Careers at Percolate

Mission

Percolate’s mission is to build The System of Record for Marketing.

History

James Gross and Noah Brier were experienced marketers. Observing how social media and mobile devices had taken the world by storm, they decided to build a solution that would capitalize on this heat. The result was a filtering engine that analyzed consumers’ social media behavior to identify online stories of interest and send them five website links on a daily basis (called a “Daily Brew”).

The service was provided through a cloud-based platform. The team members founded a company in 2011 to market the platform, called Percolate. Their offering was a success, but within a few months they realized it would be more profitable if it catered to businesses. So they changed its focus to a service that helped firms – specifically the firms’ marketers – to better engage customers.

The new service helped clients identify the content of greatest interest to fans and followers on their social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). It then used this information to find the most relevant and compelling stories to publish on those sites. It also offered a dashboard that enabled companies to monitor and analyze how the content being pushed was perceived by followers.

The new product attracted a lot of attention, and generated more revenues for Percolate. Its performance enabled it to raise $1.5 million in seed funding in late 2011 and $9 million in 2012. These investments were used to build a sales team and hire more engineers, and the firm moved its platform from alpha to beta status. Percolate now offers a wide range of marketing services.

Benefits at Percolate

Business model of Percolate

Customer Segments

Percolate has a mass market business model, with no significant differentiation between customer segments. The company targets its offering at firms of all industries and sizes that have social media platforms.

Value Proposition

Percolate offers three primary value propositions: convenience, performance, and brand/status.

The company offers convenience by making operations simpler for clients. Its platform is an end-to-end solution that helps marketing professionals plan, create, and execute all of their marketing activities. It makes their lives easier in the following ways:

  • Enables them to coordinate marketng campaigns and activities on a single calendar; tasks can be seen together or filtered by topic, channel, team, and location
  • Provides brief templates they can use to organize their marketing ideas and collaborate on content, events, and campaigns
  • Provides a mobile format they can use to obtain real-time updates and share media
  • Provides an integrated task management tool they can use to track work from beginning to end, and an enterprise-grade approvals system to conduct oversight over all content
  • Streamlines tasks by integrating existing client systems for budgeting, CRM, marketing automation, and enterprise resource planning

The company demonstrates strong performance through tangible results. High-profile examples of positive outcomes for specific clients include the following:

  • Unilever used Percolate’s solution to reduce the amount of time spent developing and approving content, resulting in a decreased cost per social post and annual savings of over $10 million
  • Amtrak used Percolate’s solution to make its marketing more customer-centric, resulting in the collection of 329 images of fans‘ experiences and a 110% increase in fan engagement
  • General Electric used Percolate’s solution to plan, store, and distribute content through a single platform, resulting in a higher publishing rate – more than 950 posts in one month alone
  • MasterCard used Percolate’s solution to brief its marketers and agency partners, enabling it to create and share six campaigns with more than 150 users across the U.S. and UK
  • Freshpet used Percolate’s solution to provide a real-time view into consumer reception of its content, resulting in the saving of several hours a day and the publishing of pieces once a week

The company has established a strong brand due to its success. It is used by over 800 brands worldwide, including Fortune 500 firms such as Marriott, IBM, adidas, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and Levi’s. It has also won a number of honors, including recognition as a “Leader“ in the Onboarding and Support category in The Forrester Wave Social Relationship Platforms report for 2015.

Channels

Percolate’s main channel is its business development team. The company promotes its offering through its website, social media pages, and participation in conferences.

Customer Relationships

Percolate’s customer relationship is primarily of a personal assistance nature. The company provides general phone and e-mail support. It also assigns clients an engagement manager that provides regular assistance, and offers a wide variety of support services through partners, such as implementation, onboarding, training, and campaign development.

Key Activities

Percolate’s business model entails maintaining a robust cloud platform for its clients.

Key Partners

Percolate maintains the following partnership programs:

Alliance Partner Program – Includes the following types of partnerships:

  • Consultants and System Integration Partners – Service providers who offer implementation, change management, technical, and content support to its customers.
  • Agency Partners – Creative, digital, and media agencies that assist in campaign development.
  • Technology Partners – Tech firms in the content publishing, social connectivity, and software-as-a-service realms that extend Percolate’s platform with distribution channels and third-party applications in order to provide an enhanced offering for its customers.
  • Marketplace Partners – Content fulfillment firms that supply licensed and on-demand content via the company’s in-app marketplace portal to help clients communicate more effectively.

Program benefits include training programs, certification and accreditation paths, go-to-market collaboration efforts, and dedicated relationship support.

Affiliate Partner Program – Invites trusted third parties to promote the company’s offerings through their platforms (websites, mobile apps, etc.). Leads that result in new customers earn the parties referral fees totaling 10% of the customer’s first-year license cost. Many partners obtain additional earnings by providing services to clients.

Key Resources

Percolate’s main resource is its proprietary software platform, which serves over 800 brands.

It depends on human resources in the form of engineers to maintain and update the platform, consultants to provide training and advisory services, and customer service personnel to provide support.

As a relatively new startup it has relied heavily on funding from outside parties, raising $74.5 million from 14 investors as of May 2015.

Cost Structure

Percolate has a value-driven structure, aiming to provide a premium proposition through significant personal service and frequent service enhancements.

Its biggest cost driver is likely cost of services, a variable expense. Other major drivers are in the areas of customer support/operations and administration, both fixed costs.

Revenue Streams

Percolate has one revenue stream: revenues it generates from the subscription fees it charges for regular access to its software-as-a-service platform. Its staff must be contacted directly for pricing.

Our team

Noah Brier,
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

info: Noah Brier earned a Bachelor of Arts in Media & Culture at New York University. He previously served as the Head of Strategic Planning at The Barbarian Group LLC, as Founder of Likemind, and as a Strategist at Naked Communications.

James Gross,
Co-Founder

info: James Gross earned a Master of Science degree at California State University – Northridge. He previously served as Senior Vice President, Publishing at Federated Media Publishing and worked in Business Development at Feedster.

Pete Perrone,
Chief Financial Officer

info: Pete Perrone earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Duke University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and an MBA at MIT. He previously served as the CFO of Limelight Networks and as a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.

Laurent Raufaste,
Executive Director, Infrastructure

info: Laurent Raufaste earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. He previously served as Technical Lead at Fresh Planet, as a Web Architect at JFG Networks, and as a Web Developer at WS Interactive.