November 26, 2025 • 37 mins
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Tracksuit co-founder and chief commercial officer Matt Herbert explains how the startup is using brand data to help marketers navigate an era of economic uncertainty, shifting consumer behaviour and AI-driven search.
“The edge that we brought to it was simplifying the fundamentals and making it incredibly accessible,” he says of Tracksuit’s dashboard of brand tracking indicators, which is now used by over 1,000 customers globally to track around 10,000 brands.
Herbert traces his obsession with brands back to childhood, recalling growing up playing football for Eastern Suburbs in Auckland, where McDonald’s Player of the Day branding made an impression on him. That early fascination with how brands connect with people ultimately led him through roles at Uber and Snapchat analytics startup Mish Guru, and on to founding Tracksuit.
From those formative experiences, Herbert and friend and co-founder Connor Archbold drew a blueprint for global expansion that they are now applying at Tracksuit. Advertising and branding guru James Hurman came on board as a co-founder to apply his insights to the Tracksuit platform, incubating the company into his Previously Unavailable innovation studio.
The Uber blueprint
“Uber to me still has one of the best blueprints of how to scale globally fast and effectively… starting one market, win the next market, hire great people, empower and scale out and go where the demand is,” Herbert said of the ride-hailing platform.
That thinking now underpins Tracksuit’s carefully sequenced move from New Zealand into Australia, the US and the UK. Herbert’s mission is to shift marketers’ focus from short-term clicks to long-term brand building.
“Most businesses have been so focused on sales and conversions and performance marketing where you put a dollar into Meta, and you get three dollars back,” he said.
“Then it got to a point where you were putting a dollar in, and you were getting 80 cents back. Everybody had been so focused on converting at the expense of building your business and your brands over the long term.”
To explain that imbalance, he shares a favourite thought experiment from marketing effectiveness expert and Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman. In a room of people, Herbert asks who is buying a phone in the next three months. Only a few hands go up. Then he asks who will buy a phone in the next two years.
“Everybody's hand goes up,” he says. “That right there is the concept of what marketing's job [is] to do… you've also got to build awareness and familiarity and connection with those who aren't ready to buy from you right now, but will do down the track.” Tracksuit’s dashboard is designed to make that long-term job visible and measurable.
Throw out the hundred-page PDF
Tracksuit’s answer was to build a software platform that pulls the essence out of expensive research reports and puts it into a live, always-on view of brand health.
“We were basically getting told we'd love just to see the exact summary of the big research reports that we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on in a hundred-page PDF,” he recalled of early interviews with chief marketing officers.
“We actually just want to see the exact summary. How big is our market? How well is our brand known and considered? What do people think and feel about us and how does that compare to the competitors?”
That customer discovery led directly to Tracksuit’s first product and revenue.
“After 67 conversations, we had 11 businesses pay us upfront annual licenses,” Herbert said.
“We took the first $110,000 and built the first prototype of the product. We didn't have a product, but we had the likes of Simplicity and Allpress and Good George Beer and Auckland Council, all of these really early brands that took a punt on us, and we built the first version and from there we continue to scale out.”
Fast-forward four and a half years and Herbert says Tracksuit has assembled “one of the largest data sets on brand health on consumer brands in the world.”
The company raised $42 million in June in a series B funding round with the proceeds to be used to expand Tracksuit’s US presence and drive growth in Europe and Asia.
The rise of agentic engine optimisation
Herbert said Tracksuit had embraced artificial intelligence, which was helping reshape the brand landscape as internet search and digital marketing were transformed by it. Tracksuit is using AI to accelerate insight delivery and supercharge internal workflows.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Business of Tech powered by Two Degrees Business.
I'm Peter Griffin and this week I'm in London with
the first of two interviews with promising New Zealand startups
using London as a beachhead into the European market. It's
an odd atmosphere in London, to be honest. The place
is bustling as usual, so many tourists, so much business
going on. It's one of the true commercial centers off Europe.
(00:26):
But the UK post Brexit has some serious issues with
significant budget shortfalls and a sluggish economy. But it's always
a great place to do business. As Matt Herbert, the
co founder of Auckland headquartered startup Tracksuit, explained to me
in this episode. Tracksuit is one of the country's hottest
startups at the moment, having enjoyed phenomenal growth and raised
(00:50):
forty two million dollars in a Series B funding round
in June. Tracksuit is revolutionizing the way brands track their
health and reputation, making powerful brand analytics accessible to not
just Fortune five hundreds, but also to up and coming
challenger brands. We'll explore tracksuits journey from a New Zealand
idea to a global operation, tracking over ten thousand brands
(01:14):
and attracting major funding from the world's top consumer investors.
Matt opens up about building a tech business through recessions
and why maintaining a uniquely keyweed DNA humility, simplicity, cutting
edge tech, and a fair dose of self deprecating humor
is key to standing out internationally. So if you want
an inside view on building a data driven tech company,
(01:37):
riding the wave of AI disruption.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
And bringing a unique New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Perspective to global markets, you want want to miss this
conversation with Tracksuits Matt Herbert, recorded at the company's UK
headquarters in London. Here's the interview with Matt. So, Matt,
(02:01):
welcome to the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
How are you doing very well? Nice to see you.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, nice to see you. And we're in this pretty
flash looking working space here in Farringdon and London tech Space.
It's called how did you find your way here?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Tech Space? Yes, we moved in here early in the year.
It's one of I think the best co working spaces
that I've seen over my career. We have a team
of twenty here in an office. We're actually gravitated a
few more Australian and New Zealand founders and companies in here,
so nice to see some familiar faces, but also good
to be in the heart of London.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, and this is really your bridgehead into the UK.
As you say, you've got what twenty staff here. You
raise some money earlier in the year to fund your expansion,
which is great, and the US, which is your biggest
market now. So we'll get into all of that, but
really just want to dial back a little bit to
recap how you came to track. So you've got a
(03:00):
a really interesting career in the lead up to this.
Give us the part in history all the way back
to uber and mish Guru, the sort of brand adjacent
stuff that got you thinking about in formulating the idea.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
For a crack suit. That's right. Yeah, Hey, well I
think my career. If I look back on my career,
I've always been someone that has had a great interest
in brands. I'll even go back to when I was
playing soccer football at Eastern Suburbs and Auckland and McDonald's
sponsored Player of the Day. I look back, that is
one of the greatest brand marketing plays for McDonald's. How
(03:35):
do you get in there right from the start on
the football fields. And I've always kind of thought of
myself as someone quite interested in creative industries, but never
thought of myself as the artist or the painter. But
how do I connect kind of creativity in business? And
that's kind of been a big part of what we've
been doing at track Suit. But if I look back,
the really fundamental change in my my career was when
(03:58):
I had the oupper unity to join the early team
with the rollout of Uber in New Zealand in twenty fourteen.
I was studying christ Church, studying law and science, but
also basically doing as much as I could with the
Uber team and for me having the experience and the
connection of a mass Uber was a massive business and
a massive brand coming out of the Northern Hemisphere. But
(04:20):
this was before the regulations, before people knew what Uber were,
and you know, how do you try to talk to
people about jumping in a stranger's car? And now you
look at what Uber's done, And I look back on
those couple of years really really fondly in terms of brands,
business but operating like a startup.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, because it was controversial, it was sort of a
gray area in the law about what it was to
be an operator. You had Travis you know, this is
very hide charging CEO and founder of Uber at the time,
who was under pressured to you know, to get out
there and get as much traction as possible. But the
(05:00):
brand caught on very quickly. What do you think in reflection,
it was about Uber that just made it such a
something that people were attracted to.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I think looking back, Uber to me still has one
of the best blueprints of how to scale globally fast
and effectively. It was I mean, they made the call
to put young, smart, hungry people into new markets like Auckland,
will Sydney, and they just said, gone figure it out.
