A Louisville-based, data management-focused tech startup took time to reflect on recent successes.
Untitled Firm held an open house at its offices located in the Butchertown neighborhood of Louisville at 1201 Story Ave. on Thursday. The startup moved into its approximate 11,000-square-foot space in the Butchertown Market building two years ago, three years after its founding.
“We’re on the other side of some pretty significant milestones, and so we wanted to bring the friends, family, investors, clients — all together just to celebrate,” said Aaron Peabody, co-founder and CEO of Untitled, which was named one of our 2022 Startups to Watch.
I recently spoke with Peabody, as well as three other members of the company’s leadership team: CTO Andrew Wyllie; Ellen Stubbs, chief revenue officer; and Brian Oldham, its newly named fractional COO.
Among those milestones is the fact that the firm has fully shifted in its business model, or as Peabody called “a new conduit of business,” a process that began in the third quarter of last year.
After launching its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, Distilled, into the open market about a year ago, the company has moved from operating as a data-driven marketing firm when it opened its doors in 2018 to a full-service data architecture and business intelligence firm, as we first reported in July 2022.
Stubbs said the firm’s goal was to have more than 50% of its revenue to come from its SaaS product by the end of 2023, compared to revenue generated from direct services.
“We’ll easily hit that,” said Stubbs, who added her team predicts that 2024 will be a “hyper-growth year for us.”
“At this point, that balance point will be fully flipped,” Peabody added.
‘One product ecosystem’
Distilled functions as a data warehousing management platform. It serves as the core platform for all of Untitled’s operations and offerings.
The Untitled employees had been using Distilled internally, which was built out by Wyllie and his team, before realizing that they would be best served by offering the platform as a plug-and-play option to customer companies.
“Basically, I looked at all the service work we were doing. It’s like, ‘How do we organize this and try to make a product out of it?,’” Wyllie said. “It’s been challenging and very rewarding, and very frustrating — and just all the stuff you would expect at any startup.”
In addition, Untitled has also released a marketing suite that works on top of Distilled, which offers a number of products such as those designed for lead identification, data enrichment and data activation. The suite has been on the market for about four months.
“It’s all one product ecosystem, but we’re starting to see traction on all of the entry points that we’ve been looking for for quite some time,” said Peabody, who co-founded the company with Connor Gaffney, chief of staff, and Kramer Caswell, vice president of marketing.
Stubbs said that the overall movement of companies spending on sales and marketing with more intentionality has become apparent based on the trends over the last two quarters, as the desire for a greater return on investment (ROI) increases.
“The wind is at our sails a little bit here with how the world is starting to look at sales and marketing,” she said.
Stubbs said that the firm currently has 41 clients, adding that it has served approximately 300 different companies since its establishment. Most clients are small- to medium-sized businesses with $25 million to $250 million in revenue — adding that many are in the direct-to-consumer industries of retail, e-commerce and consumer product goods (CPG). Stubbs said the company hopes to have at least 75 clients using Distilled by the end of 2023.
Monthly subscriptions for Untitled services can range from from $2,500 to $25,000 a month. The base marketing suite products have formed a lower entry point, ranging from $500 to $1,500 a month, Stubbs said.
Raising more capital
Untitled has also recently raised $2.8 million of a $3.75 million “seed-plus” round, as it is being called. Most of the money raised in this round will go to building out its sales and marketing initiatives, as well as “key strategic hires,” Peabody said.
“We’re not in alphabet territory yet,” he said. “It’s something we’d probably have our eyes on over the next 12 months, but right now it’s not a priority. Growing the company and growing revenue is our priority.”
Among those who have contributed to the current round is John Willmoth of Poplar Ventures, who also is a board member. Since its founding, Untitled has raised $5.4 million in capital.
The company currently has 22 employees, 20 of whom are full-time.
Its newest hire, Oldham, joined the team a little less than a month ago. He said he sees a parallel between Untitled and the company that he worked at for more than 22 years in various capacities: Appriss, a tech company that created solutions for the healthcare, retail and employee monitoring industries. Appriss launched approximately 15 SaaS products during Oldham’s tenure there.
“My focus is really to continue to help focus the talent that’s here and … continue to help to deliver on that growth strategy,” Oldham said. “In the early days of when Appriss started, [we had] a talented team, the ability to adjust and flow and they’re on the verge of growing — and so I’m really coming on to help them continue to go through that growth curve.”
Distilled is built on several layers, Peabody said.
The core layer operates as a cloud data operating system. The application layer is where the new marketing suite resides, with the hope of having third-party developers be able to build apps that can function in that space as well.
The final layer under construction is referred to as the AI layer, as the company looks to integrate artificial intelligence services into all of the platform’s different applications.
