Today, we talk to Aaron Beashel, co-founder of the start-up Attributer, a marketing attribution tool developed primarily for SMEs who are looking to start their respective marketing campaigns and monitor the progress of each campaign through a simple interface. Originally designed as a piece of code for the use of the clients he has worked with, Attributer evolved into a fully developed website that he launched together with his wife Alex in December 2021.
ISB: What inspired you to come up with the code that would be the foundation of the tool?
AB: When I was doing marketing consulting work I kept coming across the same problem. Clients would be doing various marketing initiatives like SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc and would have tools like Google Analytics installed on their website that would show them how many visitors they are getting from each initiative. But none of them had a way to track which of these initiatives were actually generating leads, customers and sales. So, I worked with a developer friend to build a little bit of code I could use on my client’s websites that would pass through with each lead where that lead came from (i.e. organic search, paid search, paid social, etc). It quickly gained traction and in six months went from zero revenue to well into six-figures in annual recurring revenue.
ISB: How was the process of making the code “work” for Attributer?
AB: The initial code was built to work only on my clients’ websites, most of which used the same CMS (WordPress), same form builder (Gravity Forms), etc. So, the earliest thing we had to do to make this a commercially viable product was to expand the amount of CMS systems and form builders that it could work with. Now, it works with all major CMS systems (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, etc) as well as all the major form builders and CRM systems.
ISB: What makes Attributer stand out among the market channel attribution tools out there in the market?
AB: Most of the other marketing attribution tools on the market focus on having their own reporting interface. That works great for larger organisations that have dedicated analytics people that have the time and technical capabilities to set this all up and manage it but for smaller organisations with small marketing teams (or even the business owner doing the marketing) this is too complicated. They just want to be able to say, “We got 50 leads from our Google Ads this month and that resulted in 10 customers and $50k in revenue.” Attributer sends the data into your existing CRM in a way that allows you to easily see how many leads you got from various marketing initiatives and how many of those became customers and revenue.
ISB: How do you manage to make such a tool more accessible to small businesses in terms of cost and technology?
AB: By sending the data into the customers existing CRM and allowing them to use the built-in reporting capabilities within their CRM to run the reports, we’ve done away with the need to build backend systems to integrate all the different tools, store all the data and then build our own reporting interface. This has meant our costs are much lower than other tools (in terms of development resources, hosting, support resources, etc), and as a result we can offer our product at a much cheaper rate than others.
ISB: What lies ahead for Attributer in the next couple of years?
AB: There are hundreds of different website CMS systems, form builders and CRM systems out there, and although Attributer already works with all the major players there are many companies that use niche products that I know could benefit from Attributer. Similarly, there’s a growing trend toward using tools like Calendly and Accuity Scheduling to allow people to book a time to speak with someone straight from the website (as opposed to completing a form and waiting several hours for a sales person to email or call). We’re working on ensuring Attributer can work with those scheduling tools to pass through information on where each lead came from.
ISB: What is the most important insight you’ve learned in this business journey that others can learn from as well?
AB: One of the things I’ve learned through this business journey is the power of having a long-term vision of what you want the business to look like and then just basically showing up everyday and taking a step towards achieving that vision. For us, our process is that we have our five-year plan that details exactly what we want the business to look like in five years time, including everything from the revenue, to number of staff, to what product functionality is, etc. Then at the beginning of every quarter we sit down and discuss what the key things are we want to achieve in the next three months to move towards that vision. So, have a really detailed vision of what you want your business to look like in the future, and make sure that the work you do each day is moving you towards that.
