MGMT Boston - W11, Q1 24 - OneScreen // Annie Lindseth, Connie Health // 4 Pieces of Advice for Manufacturing SaaS
OneScreen // Annie Lindseth, Connie Health // 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 820+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
Thank you to Debbie Steiner Hayes from Northeastern for referring 3+ readers this past week. Employers of Boston, go hire some M.G.E.N. students!
TLDR:
OneScreen - an end to end analytics platform to help brands select, purchase, and measure OOH (out of home) advertising. Because life is better in the real world!
Thanks to Michele S. for the intro to OneScreen
Annie Lindseth, Chief of Staff @ Connie Health - building a career in startups by teaching others how to fly, using her experience managing stakeholders and aptitude for operational rigor as the Chief of Staff at growth stage healthtech startup Connie Health
Thanks to Micah L. for the intro to Annie
(Operators Club Corner) 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup - competing with a mighty incumbent in Excel, integrations are table stakes, customer references are critical, and scaling means deliberate & methodical choices
Thanks to Dana Wensberg at Paperless Parts for this insightful piece
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Underscore Core Coffee Shop - more than 100 leaders from the Boston startup ecosystem came to make connections, share learnings, and discuss the current landscape
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff - assembled 60+ operators for some great discussion on 2024 trends
B2B SaaS Q1 Breakfast - Thank you to Fidelity for Startups for bringing together 100+ Boston based builders in Feb
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - updated snapshot of 2024 companies to watch. The comprehensive funding list needs work. If anyone knows an easy way to capture this holistic view (ex-biotech), reach out!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Startups Highlighted: Merlin, BlueTrace, Osmo, Boswell, Tomorrow.io, Vizit, Centaur Labs, Verve Motion, Duckbill, Circle
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex, Joe Kiernan / Perch, Micah Lanier / Jump, Craig Minoff / Kasa, Dean Walsh / TiE Boston, Kelly Peters / Tomorrow.io
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. Onboarding or offboarding employees this quarter? What’s your process? TSP has operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
OneScreen
Founders: Andrei Opesan, Greg Wise & Sam Mallikarjunan
Founding: 2020
Mission: OneScreen.ai’s mission is to transform marketing by modernizing the market for out of home advertising. Because we believe that advertising, like life, is better in the real world.
Employees: 30 & 30% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4.7M raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital Partners, Hanover Technology Management, Impellent Ventures, Techstars & notable Angels
Key Customers: Ramp, DraftKings, bobbie, Cozy Earth, Leafly
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $20M+ (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
OneScreen is building an end to end analytics platform to help brands select, purchase, and measure OOH (out of home) advertising. They’re bringing better analytics to the oldest advertising platform in the world: real life. Because life is better in the real world!
The company was founded in 2020 by a group of former HubSpot leaders - Andrei Opesan, Greg Wise & Sam Mallikarjunan. Do all roads in Boston tech lead back to HubSpot?? Over some drinks the group debated the challenges they were having maintaining ROI on digital advertising channels. As they discussed their predicament, they wondered how the TV on the restaurant wall measured its audience. They began exploring connected TV and set out to build a platform that would report accurate CPMs & attribution for screens at store checkout lines, taxis & ride shares, and elevators.
It’s not easy to get impression counts for these devices so they wanted to invent something that could bring measurement to the medium. As they navigated the idea maze, they soon realized that there is an even bigger problem in the “offline” media category. Did you know billboards have been around since 1835? But after almost 200 years, measuring their effectiveness still isn’t great…
Performance marketers tend to shy away from legacy offline channels because they can’t measure the campaigns. So OOH advertising campaign measurement is the problem that OneScreen set out to solve.
OOH advertising is a $39B market due to grow to $55B by 2028 and it’s highly fragmented (src). There are four large billboard players - Lamar (25%), Outfront Media (20%), Clear Channel (16%), & JCDecaux (2%) - followed by a long tail of mom & pop independents representing ~35% of the market (src). Not to mention all the changes that digital advertising channels have undergone. The demise of the browser cookie, Apple’s increased privacy policies & the depreciation of the IDFA, and Google’s plans to follow suit in 2024. Advertisers are having a harder time tracking the ROI of their digital advertising spend.
