a lot of charlatans out there is what I would say.
Speaker 1:I use my brother as my, as my BS detector. He's working with you, know these, these tools every single day and he's like they're just, they're really great, but they're not that great. And you'll see if you go on LinkedIn and you see some of these comments like B2B SaaS is dead, like that stupid tombstone or whatever that I saw and I think it was like a viral one.
Speaker 1:Like, okay, it feels like some people just don't want to be the ones that didn't say that this thing was coming, if it does come. But it feels like some people just don't want to be the ones that didn't say that this thing was coming if it does come.
Speaker 2:But when it doesn't happen, then they won't be the ones that missed out on having that foresight. Like I said, that's kind of typical if you've been through enough cycles, obviously I've got a few years on you.
Speaker 2:So when you've been through cycles you kind of see the same thing starting to happen again where you have this like a bunch of like schlock companies and people out there over promising and they don't have deep expertise. They think they have a moat. They don't have a moat. They're just selling something that's like built on top of publicly available data. People are doing a lot of things that aren't really that interesting that are still getting a lot of attention. I'm not going to like throw people under the bus, but I think investors or the people out there in the world don't really understand how much fake value is being perceived as real value.
Speaker 1:Right, you mentioned publicly available data. How do you think of data at North Theme as a moat, and are there any network effects that come with the amount of merchants that you have using your system now?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah, I mean, for us, the focus on data is our number one focus. That's how we started, that's where we invest, that's everything we started, that's where we invest, that's everything to us, and so we definitely think it's important in terms of our value for our customers and, obviously, our moat. But and we do learn stuff from the data, and that is our number one goal is our customers right? Our number one goal is how do we help our customers? And so, with a laser focus on that, data quality and integrity that allows our customers to do better or at least, you know, gives them the visibility of how to do better when they're not doing as well, right? So that's extremely important to us and we take it.
Speaker 1:You know that's that's a paramount concern to us is is the data? Do you ever see yourself, you know, going into other areas besides? Uh, you know, attribution? I've seen a lot of Shopify apps start to go into other areas for, for better or worse, yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Attribution is really hard. Um, I think we've got. I think we've got our work cut out for us, Right? So that's kind of my answer for now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The competitive dynamics within attributionution. How do you stand out from the the noise, especially given the fact that it's not only complicated but it is confusing too?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, and so no, it's a great question. If I'm being totally blunt, I think north beam historically has been a little hard to use. Uh, you know, for, uh, I think we could have we started. You know, it's a technical product, it's something that we we've appealed to what we'll call sophisticated media buyers and execs, right, uh, which is fine. But you know, we really we need to make it easier to use, and that's when people make that complaint, like, yeah, it's true, we're getting better. I think we're much better now than we were in the beginning.
Speaker 2:And we're getting better all the time. With regards to that, our first customer was the Ridge, if you're familiar with them, ridgecom, and so, yeah, I, I mean they're a very skid team and you know uh so for them you know they may use our product in ways we weren't even thinking sometimes, which is cool.
Speaker 2:It's great to have smart customers, right, uh, but we need we also need to appeal to people where, like you said, like not where it's not make it so complicated yeah, we put a couple of uh smbs on our solution to start.
Speaker 1:Even though that's not really our icp, that was the one that we could service at that at that particular moment with the evolution of the product, and one of them like just absolutely ripped it apart and it was off. It was, it was awesome, it was super valuable and beneficial for us. Um, you know, because I had to sit there for the last year and a half and listen to our product yeah, tell me how easy it was to use the solution. And I'm like, yeah, I get it, maybe for like mid-market and above. But you're putting this smb entrepreneur type on, you know, into your product, who is also a s founder themselves, like she's part, and it was. It was great to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. You just got to keep going. Like I said, try to get better every day, you know.
Speaker 1:How do you get that? First, you know, take me from the inception of the idea to like we have the product in market and we finally have that paying customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I don't want to bore everyone with too many details here, but long story short. I felt confident that machine learning well, ai was the future machine learning and I felt like we could find a way to provide cleaner, faster, better signal for people in marketing and attribution. That our CTO, dan Wang, felt like the advancements in processing speed and machine learning and AI would enable us to provide a better data source for customers. That was our thesis, right? And so, yeah, we I forget which CEO there was a CEO said find a crowded market where, like, no one really likes a solution and build something that is like 10X better or way you know way better. And so, yeah, that was our approach is like 10x better or way better.
Speaker 1:And so yeah, that was our approach. That's essentially what we're doing on our end here as well. I like hearing that, because sometimes you hear from people oh, you know, the space is too crowded and in my head. I'm thinking, yeah, it's crowded because nobody has any idea what the hell they're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's like I met this guy recently named Danny Meyer. Do you know who he is?
Speaker 1:He's the founder of Shake Shack.
Speaker 2:Shake Shack, right, and like. He owns some great restaurants in New York too. I'm actually going to one of his other ones in a few weeks in New York and you know if you had pitched to a lot of people oh, I'm making another burger place. There's a lot of burger places, right. Like, why are you making another burger place? Right, just turns out, if you make a great burger I mean, I don't eat a ton of burgers, to be clear, but you know, if you make a lot of, if you make a great burger, people are going to go. So the rest is history, right. So I buy that. Crowded markets are tough. You just have to be highly differentiated and really great. You have to be orders of magnitude better than what's out there. Maybe you can't just be slightly better?
Speaker 2:You've got to be like a lot, lot better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially software. You have the switching costs, all that other stuff that goes into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're marginally better, who cares? If it's just a little better. Who cares?
Speaker 1:You've got to be like.
