Stories
It was a critical pivot at a crucial moment. Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the founder and chief executive of Poppulo, had watched his business tick along for four years with revenues flat-lining.
O’Shaughnessy told participants in the Founders Series by KPMG Private Enterprise that his breakthrough business moment was when he changed his business almost overnight, transforming it into a rapidly growth business with blue-chip clients such as Rolls Royce, Bank of New York, HSBC and LinkedIn.
The pivot his business made was from email marketing to internal communications. The decision transformed Cork-based Poppulo into a rapidly scaling business.
“Research shows that those companies that are best performing in terms of internal comms are also the best performing financially, O’Shaughnessy recalled. “I realised nobody was focussed on that so I pivoted the company overnight. We started growing at 30 per cent a year then and we have done that for seven years.”
“The difficulty of keeping everyone on track and in sync in a business at scale is the problem we are solving,” O’Shaughnessy explained. “Internal communications for 1000s or tens of thousands of people is so much harder than when you only employ 100s or when you are all just in one room.”
Creating a product to meet this demand helped O’Shaughnessy raise €30 million in funding from US private equity firm Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) at the start of the year. This investment helped the entrepreneur realise his dream of accelerating the journey into becoming a growth software company with global market leading ambition.
“Employee experience and employee engagement in 2016 had become more than buzzwords. More competition was coming into the market and everything was moving really fast. We were going to miss the opportunity to be a leader if we didn’t move faster so that is when I decided that we needed to fundraise,” he told audience at the event.
While he spent over a year fundraising in the end his new investors came on board quickly. “Susquehanna really wanted to invest and I really wanted them because they are Entrepreneur-centric. Within two weeks from when I met them, we had a term sheet and two months after that the deal was done,” he said.
The founder and entrepreneur shared some of his business lessons and war stories with fellow founders at a KPMG Private Enterprise event run in partnership with The Currency in Stripe’s Dublin office.
4 mistakes Poppulo made
- “When we started growing, I got too operationally focused and did not have the head up to think strategically.”
- “At the start I hired some senior roles for where I was rather than where I was going.”
- “I should have raised money earlier than I did. We were self-funded for too long which slowed our growth.”
- “I didn’t put a strong product management function in place early enough.”
4 things Poppulo did well
- “I pivoted the company into a global opportunity that others were neglecting.”
- “We created a great culture in the business.”
- “We manage cash very well and have a capital efficient business.”
- “We have created customers that love us with a retention rate over 93%.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s advice for going global
“Our revenues are split fifty-fifty between Europe and the US. A key success of ours going abroad was based on an initial mistake in Newsweaver (the name of Poppulo when it was an email marketing business). When we opened an office in the UK with Newsweaver we were managing a remote sales team. This didn’t work for us. When we went to start in the US with Poppulo we did things differently. Our first hire was a senior person who is the President of Poppulo USA. If you want to expand overseas you need a senior person to build the business from day one.”