OneScreen began building analytics to bring disparate data sources together to show marketers all the out of home inventory that indexes highest for their target audience. Depending on an advertiser’s reach & frequency goals, their SaaS platform can help marketers build a specific inventory & media plan to buy OOH advertising at scale, maximizing ROI via different formats & inventory across the U.S.
They’re helping to provide the analytics to supply the missing piece of a truly measurable omni channel approach for marketers. Imagine a company who is trying to enter a physical market for the first time and deploy budgets across TV, Radio, Podcasts & Digital. They have multi touch attribution models for all those performance channels but OOH doesn’t feature in any of those. OneScreen is integrating offline data so that advertisers can see conversion lift across their broader marketing stack.
Alex Ewing came into the business in 2023 through investor Asymmetric Capital as their growth stage CEO to add operational rigor and help OneScreen get to the next level on their path up the mountain to build a billion dollar business. Alex brings a focus on process and responsible growth to increase revenue at an appropriately aggressive pace without having to take on too much dilutive capital in the process. The OneScreen team is lucky to be in a spot where they have a balance sheet to support their 2024 growth plans. And the real world is just an awesome advertising experience for marketers & consumers. Billboards are canvases!
OneScreen works exclusively on the demand side of the advertising market - with marketers - and does not own or re-broker any inventory. They will work to integrate more partners like mobile measurement partners & other platforms that help provide real time visibility on inventory & pricing to better streamline the OOH purchasing experience from an analytics perspective, using a data driven approach.
From a technical perspective, a big part of their secret sauce is the comprehensive database of every OOH opportunity in the U.S. they’ve built which is constantly being enriched by performance data from live campaigns. That billboard in the Bay Area off the 101 near the Palo Alto exit? How about the one on the Mass Pike by Fenway Park? I’d be curious to know how it *actually* performs too!
OneScreen builds quality scores for billboards and other OOH inventory formats. They note attributes like how far off the road is the placement, is it hard to see at night, is it blocked by trees, etc. Overlaying that contextual data with people movement & demographic data enriches the database as it grows. Probabilistic methodologies help them tie together web traffic & foot traffic by physical locations to estimate who saw an ad and then took a digital action. They leverage exposed audiences vs. lookalike audiences to show conversion lift from consumers who have seen an advertisement vs. a baseline “control” cohort. OneScreen even has a home measurement methodology that’s been peer reviewed by Northeastern.
In 2023, under Alex’s leadership, the team has found its identity and a new gear. They reduced their operating expenses by 50% and tripled revenue, finding a repeatable go to market motion that has allowed them to scale in 2024. They’re laser focused on scaling the business by adding talent and growing revenue to add value for customers. In 2024 they will be adding talent across Marketing, Product & Engineering to make their OOH platform even more compelling for advertisers.
The team plans to run at a breakeven pace to control their own destiny, admiring companies like Klaviyo and the Trade Desk who raised minimal amounts of venture capital until much later in their company lifecycle, building revenue engines that deliver real value for customers to finance their growth.
Operators to Know:
Frank Brullo, Technical Team Leader
Abby Frame, Customer Success Manager
Hannah Leary, Senior Account Executive
John Schott, Head of Finance
Justin Mandarano, Software Engineering Manager
Ben Mullaney, Senior Manager Customer Success
Jennifer Nelson, Director Media Planning
Robert Ozimek, Full Stack Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the OneScreen team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
Head of Marketing
Head of Product
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key platform differentiators relative to other OOH measurement tools?
How does OOH fit into most marketing media plans today?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about OneScreen you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more advertisers measure their offline spend digitally. All marketers & curious consumers applaud your efforts. See you on billboards around town!
Annie Lindseth, Chief of Staff @ Connie Health
Annie Lindseth is building a career in startups by teaching others how to fly, using her experience managing stakeholders and aptitude for operational rigor as the Chief of Staff at growth stage healthtech startup Connie Health. Annie leverages cross-functional strategic planning & execution skills to help make healthcare more trustworthy for older Americans.
Annie grew up in Princeton, New Jersey and loved attending summer camps on the university campus each year. Startups run in her family too. Both of her parents were entrepreneurs - her dad has been running the same software business for 30+ years and her mom started a college counseling business after she & her siblings got a little older. Her grandfather started a plastics manufacturing business in Ohio, and an aunt, uncle, and cousin have all started their own businesses.