Speaker 2:That's the challenge of a founder for you, me, everyone else is. You have to deliver on that. Your customers depend on it.
Speaker 1:I find the sales process to be much easier, though, because you already have something to sort of use as a, as a, as a goalpost. You know the people that you're selling into. They already know what it is that you're selling within reason. It's not like you're bringing something to the market.
Speaker 2:That's oh, that's a good point, yeah like you don't have to teach people what a burger, is right? Yeah, I think they know what a burger is. That's your point. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:I don't think I'm going to come up with any new food concepts anytime soon there you go so if you weren't doing this, what would you be doing?
Speaker 2:you're gonna laugh at this answer ballet dancer. I love ballet. It's a weird answer, isn't it?
Speaker 1:right, I guess it's weird do you dance ballet or do you I?
Speaker 2:love. I love ballet. Yeah, don't ask me what I always love. I grew up loving dance. I think dance is cool. Um, I grew up going to the ballet with my family. Uh, did a little bit, uh, so yeah I just I think ballet is awesome you're right, I was not.
Speaker 1:I was not expecting that, yeah, um, well, in terms of like actual, you know, hands-on insights within the media buying space in 2025, I've seen yeah, you know people talking about apple oven. I've seen a push towards some direct mail. I've seen more and more brands try and think about media diversification. Right, is that overblown, you know? Is Meta still the tried and true platform and it's going to continue to be that way? Or is there some real like juice behind some of these other acquisition channels?
Speaker 2:I think it's both. I think Meta is still tried and true, great platform, great for reaching audiences. They have a great large and effective audience. They've got really smart people that work there that are finding ways to connect with those folks. So they're not going away and they'll be. In my personal opinion, they'll increase in value over time. They'll just do better, I think Meta time, uh, they'll just do better, I think meta. But also you do have a lot of new platforms popping up, uh like an app, love and and uh, like you said, I think direct mail works for some customers, right? Um?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think there's a and there's an emergence of new ways to reach customers, which is great for brands and or not just brands anyone doing doing marketing right, Trying to connect out there. I think it's exciting that there are more ways to do it. Obviously, that was part of our thesis with Northbeam. You were asking early on like why Part of it was. We anticipated the proliferation of channels and complexity of how customers engage, so that was part of our initial thesis too. So anyway, hopefully I answered your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it making it more or less complicated when it comes to actually measuring attribution? Oh, more complicated way more complicated.
Speaker 2:That's the thing. It's a hard problem, right Like that's when you ask the question like, uh, about data?
Speaker 2:like, yeah, it's hard, this is not some like I mean, what, if it wasn't hard, then anyone could do it? Right, and it's easy. So that's always the conundrum, right. Like a lot of people early on would make fun of us like, oh, that's too hard and it's, but people tried it and do it. You know, like, a lot of the naysaying stuff right, and in some ways they were right, but the reality is that's where the opportunity is. If you can solve really hard problems that are, like, extremely challenging, that require incredible expertise, domain knowledge and technical acumen, that's gives you an advantage, right. And also, like the CEO of NVIDIA says, how much pain can you endure? He talks about pain tolerance. He's right, it's a lot of pain too.
Speaker 1:I've never had any pain. It's the easiest you will.
Speaker 2:Or, as he says, he wishes it upon you, right? Yeah, he's funny, good stuff.
Speaker 1:So, for those that are listening, what's like the time where NorthBeam makes sense for an e-com brand. What are the pain points? What do they look like in terms of size, revenue? Yeah good question.
Speaker 2:What it really boils down to is are you a company that is looking to aggressively scale and you have the resources right? So, yeah, generally not the best fit for, like, really small companies where you're still kind of figuring out you know, you're just testing meta and Google maybe, and you're not.
Speaker 2:Your setup is simple. We would advise you just to figure out. You know you're just testing meta and Google maybe, and you're not. Your setup is simple. We would advise you just to figure out. Learn your creative, learn what works and maybe don't pay for an Orpheum quite yet, right?
Speaker 2:But once you're at a place where you've got, you know, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands to spend on media and you're going to diversify your mix and you're you're going to press on the gas and you have the capital to do it, then that's where it starts to make more sense. So you could be a small business that's well capitalized, that understands what you know, knows where you're going and you're getting ready to push. You'd be a good fit. Conversely, you could be like a bigger company that like doesn't really want to invest in marketing. That much is just kind of cruising along. I still think we could help in that regard because we can provide insights on what could work. But you know, if the, if the desire is not there, maybe not as good of a fit. Yeah, got it.
Speaker 1:That makes sense, Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights with me, and I'm sure you'll have some folks who are fed up with trying to measure all this. You know all these different channels that they have going on and hopefully we'll see how that goes. But thank you for coming on Before we hop, do you want people to know where they could find you and connect with you online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, on LinkedIn it's M Austin Harrison. So just a letter m in front of my name, um, same on twitter or x. I should say same on x, um. And then northbeamio is our website. My email is austin at northbeamio. Uh, yeah, I, that's it. I probably shouldn't put out my phone number.
Speaker 1:When are you going to change it to northbeamai?
Speaker 2:We had that domain very, very early on and, yeah, we purposely didn't. Like I said, our CTO is very like I don't know how to say it, but just wants to say that AI is a portion of what we do, but there's a lot more and that would insinuate that's all we do, right? So we opted, not very early on, not to use it. For that reason, Makes sense.
Speaker 1:It feels like every website I see now is aiai and we're guilty of it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's cool. Well, we bought it, but we'll stick with what we got.
Speaker 1:We're good, Seems like it's working so far Well. Again, thank you for coming on. For everybody who's listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at brandonamorosocom and scalistai. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2:See ya.