Although there are a number of marketing dashboard tools out there, reporting marketing results is still a painful process. This is especially true for marketers in small to midsized companies and the agencies and freelancers who work with them.
Some tools are easy to use but very limited in scope. Others are powerful and flexible, but frustratingly difficult to implement and use.
While working as a software engineer at PayPal, Braden Ericson recognized this problem and decided to create a powerful yet simple reporting solution that integrates data from multiple sources and syncs the information directly with Google Sheets and Google Slides.
Here’s the story of Braden and his company, Sparrow Charts.
The Discussion
Tom: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Founders Interview on Webbiquity. Today I’m joined by Braden Ericson, founder and CEO at Sparrow Charts. Hi, Braden, thanks for joining, and how are you doing?
Braden: Hey, happy to be here. And I’m doing good.
Tom: Great to hear. Braden, you and I met almost a couple of months ago now, at Twin Cities Startup Week, six or seven weeks ago. You mentioned that was a great event for you, that you met some great people there, and generated a lot of attention.
Braden: Yeah, it was awesome just getting to network with the Minnesota startup community in person and getting a chance to do hybrid events, and see people I’ve met over the last year finally in person, masks still and all, but just still getting to see people in the flesh. I never thought I’d miss it that much.
Tom: It was another great job by BETA putting that on. Anyway, thanks again for joining. Let’s jump right into it.
The Product
Sparrow is a data and reporting platform for marketers. It helps marketing leaders within companies, agencies, and freelancers with reporting for their stakeholders. It enables anyone who needs to share marketing performance updates to sync their data across all their different marketing campaign channels directly to Google Sheets and Slides to create automated reports, and always have the latest data in a nice presentation layer.
Though it can work equally well for business or consumer marketing, early customers have been primarily small marketing teams, agencies, and freelancers who are working with a number of different B2B clients. These individuals are developing and executing marketing programs and campaigns, and who want to automate their reporting tasks as much as possible. They find Sparrow valuable because after a one-time setup, it works continuously, saving hours at the end of each month manually preparing reports.
And though it can work for companies of any size, Sparrow has been embraced primarily in smaller companies and agencies to date, rather than large enterprises which may employ business analysts and use sophisticated analytics platforms. It’s most useful to freelancers and small teams who are juggling a ton of activities and need an easy way to automatically pull data into spreadsheets. But plans are to continue to expand functionality over time.
While Sparrow provides marketers with dashboard views of their data, what makes the tool stand out is its ability to sync metrics directly to Google Sheets and Google Slides, to view all their different data sources and client marketing accounts directly from within Google.
As Braden explains it, “You could be sending an email in Gmail, and easily pull up your clients’ workspace and see all their metrics so you can quickly reference that in your update.
“You could be writing a proposal and you want to check out another client’s performance; you spin it up there all without leaving Google. Our focus is on making your data or your clients’ data readily available right within the Google Apps environment. And we plan to continue adding more features and capabilities there, and creating new ways to streamline reporting.”
Future plans call for adding integrations to other platforms and environments, but today Sparrow is finding success in optimizing reporting within the Google workspace.
The Company
Year founded: 2019
Funding rounds: Self-funded plus a friends and family funding round in early 2021
Company Size: Four employees, 600 users (freemium SaaS model)
The Inspiration
Tom: What inspired you to work on or tackle this particular problem?
Braden: I was an entry-level software engineer out in the Bay at PayPal. I was working on marketing tech products there that exposed me to the world of marketing, at least from the software side.
And I don’t know what it was, but on the weekends, I was…instead of resting like every new grad really should be doing, I was hacking away at Twitter’s API. I was just fascinated with Twitter. I thought it was so cool, all this data that was readily available that you could just pull and access and analyze and create charts and do things with it.
So while I was working in the marketing tech space, I was always interested in data analytics and the combination of data with marketing. After three years of working at PayPal, ultimately, the itch got too strong, and I decided I needed to go pursue this. I started talking to some local marketers, and learned that reporting was still a pain point in their process, even with all the tools out there. So, I set off and have been focused on that for the last two years.