It was supported by Global but there was a team
(05:29):
in Auckland and New Zealand. I think it was twelve
of us Richard Menzies and Michael Cook, the two early
guys at Uber. They had to lobby governments, there was regulations,
there was the whole process around how do you disrupt
and change industries in the right way. But there was
a formula which I think a lot of businesses now
everybody's still trying to figure out how do you grow
(05:52):
at scale and how do you empower teams and how
do you get the right people in to go to market.
Then man Uber did a phenomenal job and so a
lot of my time there and my experience with Ubert
has ultimately led to a lot of the way I
and we have looked at how do we grow tracksuit,
which is quite cool to reflect on around starting one market,
(06:14):
when the next market, hire great people, empower and scale
out and go with the demanders. So yeah, Goober was great.
And then Miss Guru started by some great guys Tom
Jacob and Ashok and first time founders out of New Zealands,
saw snapchatters of social media popping up and every brand
(06:35):
and agency in the world McDonald's Pepsie Union lever was
trying to figure out there's a whole lot of young
people in a way to connect with young people, but
how do you go about it? And so the Miss
Guru team early days basically built Snapchat onto a computer
so that the biggest brands and agencies in the world
could manage their Snapchat accounts. And it was wildfire, it was.
(06:55):
And so I had a few friends that was there.
I joined. I must have joined in the first kind
of ten people. That's where I met my now co
founder Connor started on the same day we look back,
this is eight years ago or so, sitting in Wynyard Quarter.
Connor was going to New York. I was going over
to Australia and that's where we really got into the
world of brands, marketing, technology startups. Marketing analytics has been
(07:18):
a really great transition into what we're doing now TRAKSU.
But misgu was a phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and really sort of interesting strategy. I guess it
was off the time. Snapchat was on the ascendancy at
the time, so building a sort of a platform and
a business around it made sense.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, it made a lot of sense, and every brand,
every agency wanted to be on it. And there are
a whole lot of learnings as well that came with
the growth of MSGREU was built on and reliant on
another business which has its which has it highs and lows.
I remember, I think it might have been one of
the Kardashian I think it was Kendall or Kylie Jenner
who tweeted something about him off Snapchat, right, And there
(07:55):
was the time that even the co founder was changing
a whole lot of the designs and all the social
media manager goes, well, it's naturally going to be around
and the YouTube stories and Instagram stories and it was
such a volatile but fast moving but interesting place. Unfortunately
Snapchat kind of went off the boil a little bit,
and you know, and and and so and so did
some of the some of the business but amazing learning
(08:17):
experiences and highlights of working with the biggest brands, the
biggest agencies and building technology that no one else was doing.
So yeah, and yeah, Connor and I met each other
on the on the first day there, and four and
a half years later we're into tracksit.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, incredible, and it seems like the real sort of
driving idea was you're working with all these brands and
a lot of them are deep pocketed companies, so they
can afford to buy a lot of analysis about about
their brands. But not every company can can do that.
And I know this in New Zealand, we probably underinvest
(08:53):
and you know, we invest in the in the bottom
of the funnel stuff the sales because you can track that.
You can see this is shifting the new in terms
of what our salespeople are doing, what our advertising is doing.
But further up, trying to get to build an audience
and build brand loyalty. We underinvest in that and I
think that's what the what you were aiming at was
try and democratize us. How can you build a dashboard
(09:15):
that you can track everything there is to know about
your brand and the sentiment about your brand. It's not
going to cost you fifty thousand dollars a year to
do it.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
That's right. I was fortunate to link back up with Connor.
We're both ended up back in New Zealand around the pandemic,
and then we're spending a lot of time with a
guy called James Herman who's got his studio previous and
available in Auckland, one of the world leading marketing effectiveness leaders,
and as well as working with TRA the research agency.
And it was Yeah, it was this concept of for
(09:45):
the last fifteen years, businesses have been so focused on
sales and conversions and performance marketing, where you put a
dollar in Semessa and you get three dollars back in
finance teams and hunting teams could understand finally, what on
earth is our marketing dollars doing. Then it got to
(10:05):
a point where you were putting a dollar in and
you were getting eighty cents back. Oh no, this doesn't
actually work anymore. The cost of acquisition, the efficiencies of
those digital channels, and as you were saying, everybody had
been so focused on converting at the expense of building
your business and your brands over the long term. And
there's this really nice and effective audience engagement with piece
(10:28):
we do, whether it's a key notes, and it's come
from James and his concept of James Herman and his
concept of future demand. And we look at the audience
and you say, you know, marketing has really got two roles,
and we'll present this and so ask the audience who
here is considering buying a phone in the next three months,
And depending on the size, you might get two, three,
four hands go up. And then the next question is
(10:50):
who's considering buying a phone in the next two years,
And everybody's hand goes up, right, And it's like that,
right there is the concept of what marketing's job to do.
You need to sell to the people that are ready
to buy from you. Great, they might be five percent
of the room, but you've also got to build awareness
and familiarity and connection with those who aren't ready to
buy from you. Right now, but we'll do down the track.
(11:10):
And that's the role of brand building, and that's the
role of increasing awareness and familiarity. But there hasn't been
a way to kind of measure and communicate that. And
so that was the hypothesis with with tracks. How do
you build a company and a platform that really highlights
how well are we building, how well our business is known, considered,
and what people think can feel. Now, we want to
do this all the time and we'll make this a
(11:32):
really important part that helps drive business decisions. And so
four and a half years ago we set out to
go and take that to the world.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And obviously there's you know, there's there's market research that's
surveying and that sort of thing, but there's other signals
as well to sort of get that real time sort
of view, social media channels and all that. So how
did you approach putting all of that together into this
sort of dashboard for a big brand to be able
to pivot based on that information. Okay, this is working,
(12:00):
we need to do something else. I mean, it was
a lot of big incumbent players that were working in
this space. What was the edge that you brought to it?
Speaker 2 (12:07):
The edge that we brought to it was simplifying the
fundamentals and making it incredibly accessible and so there is
no shortage of data and analytics and insights out there,
but how do you make it simplified and for something
that people are actually going to use? And so that's
what we took with tracks that we see what are
the biggest research businesses in the world doing when it
(12:29):
comes to brand tracking. We went and spoke to We
had a list of one hundred cmos and brand directors
in New Zealand and we said, when it comes to
brand tracking, what do you like? What are you not like?
Here's an idea that we think might solve you solve
your problems based on what we've heard from you. And
we're basically getting told we'd love just to see the
exec summary of the big research reports that were spending
(12:52):
hundreds of thousands of dollars on in one hundred page pdf.
We actually just want to see the exec summary. How
big is our market, how well is our brand known
and considered, what do people think and feel about us?
And how does that compare to the competitors. And we
basically said, if we could give that to you all
the time for a fraction of the cost, how do
you feel? And after sixty seven conversations, we had eleven
(13:14):
businesses pay us upfront, annual subscription, angual licenses. And so
we took the first one hundred and ten thousand dollars
and built the first prototype of the product. And that's
what the early stages of track suits. So we didn't
have a product, but we had the likes of Simplicity
and all Press and Good George Bear and Walkland Counts
all some of these really early brands that took a
(13:36):
punt on us, and we built the built the first version,
delivered and from there we continue to scale out.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Well, you've got what over one thousand customers now, yeah,
over a thousand customers and tracking over ten thousand brands.
