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It has been an amazingly fun and fast five years since we got started at Tackle. Over the last 18 months, we have raised our Series A, Series B and now a pre-emptive C, all with the focus around helping software sellers scale revenue more efficiently through the Cloud Marketplaces. We have been aggressively scaling our team, tripling in size this year, to meet the demands of our customers, partners, and the market. This new incremental capital will allow us to continue to accelerate our pace of innovation and growth globally as Cloud Marketplaces go mainstream.
We started with the hypothesis that the clouds would leverage Marketplaces to change the way that software was sold. Since then, we’ve seen the Cloud Marketplaces take real shape and become a meaningful component of the go-to-market system for software companies of all sizes. We are now seeing more startups being born not only cloud-native, but Marketplace-native and all software companies are looking to align their products towards cloud buyers. Cloud agility has moved from a technical enabler to a business requirement.
But as the entire world has worked through the global pandemic, we’ve started to see something new, something greater than we originally expected. The pandemic has shifted all consumers from ecommerce for convenience to ecommerce by default and this transformation is making its way to B2B. But it is particularly difficult for software companies.
B2B buyers and sellers want and need to engage more through digital experiences and there are very few tools that enable this to happen. The cost of acquiring customers is usually the most expensive part of a software company and the combination of Cloud Marketplaces and Tackle provide an easier starting point for both top down and bottom up selling.
Our mission is to continue to innovate to enable software companies to seamlessly evolve towards a digital selling future. Let’s dive in a bit deeper to what that means.
Where are we today: Cloud Marketplaces speed up buying and selling
In our consumer lives, we buy through Marketplaces daily and we are rapidly racing to this state in our B2B lives. Why? Marketplaces speed up both buying and selling. There are a few reasons why.
A new budget flywheel is forming where we are seeing cloud budget and enterprise software budgets become one based upon the value to buyers and sellers. This trend has accelerated tremendously over the last two years based upon the investments being made by all the Cloud Providers.
Where is the world going: The future is digital selling
Digital selling is bigger than just Marketplaces and we are seeing a wide array of signals leading that way. Product-led growth, usage-based pricing, and Cloud Marketplaces are all signals of this future. In all instances, software companies are looking for ways to meet their buyers in a seamless and efficient way.
We believe a few things will be true as the world of Marketplaces and digital selling evolve.
First is that buyers will continue to buy where it is convenient and seamless to get started and we believe the big Marketplaces will win at scale, but there will be a growing variety of Marketplaces available to both buyers and sellers over time. This will increase complexity for sellers to meet their buyers.
Second, sellers will seek to help buyers buy digitally via seamless digital experiences. We are in the earliest days of this digital selling transformation; it will continue to accelerate over the next decade and we believe will have many phases:
With most software companies spending 50% of their revenue on acquiring and maintaining customers, there is a huge opportunity to streamline and optimize this experience to deliver more value to buyers and more efficiency for sellers. We see decreasing the cost of acquiring customers as our long term opportunity to deliver value.
If Marketplaces are about speeding up sales, Tackle is about speeding up Marketplace. Tackle makes the Cloud Marketplaces a business decision versus a product and engineering prioritization problem.
Speed:
When you’ve got a buyer on the line who wants to buy through the cloud, you can’t wait 3-6 months for your team to prioritize and attempt to build out your integration. You need to launch immediately to capture revenue in real time. We allow you to launch your Marketplace business at the speed of revenue via our no-code platform getting you started selling fast.
Scale:
Once you list and sell, we have the tools and team to help you scale your cloud GTM. You do not need to overthink it at the start—we have the tools for Alliances, Sales, Finance, and Engineering to use as the Cloud GTM channel scales in significance, all delivered via our platform.
Our team is also here to help you every step of the way on how to build a Cloud GTM, execute on your first transactions seamlessly, and align this new business with your existing processes and tools.
Efficiency:
We work with hundreds of ISVs from seed stage startups up to the largest cloud sellers in the world. We learn from every customer, every transaction, every hiccup in the buying and selling process and we embed all of our learnings into the platform to save you time and ensure efficiency. We bring the collective experience of the community together into our platform to provide an enterprise grade experience.
With this capital, we will continue to strive to set the pace of innovation for Cloud Marketplaces and digital selling. Here is a rollup of what we released in 2021 and our roadmap for 2022 is even BIGGER! Our key areas of focus in 2022 will include:
Enabling Scale for Sellers
Helping Sellers Sell More, Faster
Lowering Barriers to Entry for Startups
Teaching the World How to Sell Digitally
2021 was the year where we saw the debate about build vs buy disappear. When we delivered the first version of our platform in 2017, our main competition was companies attempting to build it themselves. As we evolved to support multi-cloud, the build conversation changed to be predominantly buy and now today we have sellers who built at-scale Marketplace businesses converting to Tackle as they need enterprise software to run their enterprise Cloud Marketplace businesses.
Check out this session where Jessica Alexander, VP of Cloud Alliances at CrowdStrike talks about why they decided to buy Tackle. No one wants to build software to sell software and our plan is to ensure that no ISV ever has to again.
Finally, thank you to all of our customers and partners. We are excited to continue to innovate, learn, and share with you all into 2022 and beyond.
If this blog hits home with you, follow Tackle on Twitter or LinkedIn as we will be doing more to build and grow the community around digital selling.
If you would love to be part of bringing the future of digital selling to life, check out our open roles at Tackle. We are hiring across all functions for those inspired by changing the way software is sold.
Thanks, and if you have questions or comments please reach out!
John Jahnke, CEO, Tackle
Dillon Woods, Founder and CTO, Tackle