Australian email marketing firm Campaign Monitor shot to prominence close to three years ago when, seemingly from nowhere, it secured one of the biggest investments seen in a local start-up from US venture capital firms.
But don't expect the company, founded in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, to raise more external capital any time soon.
Despite big investments over the past two years and more to come over the next five, Campaign Monitor is planning to keep "control of our own fate", chief executive Alex Bard told The Australian Financial Review.
More investment
Since raising $US250 million from New York-based venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, Campaign Monitor has increased product investment, its global offices and moved into Sydney's central business district with an enviable view over Hyde Park.
Mr Bard said the company was profitable from day one and in the past three years had nearly tripled its employee count, including a new office in London and another with more than 100 people in San Francisco.
"The thing we've held constant throughout all that is being profitable, so that we control our own fate, so we never have to go back to the markets to raise more money to fuel delivering more value to our customers," Mr Bard said.
In control
"We want to control our own fate and have the ability to aggressively invest, because we see a tremendous opportunity. We don't want to put ourselves in a position where we're beholden to the market climates, where we're beholden to having to raise more capital to continue to fund growth."
Mr Bard stepped up as chief executive of the 12-year old Campaign Monitor in 2014, brought in from Salesforce by founders Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson.
The company now plans to evolve its products over the next quarter to include machine-learning recommendations and data and analytics in a simplified format for clients. It also is exploring opportunities in chat platforms such as WeChat.
"A lot of the areas that we've been investing in in the last year are building this foundation to be able to capture data at a huge scale," Mr Bard said.
"Not only capture that data, but then be able to be intelligent about surfacing the signals out of that data to then inform the campaigns you want to execute and the personalised content inside those campaigns to be able to drive meaningful benefit."
Helping SMEs
He said the company expected to woo small and medium business customers by giving them a way to cut through the huge wave of data that they are suddenly generating to find information that is useful.
"There's going to be a tremendous amount of noise, but surfacing meaningful data is not easy," he said.
"The companies that will be able to do that and expose that to their customers in an approachable way, where you don't need an army of engineers and data scientists, are going to be able to drive the most value to customers and succeed."
Despite Campaign Monitor's "heritage of being profitable" and its resolve to avoid further external investment, Mr Bard said he was heartened by the increasing number of VC funds targeting Australian start-ups and giving them opportunities to expand.
Eye for profit
But he says the local investor eye for clear profit rather than just market share growth should not be lost, and he advises start-ups earlier in their life cycle to ensure they properly understand the fundamentals of their company before raising funds.
"Investment to help people to build really great companies is good, as long as you are thoughtful and deliberate in how you use that capital," he said.
"You need to understand how to get profitable quickly and then execute a business plan for growth ... but not growing at all costs. Australia's tech sector has a heritage of being scrappier and more thoughtful about unit economics, and deliberate about profitable growth versus growth at all costs. We shouldn't lose that."