We've we've got one of the largest data sets on
brand t health, on consumer brands in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So it's early days though as well.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
It is, Yeah, but I mean you raised twenty five
million dollars recently Series B fundraising, and interestingly about that,
some of the money going in there was from sort
of investors who have a consumer brand sort of background,
so they're obviously going, wow, you know, this is exactly
what the sorts of coffee brands or whatever. We invest
(14:19):
in consumer fast moving consumer good brands. This is the
missing bit, so we want to invest in that. Yeah,
we're fortunate to have had great investors.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
We bootstrapped the business for the first eighteen months and
so we needed to have a really responsible an efficient business,
which was great. Then we raised our seed round from
Blackbird and ice House were involved in that. We did
our Series A from Altas and footwork out in San Francisco,
and then the most recent our Series B was led
by VMG, who you're talking about now on VMG is
(14:50):
a really well respected consumer fund out of the US
who have also been building out their consumer technology. So
they're really looking at we know how great brands and
businesses in the consumer space are built, whether it's a
Spindre of Sparkling Water or Quest Protein bars, or you
look at their portfolio in the US, it's incredible. But
(15:11):
they were also looking at what is the technology that
helps these businesses make great decisions, and so it was,
you know, from a strategic perspective, the links into the
US consumer brands and while we can also play a
really important part from the technology that we're providing vmgs
being fantastic and a really great partnership.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, and I've heard I think you guys say yourself
but also commentators that have looked at the product that
you are a very product centric business. What does that
mean to be like that? I think Rod Drury considered
himself that as well. He wanted to make accounting software
sexy with Zero, and it seems like there's a bit
(15:50):
of that ethos and what you're doing with brand tracking software.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think there are a lot of parallels without but
without actually thinking about it or being intense all looking
at what Zero had done. It very similar Zero making
accounting sexy. I mean, we hope to make market research sexy.
I don't know if too many people that grow up
or speak to course or careers advice and they say,
you know, it would be a great industry market research,
(16:16):
but such a big and important industry. And from a
product lens, that's what we've wanted to do at Trasitors
have a really great product that's incredibly easy to use,
it's intuitive, it's accessible, and it drives this common language.
And that's really what we want to do. How do
we drive a common language to help people measure and
communicate the value of brand common language. Whether you're a marketer,
(16:39):
whether you are an insights professional, where you're a CSFO,
we give you a really simple, clean, effective way to
understand what do we need to do as a business
and is what we're doing working. Yeah, So from a
product lends you know, the technology and the scale of
what we've been able to do within research to bring
it down to a fraction of the cost to keep
it simple while also really investing to our own brand
(17:00):
as well. So it's product, it's brand that it's focusing
on the ends the end customer. But from a brand,
I mean when I see our software engineers talk at
the Snowflake conference and doing team nutes and they're wearing tracksuits,
I mean our whole team buys into the brand that
we're building and we're trying to be a reflection of
the power that a brand has as well as a
(17:21):
good product and pricing and packaging and distribution. So if
we can do the fundamentals hopefully of marketing effectiveness and fundamentals,
then that's what we're trying to support each of each
of our customers do.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, it's sort of a challenging area to working because
obviously maintaining a competitive and a really attractive product is
a challenge in itself, and you've got to build a
high performance team to do that, which you've done. But
it's also a fast moving industry that you're focused on,
which is market research and branding. So interesting how you
(17:56):
sort of keep on the cutting edge of that. Presumably
you've got really good, really relationship with the ones who
are out there on the front line doing market research
and getting insights into thousands of consumers around the world.
But then you've got you've got big, sort of massive
shifts around artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Search is changing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
AI platforms like Perplexity and nowt of becoming search engines
and buying or creating their own web browsers, So you've
got to keep on top all of that as well.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
That's right, And so there's four pillars that I really
look at. It's around our brand, strategy, expertise, our research expertise.
We are fundamentally here technology business, so how world leading
in our technology and then our own brand. So those
are kind of the four pillars to say, if we
can be world leading in each of those four, then
(18:49):
we'll know we're confident that we'll stay ahead and lead
the lead the industry. And so there's absolutely these changes
in the research, but then there's also the speed that
products can be built now means that you know, we've
got to be right on top of and ahead of
best in brand technology research in our own brand and
the you know, the artificial intelligence and AI and just
(19:10):
the signals that are coming through now, that's where we're
really positioning tracts it as how do we be the
place to understand how well your brands know and consider
what people think and feel that surveys, that's panels, and
there's you know, that whole world is changing as well,
and so what's the hybrid of real people and synthetic
data and socialisting and the changes in search. Ultimately the
(19:33):
end of the day, we're still answering and helping people
answer that question how well are we knowing what do
people think and feel? And that can come from a
lot of places now.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
In terms of artificial intelligence, is it having much of
a role in your development process in terms of creating
code right now?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's something that we've had ingrained and tracks it right
from the big the first big change that we were
able to do as a technology business was the speed
at which we could deliver insights. And so instead of
having fifty data scientists or analysts at a research consultancy
taking six weeks to analyze results and create a PDF
(20:17):
and come and present it to you, we could basically
do that within a couple of days or instantaneously. So
the speed of data also leading to large language models
and the ability to look at perceptions and analyze sentiment
around brands. And now there's all the internal workflows. Coding
is a huge, huge part of that. Our chief of staff, sorry,
(20:41):
our Dan, our VP of Strategy and Ops, was using
some agentic AI workflows and built and an AEO product
how well is your brand showing up? And the likes
of Claude and Perplexity and chat gbtow. He did that
within a weekend, over six hours. So you look at
(21:01):
that and obviously you know it was just a prototype
and a test, but just goes to show how fast
things can be spun up. Now, so we'll lean into that.
We are leaning into that we'll always have this mix
of great humans and technology coming together to get most
out of it.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, what does your take sort of seeing all of
this going on around what is facing brands as the
way that people discover their products starts to change that.
You know, we're talking about zero click sort of situation
now where you might go to the Google search engine
(21:38):
and hopefully you'll be featured in the AI overviews section
that people are increasingly reading on top of search results.
They may not even actually go to your website, but
they may come away with some information about your brand
or your product. That's a complete shift away from it
was all about pushing people towards your website previously.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
There is a shift happening and the way that brands
are being kind of awareness and consideration these new search engines,
where's chat, GBT, where it's clawed, whether it's you know,
Google and geminized. It's something that absolutely businesses need to
take take a look at and be aware of. And
(22:19):
I think there's also a world in which it's still
you know, it's like SEO. Back in the day, marketing
needed to optimize for a search engine optimization. There are
keywords how do you rank on the first page of Google?
There was a whole school of thought and a whole
an approach to doing that. You know, I don't know
(22:40):
what that When SEO was the first thing that came out,
but this has called the last kind of ten to
fifteen years and so now it's the aegentic engine optimization.
So definitely something to look at play a part of.
But there's these crazies that come through and stay on
top of it, be aware of it. But I think
is also a world and where people still want to
(23:03):
have a depth of experience where shopping, I think is
an interesting one to look at into that shopping where
Instagram comes out, where you can hate a click to
buy a buy a T shirt. I has heard that
the VP of marketing at Footlockers speak recently who said,
we're all worried about what one click shopping was going
to do. But right now social shopping accounts for something
(23:24):
like fifteen percent of total e commerce. So people are
still wanting a shopping experience. You will still want to
come to your website to learn more, to browse, to
see what else is going on. And so I don't
think it's going to be one click and done forever.
But absolutely within the space of how's your brand or business,
no one explored, considered understood we'd need to be aware
(23:45):
of what these are, what these search engines are doing.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
I guess the other trend it's in the last few
years around brands that has become apparent is how quickly
brand sentiment can be created or destroyed, driven by social media.