Both parents encouraged their three children to work hard and try new things, all while keeping a sense of humor. When it was time to look for colleges, Annie was ready to try somewhere very different. She was lucky enough to be accepted into Stanford and headed to the west coast. She remembers the optimism of the time, reading about a couple Stanford graduates who started a software company called YouTube that was acquired by another emerging company started by some Stanford alumni: Google.
After graduating with a degree in Environmental Sciences as part of Stanford’s Earth Systems Program, Annie moved to San Francisco where she began commuting back to Silicon Valley for consulting firm LeighFisher. They were a specialized consulting firm focused on the aviation industry, specifically focused on civil aviation & airport planning. She loved the environmental impact of the role and working on cool problems like energy efficiency, writing grants with the FAA to get more electric vehicles in use at airports, and also helping to plan new state of the art airport facilities across the world.
Annie learned how to organize stakeholders who had different goals, bringing constituents together to place runways and terminals. The land side and air side of an airport must be optimized to make the entire airport function as a system. It’s a really cool challenge with a lot of lessons in stakeholder management. Airports are so capital intensive that there are a lot of “one way” doors. Even a good airport planner who knows what needs to change can’t always execute in the near term with projects that might cost $10s or $100s of millions of dollars. She worked on projects in San Francisco, Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, Philadelphia, Logan Airport, and international projects in Ecuador & Brazil too.
Ultimately, she knew she didn’t want to be a walking encyclopedia of airport knowledge forever. It was time to look more broadly. Networking throughout the Bay Area, she was encouraged to consider business school. Her boyfriend (now husband) was in biotech, so Boston was at the top of their wishlist. When she was accepted to Harvard Business School, off they went to make their home in Boston!
She admits she felt slightly out of place when she landed in Cambridge. But everyone she met was thoughtful and had different interests. She quickly learned that there is much more than one type of person that attends business school. At HBS, she set out to learn how to use her planning skills in the “build environment” to run construction projects.
One summer, she worked at Facebook helping them build out data centers in their real estate division. But she was wisely counseled by an executive that, if you want to work in real estate, “do it at a real estate company, not a big tech company.”
When Annie graduated, she entered a real estate leadership development program at RMR Group, a large alternative asset manager & operating business here in Boston. At RMR, she got to lean into traditional real estate investing and equity research, including a project on the state of the self storage business. She also helped out on the operations side of the business with a hotel operator, truck stop business, and senior living business.
She loved the operating side of the business and wanted to explore operations more deeply. When Wayfair reached out, she decided to take a chance to join the rapidly growing Boston based e-commerce giant.
Annie was brought on to help lead their expansion into Canada, one of their largest strategic programs, helping reduce costs with cross border shipments & incident prevention. She helped set up a return center in their Toronto warehouse on the eve of Covid, zooming with product & engineering leadership back in Boston as borders began to close.
Next, she took a role to help build out their freight forwarding business - Castlegate Forwarding - moving goods from factories in Asia to distribution centers in the U.S. and Europe. There was a lot of supply chain innovation in the Covid years and focus on supply chain visibility with emerging platforms like Flexport. And it was exciting to run a Strategic Projects team that built out of stock purchasing, created a customs brokerage launch plan, and helped open new facilities while the freight market was growing so fast.
Annie finally led the returns monetization strategy at Wayfair, where her team designed systems to decide how to resell returned items for as much of the original value as possible, leveraging open box ecommerce resale and B2B liquidation sales.
Throughout Annie’s work at Wayfair, she had served in several “Chief of Staff” type roles at the intersection of strategic planning & execution. For her, it’s the perfect mix of strategy and operations. She gets to map the vision, set goals, and then go out & handle the execution. So when Connie Health reached out on LinkedIn leveraging the HBS alumni network, their Chief of Staff role sounded like a perfect opportunity to join a growth stage business where she could be a key piece of their success.
While she didn’t know too much about healthcare, she was excited to join a venture backed company and leverage her well worn strategic planning & project management skills. As Connie Health’s Chief of Staff, she is helping to improve their strategic planning process, scale their operational execution, and help with quarterly planning & goal setting cross functionally.
Connie Health is a growth stage healthtech startup on a mission to make healthcare more trustworthy for older Americans. Annie has loved learning from their amazing executive team in her first true startup role and she appreciates the quick decision making and lack of bureaucracy.
