History of Ambine: Transitioning from an agency to SaaS

Ambine launched about two years ago, just before the COVID pandemic ?? hit the turbine. But our journey had already started around 2018. This post focuses on telling a part of the story of how a single proof-of-concept idea from a marketing agency’s R&D unit developed into a SaaS company targeting global markets.?

The digitalization of agencies?

Ambine’s roots go back to the leading Nordic marketing agency Dagmar and its data science unit. The team served consultation and development projects around data-driven marketing analytics for advertisers and provided tools for the agency’s internal use.?

The latter ignited the spark for developing more advanced and automated processes to enhance and support the relatively heavy and tedious manual workflows, especially in managing and optimizing digital advertising campaigns. Further, machine learning, which was the data science team’s key competence area, aligned well with this agenda. Building software capable of collecting data, analyzing and learning from it, and eventually performing autonomous actions was an obvious continuation.?

To put this into a broader context, we touched on the business model, where value comes from seasoned specialists’ hands – to grow the business, you need to hire new staff. Sounds like a good opportunity for digitalization to ramp up efficiency - and eventually to create an entirely new scalable business.?

The beginning??

Starting a tech startup isn’t a big move nowadays. If you have a solid idea, and a good team that’s capable of building and delivering the first version of the product quickly – go for it! What is more difficult in the beginning is finding the first customers who test your product and validate the value proposition you initially promised in the sales pitch.?

In our case, we were in a fortunate position: there were a good bunch of clients in our agency’s portfolio who were keen to test new tools and even the very first proof-of-concept versions. So, before we even had a proper UI for the end users, we got a hot test bench for our product’s key functionalities. Eventually, when we launched the first commercial version of the product, we had concrete evidence that it works and provides the planned and promised value. A tasty foundation for a tech company, I would say!?

The product, the vision?

…What we had in mind was nothing less than a “hell-machine” that has integrations to different advertising channels & platforms and would automate all the tedious manual operations in different parts of the process. And eventually solve one of the key questions in advertising: where to allocate ad budgets to maximize the outcomes. Although our team had a vast amount of experience on the measurement side f.ex. with the know-how of MMM (marketing mix modeling) and attribution modeling techniques, we explicitly wanted to address the question of what happens after the measurement: (the automation) of activating budgeting decisions.??

To do this one needs first the capability to shift the budgets and possibly other delivery parameters “inside” different ad channels & platforms. This laid the foundation for the platform integration strategy – by adding channels piece by piece into the puzzle, would later allow holistic cross-channel optimization of the ad budgets. In the meantime, channel-specific automation had great potential to support the journey.????

Fast forward: the choice for the first integration back then was either Google’s or Adform’s DSP, which has a relatively strong foothold in the Nordic region, while globally it’s more David vs. Goliath type of game. The choice then was Adform, because it offered good access to APIs among other things allowing very fast development of the first MVP.??????

Double the fast forward; the integrations we have at the moment and the arguments behind those decisions need a separate post – or a series of posts.?

Triple the fast forward; we are currently focusing on mastering the LinkedIn for Marketing space which means developing features for LinkedIn advertisers that will help their daily work and improve campaign performance. We are also soon partnering more closely with LinkedIn?but more on that later...??

Building blocks for growth?

Although the start was somehow solid, no product or service sells itself. Demand generation and client acquisition in the current technology-driven era can be made in various ways. Still, when no one knows your brand, the way to kick-start your sales is outbound operations.??

Sales-led motion in the core of our GTM was a clear choice also from the other perspective, distinctive for SaaS businesses - the famous product-market fit. Especially in our case, it was important: when the first MVP was built based on the needs and use cases of one agency in a small market like Finland, what are the odds that the solution generalizes (at least straight away) to a broader audience? The sales team is on the front lines and can get feedback on what resonates in the market and by doing so, give valuable information on product specs needed to turn prospects into paying customers.????????

Lessons so far?

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Or two steps forward and 1.5 steps back. These describe somehow well the past two years of building this tech startup. What you typically read is the stories from tech companies already established & experienced great success, but not the “typical” rocky road to get there. In this newsletter, we are going to post learnings through our journey from different angles like product development, marketing & sales ramp-up, building team & cohesion, etc., and hopefully courage peers to join the discussion and share their experiences. And for anybody else interested.???

Join us on our "rocky road"!?

Cheers,?

Mikko / Chief Janitor @Ambine?