So we've seen the the whole sort of woke criticism,
you know, with people bending the need football players or
bud Light being criticized for an ad campaign it was
(24:08):
considered to be woke or something like that. Presumably you
can see the signals straight away when sentiment starts to
turn it against a brand for some of the activity
that it's been doing in the marketplace. One of the
roles that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
We play at tracks it is we give an objective
view around what is the whole market of consumers thin
can feel about a brand. And over the course of
history there will be brands who have done good things
and done bad things and had debate, and you know,
we remain objective and representing what is the actual conversation
going out. I think there was an interesting one to
look at is around the American Eagle campaign. I'm not
(24:45):
sure if you familiar with the American Eagle A you.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Eb to just summarize what that was.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
One of the one of the campaigns we're talking about
is the debate or the backlash around American Eagle who
came out with a campaign with Sydney Sweeney around blue genes,
and readers can go and have a look at either
side of it and you know, valid and a lot
of cases, I think maybe over overstated in some or
(25:10):
I don't know exactly what the decision making process oil
or the intent behind it, but it was one that
got especially in the US, it got it was really
really polarizing, especially on social media and particular parts of
the US, around who was representing the company, what they
were talking about blonde, blue eyes genes, and it sparked,
and it sparked debate, you know, for various reasons, and
(25:31):
a whole lot of the question, oh my gosh, how
damaging is this going to be to the brand? What's
it going to do? And what we're able to do
attracts it and the role that we play as an
objective measurement partners, we give just that reflection around what
does the total consumer group actually think and feel, And
when you segment it by different demographics or regions or
parts of countries, you're able to start to see where
(25:54):
are perceptions shifting where might we need to react, how
well do we need to react? But from what we saw,
it hasn't had as bigger impact as potentially what people
thought if you were only on particular social media channels
every single day and their share price I think went
up anyway as well. But yeah, not to get in
kind of the politics of it, but really interesting to
(26:17):
look at what signals as a business or someone working,
what signals are you looking at and how are you
looking not in your own echo chamber. It's very easy
to get hyped up around your own water cooler because
you're thinking and concerned with your brandle your business every
single day. You know, you know what your business means
(26:37):
or should mean. You're talking about it every single day,
But consumers aren't thinking about your business every single day,
and so how do you get that two way feedback?
But brands can bounce back as well. Yeah, it doesn't
need to be to the defining thing for a brand.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And I guess taking that evidence data driven approach is,
you know, don't necessarily freak out if suddenly you're getting
criticism going viral about you. What are the actual underlying
signals saying about what the bulk of your consumers actually
think about the brand. That's the important thing and that's
what you.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Bring to it. That's all right, and we absolutely support
the internal reflection and the ongoing what should our strategy be,
what should our messaging be, and how do we iterate
in the right way? Ongoing and so a reflection of
the market is what we're giving our customers, brands and businesses.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So one thousand customers now as you say, ten thousand
brands that you're tracking, which is great, and you've sort
of from a pricing point of view, democratized the cost
of doing that, which is to a more manageable cost.
So you can get smaller companies tracking their brands as well,
which is great. That capital that you raise, presumably that's
(27:45):
gone into creating a beachhead in the UK, in the
US where you have what thirty people in the US,
you've got one hundred and fifty across Australian in New Zealand. Now,
what else does that cash give you in terms of
runway to do? Now?
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, so the cash was raised to just fuel what
we wanted to do and so as continue to set
up our teams and markets and support our customers in
the Northern Hemisphere, the US and the UK. Just this
week we've announced that we're now tracking twenty five international
markets and so if you want brand tracking in Italy
or in Germany or in Singapore, that can be done now.
(28:26):
And so really doing more of what we've been providing
our customers based off the back of the demands US
and UK businesses saying can you do this in Europe?
Can you do this in Asia? Same as Australian businesses
we've got growing we've got growing markets in Southeast Asia
or in the US, and so just being able to
follow and provide value for our customers and agencies in
(28:47):
the markets that they want as well as well as
continue to double down on our products, innovation and the
velocity all focused on how do we build the best
company possible for people that using brand to drive back
great businesses and advanced technology and the go to market teams.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
What's the key we DNA off this business? You know
that you want to continue to imprint, you know, no
matter how big it gets, the New.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Zealand story will always be part of the part of
the folklore of Tracksuit. Every year or for the last
couple of years, we've done a team off site where
we've flown everybody into New Zealand to connect with each other.
You know, great connection culture, you know, go over the
you know what are what are our core values and
how do we operate and setting these markets up and
(29:36):
it's it's really cool about to bring people from the UK,
from the from the US into New Zealand and show
here this is the home of where Tracksuit was, but
also being really intentional about we want to grow a
global business and that's why we've got one of the
first exercises we did, what are our core values? Put
them on a whiteboard. We just struck them off that
(29:58):
it might sound good, but do we really live and
breathe it. And we got down to about five or
six of our core values which have stayed the same,
things like be a cheerleader and a champion for each other,
for the industry, for brandsen champion brand, keep it simple,
leave it better than you found it. Simplicity is a superpower.
(30:20):
So these have allowed us to really deepen underlying fabric
of who we are, what's the type of business, how
do we operate, how do we hire and have that
core underlying fabric. Whether you're in Auckland Sydney, London, New York, Melbourne.
You can tell its tracksuit and the way we show
(30:40):
up and how we operate, But London, New York, Sydney, Auckland, Melbourn,
they're all different than their own right. And I think
that's the thing that we've wanted to make sure is
that the London office is here to support great UK
businesses and brands build great businesses. The US is is
uniquely positioned that this is tracksuit for the US, but
(31:03):
you do know it's tracksit and that's that underlife Fairbrook
and I think it's a bit of probably Kiwi humor, humility,
humor not taking ourselves too serious. And I think that's
resonating quite quite well across the across the markets, especially
compared to kind of traditional market research.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, and that classic Kiwi thing which a lot of
our company has been very good at, which is frankly
doing it cheaper as well, you know, doing doing it more,
creating a more affordable product, whether it's Sir Peter Beck
with his electron rocket or you know zero or whatever.
It's actually that's a disruptive quality. I think of what
(31:43):
you're doing in others is that it's like this doesn't
have to cost fifty thousand dollars a year. We can
actually create a beautiful dashboard with all irrelevant information and
that one pdf that they are New Zealand customers who
are asking for for a fraction of the price and
make it sustainable business out of it.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
A great thing about coming out of New Zealand was
New Zealand we have a small population and we had
to figure out how do we do market research with
a small population at scale? And so from a technology standpoint,
it forced us to go, there's only a small group
of people, how do we still provide reliable, robust, statistically
significant scale of research and insights. And then when you
(32:19):
go into other markets, it's like, well we've done it
with five six million people when most other populations are
a little larger than that. So that was a great
forcing function, absolutely forcing function. How to do it better, cheaper,
more effective and you can have all of it.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
We're rapidly approaching the end of the year. It won't
be the big holiday time for you, as it will
be for a lot of year tracksuit colleagues who'll be
heading the beach. Hopefully we get a decent summer, but
interest in your views on what twenty twenty six is
going to look like. Obviously things are uneven economically around
the world. New Zealand's not looking so flash at the moment,
(32:57):
some of the signals. Australia is sort of coming back
a bit. The US market seems to defire gravity at
the moment in terms of the stock market. And but yeah,
interested in what the outlook it is and is your
business dependent to some extent on it being a buoyant market,
or how do you help your businesses when things are tough?
Is it even more important in a recessionary environment to
(33:21):
really understand what people think of your brand.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
We found a track suit at at the back end
of the pandemic. So it's a really interesting time, I
think to be building businesses. I think since that time
in twenty one, I think there's probably been three different
recessions or hints of recessions globally, and so there'll always
be there will always be something, and that's why it's
really important for us to be building a sustainable, responsible
business that isn't relying on continuing to raise external capital
(33:48):
just to just to keep the lights on. And so
that's what we're really focused on. Building a responsible and
enduring business. It helps that we're a cost effective solution
in the market. And so if we can help businesses
and agencies and brands free up budget to keep their
marketing working, to continue to build awareness and marketing activity
(34:09):
and not drain at all on research, but also given
them the right signals. I think that's helped us to
be where we're at and continue to be really confident
in the market. It's cost effective. It's incredibly important to
businesses and also for businesses if you can keep your
marketing going through times of recessions has proved time and
time again that you come out far stronger than when
(34:30):
people cut budget. If you can keep marketing, keep building
your brands, stay top of minds, then your consistency of
sales continues, Whereas if you turn off and go dark
and then try to pop up two years later, people
have forgotten about you. And so it's really important to
keep it on and being cost effective. That's the way
that we are able to support and each market, each
(34:52):
region is always going through, is always going through something.
