As a company gets larger, one of the larger challenges becomes figuring out how to maximize its revenue — which ultimately comes down to determining who the good and bad customers are and acting accordingly.
For this problem, serial entrepreneur Alex Laats thinks he has a "secret weapon" that can help companies uncover opportunities to increase revenue from satisfied customers and retain customers who may be having second thoughts. It's called Rekener, a new Boston startup founded by Laats that recently raised $1.75 million for its second seed round from local venture capital firms Pillar, Accomplice and Founder Collective, along with some angel investors. The startup's total funding is now nearly $5 million, which includes its first, $3.2 million seed round that was raised last year while it was still in stealth mode.
While companies with software-as-a-service platforms are a focus for Rekener, Laats told BostInno in a recent interview that the company is more broadly centered on helping any company that sells to customers more than once. This is a challenge Laats knows all too well from previous companies he led and founded, including Java productivity tool provider ZeroTurnaround, video tech company Ramp and Raytheon subsidiary BBN Technologies.
Rekener uncovers opportunities to grow revenue through its account lifecycle management software platform, which pulls in data from a variety of systems covering a customer's lifecycle: Salesforce for customer relationship management, HubSpot and Marketo for marketing automation, Zendesk for customer support and Mixpanel for customer usage.
Using that data, it provides a dashboard that tells customers, for instance, which products help land new customers and which ones can be used to expand existing accounts. It can also indicate when a customer's enthusiasm for a product may be waning so that an account manager can intervene and see if they can do anything to rescue the account. Rekener also provides notifications through email and Slack.
"These people being put into roles like Sales Ops and Biz Ops are becoming strategically important to the business and it’s wicked hard."
"Understanding how to grow recurring revenue also means basically addressing the most difficult challenges you have," Laats said. "[...] We’re not a consulting firm but we do provide very strategic solutions."
Asked about Rekener's competitors, Laats said they are "smart guys with Google spreadsheets" and business operations professionals who rely on do-it-yourself solutions.
"We have an incredible core competency in data structure," Laats said. "That underlining data structure makes it possible to do the kind of analytics at scale [that would otherwise require] an army of SQL engineers."
Laats said Rekener started selling to customers in July and that he feels good about traction with early adopters so far. But he declined to identify any of the company's customers, saying that they view Rekener as their "secret weapon."
Beyond software, Rekener is focused on creating a community of professionals working in business operations, also known as "BizOps," with meetups happening on a regular basis. The goal is to help people share knowledge for what has been an emerging profession.
"These people being put into roles like Sales Ops and Biz Ops are becoming strategically important to the business and it’s wicked hard," Laats said.
