‘We’re in the business of growing businesses’: No plans for an exit for Mutiny founders
Speaking on this week’s Mumbrellacast, founders of SaaS company, Mutiny Matt Farrugia and Henry Innis said their sole focus is “transforming the industry”, rejecting the idea of a potential float or exit any time soon.
“It’s our ambition and our life work to shift marketing from a cost center from marketing to be managed as an investment,” said Farrugia of the three-and-a-half-year-old company.
Mutiny’s Matt Farrugia
“I couldn’t see myself doing anything else, I just really couldn’t,” Innis added. “There’s too much potential to realise in the platform as well.”
Innis said that this goal of transforming the industry is proving the value that marketing and advertising adds to the bottom line for brands, by developing the company’s proprietary platform, WarChest.
The pair said in August last year that it aims to have $1 billion worth of ads in WarChest within 12 months, a target which Innis said it is reaching “fairly fast” and “maybe even before the June, July period”.
“Imagine if every agency could tell the story of financial contribution to the bottom line. Imagine if every marketer could say ‘every time you cut my budget, you’re cutting revenue’. Imagine if we change the industry to that, screw the talks of exits, right, imagine if we think about how do we fundamentally have analytics to change the entire industry, and get our industry on the front foot of what we do, which is we grow businesses.”
Co-founder, Henry Innis
“We’re in the business of growing businesses. That is what marketers do and what we should be proud of, and too often we’re getting buffeted by all these things saying ‘you guys are spending too much blah, blah, blah’. Without marketing there’s no bloody revenue. So good luck.”
“So to my mind, if we build a platform that helps change that at a massive scale, that to me is how do you actually help the industry? How do you transform the industry? How do you rethink the structural paradigm that the industry is currently in? And the answer there is analytics because analytics is what will fundamentally allow us to get on the front foot and say, gosh we make everybody else money.”
Farrugia said that all Mutiny staff across the country are aligned on this vision, but that “we’ve still got a long way to go and a big job to do.”
“We’re doing that with some huge brands already, but we do want to take that and scale it out and make it accessible for many more brands around the globe eventually.”
Mutiny opened a second office in Sydney last year, and on whether the company has imminent plans to expand beyond the local market, the pair said that geography is not going to be defined by “boots on the ground”, rather how they make “a wonderful product” and make that product accessible and easy to use as a self-service, “so that anyone in the globe can pick it up and use it”.
Catch the full conversation on the Mumbrellacast below. You can find all previous episodes here.
Got a tip?
Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
Linkedin
Nicely put and I wish you all the best. There is no doubt you’ll get there.
User ID not verified.
Have your say