I think visibility in the Northern Hemisphere Europe back out
to Apac Australian there's always something going on. But it's
staying true to who we work with, how we build
the business, and keeping the lights on.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Really yeah, it goes back to what you said at
the start, you know, which is like, you know, five
percent of the people in front of I. You may
be willing and able to buy your product right now,
it's the ninety five percent who if you appeal to
them well through good brand marketing down the track, we'll
be able to put their hand up when the economy
is better and buy an expensive smartphone or whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
And they're going to gravitate to the brands that they
feel more familiar with. And if you can keep building
that familiarity over soft times and high times, then a
lot of your competition we're cutting budgets and turning things off,
and so if you can stay on and we can
help you stay on, then you're coming out better. It's brilliant.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Well, thanks so much for having me into the tech
space and meeting the track Suit team here in Farrington,
and thanks for coming on the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Thanks so much. Yeah, Peter, anytime, lovely to see you.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Thanks so much to Matt Herbert, co founder of Tracksuit,
for coming on an incredible business. Some real great insights
there on scaling a tech business internationally from New Zealand,
emphasizing the importance of simplifying brand measurement, investing in a
strong team, staying relentlessly focused on product and customer needs.
(36:26):
I really love the way that the New Zealand roots
of this business have been reflected in it as it
goes international. You know, this company is now integral to
over a thousand companies and ten thousand brands internationally, so
it's obviously working. The simplicity they're bringing to brand tracking
is returning dividends. So great to catch up with Matt
(36:49):
next week I'll bring you another great New Zealand company
that is also basing itself in London at the moment
and doing great things. If you enjoyed the episode, please
like or rate it in your podcast app. It's also
streaming on iHeartRadio, where you can leave a rating as well.
Thanks so much to two degrees for sponsoring the Business
(37:10):
of Tech and I'll be back next week with one
of the final shows of the year, another cracking interview.
We'll see you then,
Welcome to the Business of Tech powered by Two Degrees Business.
I'm Peter Griffin and this week I'm in London with
the first of two interviews with promising New Zealand startups
using London as a beachhead into the European market. It's
an odd atmosphere in London, to be honest. The place
is bustling as usual, so many tourists, so much business
going on. It's one of the true commercial centers off Europe.
(00:26):
But the UK post Brexit has some serious issues with
significant budget shortfalls and a sluggish economy. But it's always
a great place to do business. As Matt Herbert, the
co founder of Auckland headquartered startup Tracksuit, explained to me
in this episode. Tracksuit is one of the country's hottest
startups at the moment, having enjoyed phenomenal growth and raised
(00:50):
forty two million dollars in a Series B funding round
in June. Tracksuit is revolutionizing the way brands track their
health and reputation, making powerful brand analytics accessible to not
just Fortune five hundreds, but also to up and coming
challenger brands. We'll explore tracksuits journey from a New Zealand
idea to a global operation, tracking over ten thousand brands
(01:14):
and attracting major funding from the world's top consumer investors.
Matt opens up about building a tech business through recessions
and why maintaining a uniquely keyweed DNA humility, simplicity, cutting
edge tech, and a fair dose of self deprecating humor
is key to standing out internationally. So if you want
an inside view on building a data driven tech company,
(01:37):
riding the wave of AI disruption.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
And bringing a unique New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Perspective to global markets, you want want to miss this
conversation with Tracksuits Matt Herbert, recorded at the company's UK
headquarters in London. Here's the interview with Matt. So, Matt,
(02:01):
welcome to the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
How are you doing very well? Nice to see you.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, nice to see you. And we're in this pretty
flash looking working space here in Farringdon and London tech Space.
It's called how did you find your way here?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Tech Space? Yes, we moved in here early in the year.
It's one of I think the best co working spaces
that I've seen over my career. We have a team
of twenty here in an office. We're actually gravitated a
few more Australian and New Zealand founders and companies in here,
so nice to see some familiar faces, but also good
to be in the heart of London.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, and this is really your bridgehead into the UK.
As you say, you've got what twenty staff here. You
raise some money earlier in the year to fund your expansion,
which is great, and the US, which is your biggest
market now. So we'll get into all of that, but
really just want to dial back a little bit to
recap how you came to track. So you've got a
(03:00):
a really interesting career in the lead up to this.
Give us the part in history all the way back
to uber and mish Guru, the sort of brand adjacent
stuff that got you thinking about in formulating the idea.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
For a crack suit. That's right. Yeah, Hey, well I
think my career. If I look back on my career,
I've always been someone that has had a great interest
in brands. I'll even go back to when I was
playing soccer football at Eastern Suburbs and Auckland and McDonald's
sponsored Player of the Day. I look back, that is
one of the greatest brand marketing plays for McDonald's. How
(03:35):
do you get in there right from the start on
the football fields. And I've always kind of thought of
myself as someone quite interested in creative industries, but never
thought of myself as the artist or the painter. But
how do I connect kind of creativity in business? And
that's kind of been a big part of what we've
been doing at track Suit. But if I look back,
the really fundamental change in my my career was when
(03:58):
I had the oupper unity to join the early team
with the rollout of Uber in New Zealand in twenty fourteen.
I was studying christ Church, studying law and science, but
also basically doing as much as I could with the
Uber team and for me having the experience and the
connection of a mass Uber was a massive business and
a massive brand coming out of the Northern Hemisphere. But
(04:20):
this was before the regulations, before people knew what Uber were,
and you know, how do you try to talk to
people about jumping in a stranger's car? And now you
look at what Uber's done, And I look back on
those couple of years really really fondly in terms of brands,
business but operating like a startup.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, because it was controversial, it was sort of a
gray area in the law about what it was to
be an operator. You had Travis you know, this is
very hide charging CEO and founder of Uber at the time,
who was under pressured to you know, to get out
there and get as much traction as possible. But the
(05:00):
brand caught on very quickly. What do you think in reflection,
it was about Uber that just made it such a
something that people were attracted to.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I think looking back, Uber to me still has one
of the best blueprints of how to scale globally fast
and effectively. It was I mean, they made the call
to put young, smart, hungry people into new markets like Auckland,
will Sydney, and they just said, gone figure it out.
It was supported by Global but there was a team
(05:29):
in Auckland and New Zealand. I think it was twelve
of us Richard Menzies and Michael Cook, the two early
guys at Uber. They had to lobby governments, there was regulations,
there was the whole process around how do you disrupt
and change industries in the right way. But there was
a formula which I think a lot of businesses now
everybody's still trying to figure out how do you grow
(05:52):
at scale and how do you empower teams and how
do you get the right people in to go to market.
Then man Uber did a phenomenal job and so a
lot of my time there and my experience with Ubert
has ultimately led to a lot of the way I
and we have looked at how do we grow tracksuit,
which is quite cool to reflect on around starting one market,
(06:14):
when the next market, hire great people, empower and scale
out and go with the demanders. So yeah, Goober was great.
And then Miss Guru started by some great guys Tom
Jacob and Ashok and first time founders out of New Zealands,
saw snapchatters of social media popping up and every brand
(06:35):
and agency in the world McDonald's Pepsie Union lever was
trying to figure out there's a whole lot of young
people in a way to connect with young people, but
how do you go about it? And so the Miss
Guru team early days basically built Snapchat onto a computer
so that the biggest brands and agencies in the world
could manage their Snapchat accounts. And it was wildfire, it was.
(06:55):
And so I had a few friends that was there.
I joined. I must have joined in the first kind
of ten people. That's where I met my now co
founder Connor started on the same day we look back,
this is eight years ago or so, sitting in Wynyard Quarter.
Connor was going to New York. I was going over
to Australia and that's where we really got into the
world of brands, marketing, technology startups. Marketing analytics has been
(07:18):
a really great transition into what we're doing now TRAKSU.
But misgu was a phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and really sort of interesting strategy. I guess it
was off the time. Snapchat was on the ascendancy at
the time, so building a sort of a platform and
a business around it made sense.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, it made a lot of sense, and every brand,
every agency wanted to be on it. And there are
a whole lot of learnings as well that came with
the growth of MSGREU was built on and reliant on
another business which has its which has it highs and lows.
