How Tracksuit turned brand data into a global growth engine

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.