What you need to know:

• Tracksuit now tracking 500 brands and their competitors, circa 5,000 all in, most in Australia, with with demand from CPG, fashion and accessories brands booming and fintech and fin services starting to build.
• It has racked-up 50 customers apiece in the UK and US so is now pushing into those markets in earnest in a bid to “double or triple” revenue every year.
• It’s currently making $10m in annually recurring revenue, suggesting clients on average are paying $20,000 for its always-on Saas-based tracking platform.
• It’s the low-cost, rapid access and ease of use aspects that set Trackstui apart from brand tracking incumbents like Qualtrics, Kantar, Ipsos, Nielsen and YouGov.
• Co-founder Connor Archbold said Tracksuit doesn’t necessarily have to replace those rivals entirely – but some clients are swapping them out.
• Archbold said the big platforms are now acting as growth accelerants, because they need credit for the brand building they increasingly claim to deliver – and more brand dollars – and so are “ recommending people buy things like Tracksuit”.
• Next he's planning further partnerships to join the dots between brand, awareness, channel choice and ultimately sales.

Triple play

Brand tracking start-up Tracksuit is using a chunk of the $20.5m raised in February from a conga line of heavyweight backers to expand into the UK and US, where it now has circa 50 customers apiece.

Co-founder Connor Archbold aims to “double or triple” revenue this year – with the three-year-old firm already booking $10m ARR via a SaaS-based platform used by 500 businesses, the bulk of which are in Australia, with demand from CPG, fashion and accessories brands booming and fintech and fin services starting to build. But he thinks some “big bets … might boost us even further and faster”.

Archbold, a former M&A lawyer, investment fund director, and scout for Australian VC Blackbird Ventures (one of Tracksuit’s early investors), said the big platforms are hot for brand tracking as they push harder for brand advertising budgets as well as performance dollars. They want advertisers to use brand tracking tools to show that spending brand dollars on their platforms also ultimately feeds into performance and incremental sales. And Tracksuit, “always on”, per Archbold, does the tracking in weeks, not months and years and at a fraction of the price. Hence gaining rapid traction since launch in 2021.

“The wave that Tracksuit is riding is this wave of people thinking more about brand, future demand, long – all the different names for it, and a little less about performance and conversion,” said Archbold.

“The big tech platforms are all getting more in tune with the long and short of it and building future demand – and they want credit for the brand building that people are doing on their platform. So they're starting to recommend that people buy things like Tracksuit because they want credit for the awareness and the consideration that they're building on that platform.”

For those with a through-line to sales, it can also help prove more concrete returns.

The firm last year published a study along with WARC and Ascential stablemate ecom intelligence firm Perpetua that ran the numbers on a billion dollars worth of Amazon sales – and ad spend – for 100 brands. It found a direct correlation between brand awareness, ad performance and sales, essentially that high awareness brands got double the sales return from their ad investment: High awareness brands that increased ad spend 10 per cent got a 13 per cent sales increase while low awareness brands got only 6 per cent lift.

Archbold told Mi3 there’s more of that to come. “Some of those big bets we're working on this year will be in that space of partnerships to release studies on the performance of certain channels against key [metrics like] awareness, consideration,” he said.

Tracksuit is also working with others – it last year struck a partnership with econometric modelling firm Mutinex – to better illustrate the linkages between brand, channel and outcomes. “You will some really interesting reports this year as we move and partner with more folks,” per Archbold. “But I can’t talk about it too much now.”

US push

In the meantime, Tracksuit now has boots on the ground in both UK and US. “We don’t invest in a market until it’s proven that it can work,” said Archbold. “We let it get to a certain level – we try to get 50-60 customers – before we invest in it and then you have good case studies. Through word of mouth, we have acquired that 50 customer mark in both the US and UK and now we see it as suitable for investment,” he added. “So we'll take some of the money that we've raised in this round and put that towards marketing and growth and building those teams out in those countries.”

Getting into the US this year is a smart move, given the election cycle will give a massive boost to ad spending – but make it harder for brands to cut through and maintain share of voice and share of mind. Which means they will have to spend more, per Archbold, and tracking their brand metrics will likely become more important – another growth wave Tracksuit aims to ride.

He said “doubling or tripling in size every year is table stakes”, which means the firm is aiming for $20m in recurring revenues at minimum this year.

“That's what we want to do – and then if any big bets take off, you might expect a little more.”

Tracksuit top?

While Tracksuit is aiming to disrupt brand tracking incumbents like Qualtrics, Kantar, Ipsos, Nielsen and YouGov, Archbold said it doesn’t necessarily have to displace them entirely.

“About 50 per cent of our customers have had some sort of brand tracking in place before and the other 50 per cent have never done any,” he said. “We see them swapping out [other tracking firms for Tracksuit], because what we offer being affordable and always on, is different to what they have been used to – a quarterly slide deck and having that presented. So they may retain an annual presentation of data or something like that. That scratches that itch they've had. But then they switch to us for an always-on insight into how their brand is performing over time.”

Tracksuit also eats its own dog food – running its brand tracking on itself and its competitors. So how is Tracksuit tracking?

“We’re up there equal with any of the big players,” said Archbold. But, he claimed, “We’re the only one that’s growing”.