I remember, I think it might have been one of
the Kardashian I think it was Kendall or Kylie Jenner
who tweeted something about him off Snapchat, right, And there
(07:55):
was the time that even the co founder was changing
a whole lot of the designs and all the social
media manager goes, well, it's naturally going to be around
and the YouTube stories and Instagram stories and it was
such a volatile but fast moving but interesting place. Unfortunately
Snapchat kind of went off the boil a little bit,
and you know, and and and so and so did
some of the some of the business but amazing learning
(08:17):
experiences and highlights of working with the biggest brands, the
biggest agencies and building technology that no one else was doing.
So yeah, and yeah, Connor and I met each other
on the on the first day there, and four and
a half years later we're into tracksit.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, incredible, and it seems like the real sort of
driving idea was you're working with all these brands and
a lot of them are deep pocketed companies, so they
can afford to buy a lot of analysis about about
their brands. But not every company can can do that.
And I know this in New Zealand, we probably underinvest
(08:53):
and you know, we invest in the in the bottom
of the funnel stuff the sales because you can track that.
You can see this is shifting the new in terms
of what our salespeople are doing, what our advertising is doing.
But further up, trying to get to build an audience
and build brand loyalty. We underinvest in that and I
think that's what the what you were aiming at was
try and democratize us. How can you build a dashboard
(09:15):
that you can track everything there is to know about
your brand and the sentiment about your brand. It's not
going to cost you fifty thousand dollars a year to
do it.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
That's right. I was fortunate to link back up with Connor.
We're both ended up back in New Zealand around the pandemic,
and then we're spending a lot of time with a
guy called James Herman who's got his studio previous and
available in Auckland, one of the world leading marketing effectiveness leaders,
and as well as working with TRA the research agency.
And it was Yeah, it was this concept of for
(09:45):
the last fifteen years, businesses have been so focused on
sales and conversions and performance marketing, where you put a
dollar in Semessa and you get three dollars back in
finance teams and hunting teams could understand finally, what on
earth is our marketing dollars doing. Then it got to
(10:05):
a point where you were putting a dollar in and
you were getting eighty cents back. Oh no, this doesn't
actually work anymore. The cost of acquisition, the efficiencies of
those digital channels, and as you were saying, everybody had
been so focused on converting at the expense of building
your business and your brands over the long term. And
there's this really nice and effective audience engagement with piece
(10:28):
we do, whether it's a key notes, and it's come
from James and his concept of James Herman and his
concept of future demand. And we look at the audience
and you say, you know, marketing has really got two roles,
and we'll present this and so ask the audience who
here is considering buying a phone in the next three months,
And depending on the size, you might get two, three,
four hands go up. And then the next question is
(10:50):
who's considering buying a phone in the next two years,
And everybody's hand goes up, right, And it's like that,
right there is the concept of what marketing's job to do.
You need to sell to the people that are ready
to buy from you. Great, they might be five percent
of the room, but you've also got to build awareness
and familiarity and connection with those who aren't ready to
buy from you. Right now, but we'll do down the track.
(11:10):
And that's the role of brand building, and that's the
role of increasing awareness and familiarity. But there hasn't been
a way to kind of measure and communicate that. And
so that was the hypothesis with with tracks. How do
you build a company and a platform that really highlights
how well are we building, how well our business is known, considered,
and what people think can feel. Now, we want to
do this all the time and we'll make this a
(11:32):
really important part that helps drive business decisions. And so
four and a half years ago we set out to
go and take that to the world.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And obviously there's you know, there's there's market research that's
surveying and that sort of thing, but there's other signals
as well to sort of get that real time sort
of view, social media channels and all that. So how
did you approach putting all of that together into this
sort of dashboard for a big brand to be able
to pivot based on that information. Okay, this is working,
(12:00):
we need to do something else. I mean, it was
a lot of big incumbent players that were working in
this space. What was the edge that you brought to it?
Speaker 2 (12:07):
The edge that we brought to it was simplifying the
fundamentals and making it incredibly accessible and so there is
no shortage of data and analytics and insights out there,
but how do you make it simplified and for something
that people are actually going to use? And so that's
what we took with tracks that we see what are
the biggest research businesses in the world doing when it
(12:29):
comes to brand tracking. We went and spoke to We
had a list of one hundred cmos and brand directors
in New Zealand and we said, when it comes to
brand tracking, what do you like? What are you not like?
Here's an idea that we think might solve you solve
your problems based on what we've heard from you. And
we're basically getting told we'd love just to see the
exec summary of the big research reports that were spending
(12:52):
hundreds of thousands of dollars on in one hundred page pdf.
We actually just want to see the exec summary. How
big is our market, how well is our brand known
and considered, what do people think and feel about us?
And how does that compare to the competitors. And we
basically said, if we could give that to you all
the time for a fraction of the cost, how do
you feel? And after sixty seven conversations, we had eleven
(13:14):
businesses pay us upfront, annual subscription, angual licenses. And so
we took the first one hundred and ten thousand dollars
and built the first prototype of the product. And that's
what the early stages of track suits. So we didn't
have a product, but we had the likes of Simplicity
and all Press and Good George Bear and Walkland Counts
all some of these really early brands that took a
(13:36):
punt on us, and we built the built the first version,
delivered and from there we continue to scale out.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Well, you've got what over one thousand customers now, yeah,
over a thousand customers and tracking over ten thousand brands.
We've we've got one of the largest data sets on
brand t health, on consumer brands in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So it's early days though as well.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
It is, Yeah, but I mean you raised twenty five
million dollars recently Series B fundraising, and interestingly about that,
some of the money going in there was from sort
of investors who have a consumer brand sort of background,
so they're obviously going, wow, you know, this is exactly
what the sorts of coffee brands or whatever. We invest
(14:19):
in consumer fast moving consumer good brands. This is the
missing bit, so we want to invest in that. Yeah,
we're fortunate to have had great investors.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
We bootstrapped the business for the first eighteen months and
so we needed to have a really responsible an efficient business,
which was great. Then we raised our seed round from
Blackbird and ice House were involved in that. We did
our Series A from Altas and footwork out in San Francisco,
and then the most recent our Series B was led
by VMG, who you're talking about now on VMG is
(14:50):
a really well respected consumer fund out of the US
who have also been building out their consumer technology. So
they're really looking at we know how great brands and
businesses in the consumer space are built, whether it's a
Spindre of Sparkling Water or Quest Protein bars, or you
look at their portfolio in the US, it's incredible. But
(15:11):
they were also looking at what is the technology that
helps these businesses make great decisions, and so it was,
you know, from a strategic perspective, the links into the
US consumer brands and while we can also play a
really important part from the technology that we're providing vmgs
being fantastic and a really great partnership.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, and I've heard I think you guys say yourself
but also commentators that have looked at the product that
you are a very product centric business. What does that
mean to be like that? I think Rod Drury considered
himself that as well. He wanted to make accounting software
sexy with Zero, and it seems like there's a bit
(15:50):
of that ethos and what you're doing with brand tracking software.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think there are a lot of parallels without but
without actually thinking about it or being intense all looking
at what Zero had done. It very similar Zero making
accounting sexy. I mean, we hope to make market research sexy.
I don't know if too many people that grow up
or speak to course or careers advice and they say,
you know, it would be a great industry market research,
(16:16):
but such a big and important industry. And from a
product lens, that's what we've wanted to do at Trasitors
have a really great product that's incredibly easy to use,
it's intuitive, it's accessible, and it drives this common language.