The Launch
Tom: Excellent. I can verify that that is still the case. So, what have been the most effective channels or methods for you to get the word out to prospective customers to this point?
Braden: We’ve pivoted a few times over the last two years. We’ve had a couple of different versions of our products, and I’ve tried different channels from pay-per-click ads on Facebook, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and Google search ads.
I tried all sorts of different channels to figure that out. To know your customer, be your customer, right? So we did our own reporting. We tried pay-per-click ads, we tried direct sales outreach, just me reaching out to customers.
It wasn’t until we released this add-on that we’ve gotten the most organic discovery. And that’s primarily from having a listing in the Google workspace marketplace of add-ons. We get about 1,500 visits per month to that listing alone. And from that, we get quite a high conversion rate of people installing and using the product.
It’s really cool when, instead of having to reach out to people, they’re finding us through a listing, and then seeing some of those people I have never engaged with actually sign up for one of the pro subscriptions or for a paid plan. It’s a really cool feeling.
Tom: That’s fantastic. Where do you think you’re going next on the marketing promotion side?
Braden: We’re sticking with that channel for sure. I mean, it’s organic. Probably work on… I’ve been reading a book recently about blog content and SEO. We’ll probably do some combination of writing helpful content and promoting that through our channels.
And we just recently launched on AppSumo, too. That’s kind of a really weird product offering, that feels counterintuitive. But we’ve had a great reception of users there, giving us tons of great feedback.
We’ll keep trying, experimenting with different channels. We’ll probably turn on pay-per-click ads again, and just kind of see what works.
Tom: Have you thought about affiliate marketing? I know a lot of companies in the space use that.
Braden: Yes, I’ve signed up for software that manages that for me. But I have no idea how to even get about that process. I think I’m probably going have to talk with you after, go check out your blog for some recommendations.
The Lessons
Tom: I’d be happy to do that! Please finish this sentence: “Knowing what I know now if I were starting over today, what I would do differently is…”
Braden: Talk to my customers even more than I thought I should be. Yeah, that’s the first thing everyone says, and although I thought I was doing it enough, I wasn’t.
I’d also try to charge for the earlier versions of the product, because that would have saved us a lot of pivots. We’d have realized earlier that people will say nice things, but when it comes to writing you a check or giving you money, it’s different.
Ultimately, there will be pivots. Don’t 100% believe that whatever you’re working on now is going to be the solution. Focus on building quickly and pivoting quickly, if possible. I mean, this is our fourth pivot, and we finally started to find some traction in the market. It’s only been a few months, but it’s enough where our team is excited and it feels promising.
Tom: Definitely. When someone will write a check, that’s when you know they’re sincere.
Braden: Yeah. And it feels counterintuitive. But really, if it’s solving a problem they actually have they, they will write a check, or they’ll find a way to make sure you know that they need this.
I’d show up some cool dashboards and everyone would say, “Oh, that’s amazing. This would be so useful.” And then we build it and hear, “Oh, I don’t need that.”
It’ definitely been a learning experience going from software engineering to full-time salesperson.
The Takeaways
Tom: Yes. And when you’re dealing with a passive-aggressive audience, that’s an additional challenge. So what’s the most important advice that you would offer to someone like yourself, an entrepreneur, a founder just starting out today?
Braden: I think it goes back to, again, talk to your customers. Make sure whatever you’re working on, you’re passionate about. Because two years ago, when I first started this, I thought it was going to be six months and we’d be breakeven, making money.
It’s been two years now and we’re making money, but still not breakeven. You have to be willing to go through the trenches and really believe in what you’re building. And just remember that the going gets tough, but there are ups. Reach out to your community and find a support group, and just keep fighting and you can make it work.
Tom: Thanks Braden, it’s been a great discussion. Last question—where can people connect with you, and how can they learn more about Sparrow?
Braden: You can learn more about Sparrow at sparrowcharts.com. We have recently updated marketing content that should give a better idea of what our product is.
You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. And I’m trying to tweet more, inspired by you, Tom. I’m trying to get more into the Twitterverse, so happy to engage in conversation there, and on LinkedIn definitely, too.
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