And that's really what we want to do. How do
we drive a common language to help people measure and
communicate the value of brand common language. Whether you're a marketer,
(16:39):
whether you are an insights professional, where you're a CSFO,
we give you a really simple, clean, effective way to
understand what do we need to do as a business
and is what we're doing working. Yeah, So from a
product lends you know, the technology and the scale of
what we've been able to do within research to bring
it down to a fraction of the cost to keep
it simple while also really investing to our own brand
(17:00):
as well. So it's product, it's brand that it's focusing
on the ends the end customer. But from a brand,
I mean when I see our software engineers talk at
the Snowflake conference and doing team nutes and they're wearing tracksuits,
I mean our whole team buys into the brand that
we're building and we're trying to be a reflection of
the power that a brand has as well as a
(17:21):
good product and pricing and packaging and distribution. So if
we can do the fundamentals hopefully of marketing effectiveness and fundamentals,
then that's what we're trying to support each of each
of our customers do.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, it's sort of a challenging area to working because
obviously maintaining a competitive and a really attractive product is
a challenge in itself, and you've got to build a
high performance team to do that, which you've done. But
it's also a fast moving industry that you're focused on,
which is market research and branding. So interesting how you
(17:56):
sort of keep on the cutting edge of that. Presumably
you've got really good, really relationship with the ones who
are out there on the front line doing market research
and getting insights into thousands of consumers around the world.
But then you've got you've got big, sort of massive
shifts around artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Search is changing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
AI platforms like Perplexity and nowt of becoming search engines
and buying or creating their own web browsers, So you've
got to keep on top all of that as well.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
That's right, And so there's four pillars that I really
look at. It's around our brand, strategy, expertise, our research expertise.
We are fundamentally here technology business, so how world leading
in our technology and then our own brand. So those
are kind of the four pillars to say, if we
can be world leading in each of those four, then
(18:49):
we'll know we're confident that we'll stay ahead and lead
the lead the industry. And so there's absolutely these changes
in the research, but then there's also the speed that
products can be built now means that you know, we've
got to be right on top of and ahead of
best in brand technology research in our own brand and
the you know, the artificial intelligence and AI and just
(19:10):
the signals that are coming through now, that's where we're
really positioning tracts it as how do we be the
place to understand how well your brands know and consider
what people think and feel that surveys, that's panels, and
there's you know, that whole world is changing as well,
and so what's the hybrid of real people and synthetic
data and socialisting and the changes in search. Ultimately the
(19:33):
end of the day, we're still answering and helping people
answer that question how well are we knowing what do
people think and feel? And that can come from a
lot of places now.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
In terms of artificial intelligence, is it having much of
a role in your development process in terms of creating
code right now?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's something that we've had ingrained and tracks it right
from the big the first big change that we were
able to do as a technology business was the speed
at which we could deliver insights. And so instead of
having fifty data scientists or analysts at a research consultancy
taking six weeks to analyze results and create a PDF
(20:17):
and come and present it to you, we could basically
do that within a couple of days or instantaneously. So
the speed of data also leading to large language models
and the ability to look at perceptions and analyze sentiment
around brands. And now there's all the internal workflows. Coding
is a huge, huge part of that. Our chief of staff, sorry,
(20:41):
our Dan, our VP of Strategy and Ops, was using
some agentic AI workflows and built and an AEO product
how well is your brand showing up? And the likes
of Claude and Perplexity and chat gbtow. He did that
within a weekend, over six hours. So you look at
(21:01):
that and obviously you know it was just a prototype
and a test, but just goes to show how fast
things can be spun up. Now, so we'll lean into that.
We are leaning into that we'll always have this mix
of great humans and technology coming together to get most
out of it.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, what does your take sort of seeing all of
this going on around what is facing brands as the
way that people discover their products starts to change that.
You know, we're talking about zero click sort of situation
now where you might go to the Google search engine
(21:38):
and hopefully you'll be featured in the AI overviews section
that people are increasingly reading on top of search results.
They may not even actually go to your website, but
they may come away with some information about your brand
or your product. That's a complete shift away from it
was all about pushing people towards your website previously.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
There is a shift happening and the way that brands
are being kind of awareness and consideration these new search engines,
where's chat, GBT, where it's clawed, whether it's you know,
Google and geminized. It's something that absolutely businesses need to
take take a look at and be aware of. And
(22:19):
I think there's also a world in which it's still
you know, it's like SEO. Back in the day, marketing
needed to optimize for a search engine optimization. There are
keywords how do you rank on the first page of Google?
There was a whole school of thought and a whole
an approach to doing that. You know, I don't know
(22:40):
what that When SEO was the first thing that came out,
but this has called the last kind of ten to
fifteen years and so now it's the aegentic engine optimization.
So definitely something to look at play a part of.
But there's these crazies that come through and stay on
top of it, be aware of it. But I think
is also a world and where people still want to
(23:03):
have a depth of experience where shopping, I think is
an interesting one to look at into that shopping where
Instagram comes out, where you can hate a click to
buy a buy a T shirt. I has heard that
the VP of marketing at Footlockers speak recently who said,
we're all worried about what one click shopping was going
to do. But right now social shopping accounts for something
(23:24):
like fifteen percent of total e commerce. So people are
still wanting a shopping experience. You will still want to
come to your website to learn more, to browse, to
see what else is going on. And so I don't
think it's going to be one click and done forever.
But absolutely within the space of how's your brand or business,
no one explored, considered understood we'd need to be aware
(23:45):
of what these are, what these search engines are doing.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
I guess the other trend it's in the last few
years around brands that has become apparent is how quickly
brand sentiment can be created or destroyed, driven by social media.
So we've seen the the whole sort of woke criticism,
you know, with people bending the need football players or
bud Light being criticized for an ad campaign it was
(24:08):
considered to be woke or something like that. Presumably you
can see the signals straight away when sentiment starts to
turn it against a brand for some of the activity
that it's been doing in the marketplace. One of the
roles that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
We play at tracks it is we give an objective
view around what is the whole market of consumers thin
can feel about a brand. And over the course of
history there will be brands who have done good things
and done bad things and had debate, and you know,
we remain objective and representing what is the actual conversation
going out. I think there was an interesting one to
look at is around the American Eagle campaign. I'm not
(24:45):
sure if you familiar with the American Eagle A you.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Eb to just summarize what that was.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
One of the one of the campaigns we're talking about
is the debate or the backlash around American Eagle who
came out with a campaign with Sydney Sweeney around blue genes,
and readers can go and have a look at either
side of it and you know, valid and a lot
of cases, I think maybe over overstated in some or
(25:10):
I don't know exactly what the decision making process oil
or the intent behind it, but it was one that
got especially in the US, it got it was really
really polarizing, especially on social media and particular parts of
the US, around who was representing the company, what they
were talking about blonde, blue eyes genes, and it sparked,
and it sparked debate, you know, for various reasons, and
(25:31):
a whole lot of the question, oh my gosh, how
damaging is this going to be to the brand? What's
it going to do? And what we're able to do
attracts it and the role that we play as an
objective measurement partners, we give just that reflection around what
does the total consumer group actually think and feel, And
when you segment it by different demographics or regions or
parts of countries, you're able to start to see where
(25:54):
are perceptions shifting where might we need to react, how
well do we need to react? But from what we saw,
it hasn't had as bigger impact as potentially what people
thought if you were only on particular social media channels
every single day and their share price I think went
up anyway as well. But yeah, not to get in
kind of the politics of it, but really interesting to
(26:17):
look at what signals as a business or someone working,
what signals are you looking at and how are you
looking not in your own echo chamber. It's very easy
to get hyped up around your own water cooler because
you're thinking and concerned with your brandle your business every
single day. You know, you know what your business means
(26:37):
or should mean. You're talking about it every single day,
But consumers aren't thinking about your business every single day,
and so how do you get that two way feedback?
But brands can bounce back as well. Yeah, it doesn't
need to be to the defining thing for a brand.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And I guess taking that evidence data driven approach is,
you know, don't necessarily freak out if suddenly you're getting
criticism going viral about you. What are the actual underlying
signals saying about what the bulk of your consumers actually
think about the brand. That's the important thing and that's
what you.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Bring to it. That's all right, and we absolutely support
the internal reflection and the ongoing what should our strategy be,
what should our messaging be, and how do we iterate
in the right way? Ongoing and so a reflection of
the market is what we're giving our customers, brands and businesses.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So one thousand customers now as you say, ten thousand
brands that you're tracking, which is great, and you've sort
of from a pricing point of view, democratized the cost
of doing that, which is to a more manageable cost.
So you can get smaller companies tracking their brands as well,
which is great. That capital that you raise, presumably that's
(27:45):
gone into creating a beachhead in the UK, in the
US where you have what thirty people in the US,
you've got one hundred and fifty across Australian in New Zealand. Now,
what else does that cash give you in terms of
runway to do? Now?
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, so the cash was raised to just fuel what
we wanted to do and so as continue to set
up our teams and markets and support our customers in
the Northern Hemisphere, the US and the UK. Just this
week we've announced that we're now tracking twenty five international
markets and so if you want brand tracking in Italy
or in Germany or in Singapore, that can be done now.
(28:26):
And so really doing more of what we've been providing
our customers based off the back of the demands US
and UK businesses saying can you do this in Europe?
Can you do this in Asia? Same as Australian businesses
we've got growing we've got growing markets in Southeast Asia
or in the US, and so just being able to
follow and provide value for our customers and agencies in
(28:47):
the markets that they want as well as well as
continue to double down on our products, innovation and the
velocity all focused on how do we build the best
company possible for people that using brand to drive back
great businesses and advanced technology and the go to market teams.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
What's the key we DNA off this business? You know
that you want to continue to imprint, you know, no
matter how big it gets, the New.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Zealand story will always be part of the part of
the folklore of Tracksuit. Every year or for the last
couple of years, we've done a team off site where
we've flown everybody into New Zealand to connect with each other.
You know, great connection culture, you know, go over the
you know what are what are our core values and
how do we operate and setting these markets up and
(29:36):
it's it's really cool about to bring people from the UK,
from the from the US into New Zealand and show
here this is the home of where Tracksuit was, but
also being really intentional about we want to grow a
global business and that's why we've got one of the
first exercises we did, what are our core values? Put
them on a whiteboard. We just struck them off that
(29:58):
it might sound good, but do we really live and
breathe it. And we got down to about five or
six of our core values which have stayed the same,
things like be a cheerleader and a champion for each other,
for the industry, for brandsen champion brand, keep it simple,
leave it better than you found it. Simplicity is a superpower.
(30:20):
So these have allowed us to really deepen underlying fabric
of who we are, what's the type of business, how
do we operate, how do we hire and have that
core underlying fabric. Whether you're in Auckland Sydney, London, New York, Melbourne.
You can tell its tracksuit and the way we show
(30:40):
up and how we operate, But London, New York, Sydney, Auckland, Melbourn,
they're all different than their own right. And I think
that's the thing that we've wanted to make sure is
that the London office is here to support great UK
businesses and brands build great businesses. The US is is
uniquely positioned that this is tracksuit for the US, but
(31:03):
you do know it's tracksit and that's that underlife Fairbrook
and I think it's a bit of probably Kiwi humor, humility,
humor not taking ourselves too serious. And I think that's
resonating quite quite well across the across the markets, especially
compared to kind of traditional market research.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, and that classic Kiwi thing which a lot of
our company has been very good at, which is frankly
doing it cheaper as well, you know, doing doing it more,
creating a more affordable product, whether it's Sir Peter Beck
with his electron rocket or you know zero or whatever.
It's actually that's a disruptive quality. I think of what
(31:43):
you're doing in others is that it's like this doesn't
have to cost fifty thousand dollars a year. We can
actually create a beautiful dashboard with all irrelevant information and
that one pdf that they are New Zealand customers who
are asking for for a fraction of the price and
make it sustainable business out of it.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
A great thing about coming out of New Zealand was
New Zealand we have a small population and we had
to figure out how do we do market research with
a small population at scale? And so from a technology standpoint,
it forced us to go, there's only a small group
of people, how do we still provide reliable, robust, statistically
significant scale of research and insights. And then when you
(32:19):
go into other markets, it's like, well we've done it
with five six million people when most other populations are
a little larger than that. So that was a great
forcing function, absolutely forcing function. How to do it better, cheaper,
more effective and you can have all of it.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
We're rapidly approaching the end of the year. It won't
be the big holiday time for you, as it will
be for a lot of year tracksuit colleagues who'll be
heading the beach. Hopefully we get a decent summer, but
interest in your views on what twenty twenty six is
going to look like. Obviously things are uneven economically around
the world. New Zealand's not looking so flash at the moment,
(32:57):
some of the signals. Australia is sort of coming back
a bit. The US market seems to defire gravity at
the moment in terms of the stock market. And but yeah,
interested in what the outlook it is and is your
business dependent to some extent on it being a buoyant market,
or how do you help your businesses when things are tough?
Is it even more important in a recessionary environment to
(33:21):
really understand what people think of your brand.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
We found a track suit at at the back end
of the pandemic. So it's a really interesting time, I
think to be building businesses. I think since that time
in twenty one, I think there's probably been three different
recessions or hints of recessions globally, and so there'll always
be there will always be something, and that's why it's
really important for us to be building a sustainable, responsible
business that isn't relying on continuing to raise external capital
(33:48):
just to just to keep the lights on. And so
that's what we're really focused on. Building a responsible and
enduring business. It helps that we're a cost effective solution
in the market. And so if we can help businesses
and agencies and brands free up budget to keep their
marketing working, to continue to build awareness and marketing activity
(34:09):
and not drain at all on research, but also given
them the right signals. I think that's helped us to
be where we're at and continue to be really confident
in the market. It's cost effective. It's incredibly important to
businesses and also for businesses if you can keep your
marketing going through times of recessions has proved time and
time again that you come out far stronger than when
(34:30):
people cut budget. If you can keep marketing, keep building
your brands, stay top of minds, then your consistency of
sales continues, Whereas if you turn off and go dark
and then try to pop up two years later, people
have forgotten about you. And so it's really important to
keep it on and being cost effective. That's the way
that we are able to support and each market, each
(34:52):
region is always going through, is always going through something.
I think visibility in the Northern Hemisphere Europe back out
to Apac Australian there's always something going on. But it's
staying true to who we work with, how we build
the business, and keeping the lights on.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Really yeah, it goes back to what you said at
the start, you know, which is like, you know, five
percent of the people in front of I. You may
be willing and able to buy your product right now,
it's the ninety five percent who if you appeal to
them well through good brand marketing down the track, we'll
be able to put their hand up when the economy
is better and buy an expensive smartphone or whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
And they're going to gravitate to the brands that they
feel more familiar with. And if you can keep building
that familiarity over soft times and high times, then a
lot of your competition we're cutting budgets and turning things off,
and so if you can stay on and we can
help you stay on, then you're coming out better. It's brilliant.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Well, thanks so much for having me into the tech
space and meeting the track Suit team here in Farrington,
and thanks for coming on the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Thanks so much. Yeah, Peter, anytime, lovely to see you.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Thanks so much to Matt Herbert, co founder of Tracksuit,
for coming on an incredible business. Some real great insights
there on scaling a tech business internationally from New Zealand,
emphasizing the importance of simplifying brand measurement, investing in a
strong team, staying relentlessly focused on product and customer needs.
(36:26):
I really love the way that the New Zealand roots
of this business have been reflected in it as it
goes international. You know, this company is now integral to
over a thousand companies and ten thousand brands internationally, so
it's obviously working. The simplicity they're bringing to brand tracking
is returning dividends. So great to catch up with Matt
(36:49):
next week I'll bring you another great New Zealand company
that is also basing itself in London at the moment
and doing great things. If you enjoyed the episode, please
like or rate it in your podcast app. It's also
streaming on iHeartRadio, where you can leave a rating as well.
Thanks so much to two degrees for sponsoring the Business
(37:10):
of Tech and I'll be back next week with one
of the final shows of the year, another cracking interview.
We'll see you then,
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