People & Culture Drive Strategic Execution
Annie’s career happiness hinges on people & culture. Before joining Connie Health, she had prioritized working with congenial groups of people. Through the managers she has had in her career (good and bad), she’s developed a strong view of where she fits and how she wants to run teams. It all comes down to strategy & execution.
The opportunity to take something from an idea and then see “boxes coming down the line” gets Annie up in the morning. In order to do this effectively, Annie is very intentional about goal setting. She sets goals backed by as much data as possible so her teams know *exactly* what is needed to reach their goal with flexibility built in to change things on the fly.
For example, at Connie Health, they have an aggressive target for the number of agents they want to hire this upcoming year. Who doesn’t like setting a lofty goal?
Now, all they have to do is go execute!
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Connecting the Dots - “It’s ok to change industries and change your goals because your knowledge and expertise will be more cross-functional than you think. As Steve Jobs once said in his commencement speech at Stanford, ‘you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.’”
People & Culture Rule - “Increasingly I think people & culture are the most important ingredients for being happy in your career. Early in my career, I really optimized for problems I thought were the ‘most interesting’ and was willing to give up a lot of other things to work on them. I still think that’s important, but the people I work with & the culture I work in have become more important over time.”
Quantifying Career Risk - “The path that looks like a safe path is often riskier than you think. A risky path sometimes isn’t as risky as it seems. In 2024, working at a big company can be risky. Staying at the same job where you’re not learning or growing for too long can be a big risk too.”
Annie would like to continue to serve on startup leadership teams. One day she’d either like to run her own business or perhaps serve as a COO for an organization whose mission she really believes in. She’s really excited about the mission at Connie Health and hopes to stay there for a long time. She loves the rewards of mentoring & coaching and hopes to dig further into the skillset she honed at Wayfair in the coming years.
If you’d like to learn more about Annie, you can find her spending time with her family in and around Boston, digging into the numbers at Connie Health, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the people & cultures you impact in the years ahead!
Operators Club Corner
4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup
Dana Wensberg was an early engineering hire at Paperless Parts and served as their first Product Manager. You can learn more about his career here.
In May of 2017, I joined Paperless Parts as the first hire outside the founding team. Paperless Parts caters to custom part manufacturers, offering a quoting and estimating platform that marries the precision of CAD, the versatility of Excel, and the organizational power of ERP systems. This platform simplifies and scales the complex processes of quoting custom parts by automating the extraction and application of data from part files into cost and pricing models. I've journeyed with the company from its pre-revenue stage to its current status as a market leader, through numerous pivots and product enhancements, as both an engineer and product manager. I've distilled four key learnings that I believe are essential for anyone venturing into the Manufacturing SaaS space.
1. The Challenge of Displacing Excel
Many shops run much of their quoting process on Excel. Given each shop floor is different and there are so many ways to manufacture parts, Excel emerged over time as the only tool adaptable enough to meet the wide variety of formulas and inputs required to quote custom parts. At its core, our solution automated many manual data entry tasks, such as inputting part size and weight, but we quickly learned that onboarding new customers meant effectively replicating and enhancing their existing Excel sheets. This was not straightforward. No two shops had the exact same approach and very few were willing to start over from scratch. The lesson here is to be weary of customization overhead, especially in an environment where Excel is the incumbent, and there is little standardization of approach across the industry. If you cannot deliver your product in a cost effective and timely manner, you won’t acquire customers fast enough to survive.
2. The Complexities of Integration
Manufacturing is an old yet highly nuanced field, leading to a diverse landscape of software solutions, each slightly different from the next. This diversity makes integration a challenging task, as no two systems model processes in exactly the same way. Moreover, the dependency on ERP systems for business operations means that seamless integration is non-negotiable for any new SaaS offering in this domain. The lesson here is clear: effective and automated integrations are crucial, especially as businesses grow and more people touch a workflow, in our case the quote-to-cash cycle.
3. Crossing the Chasm in Manufacturing
The adoption lifecycle in manufacturing is real and challenging. It took us four years to move from engaging innovators and early adopters to making significant inroads with the early and late majority segments. The transition required developing and maintaining more sophisticated business features, especially integrations. Also, the need for reference customers in similar businesses becomes critical past the early adopter stage, highlighting the importance of building a strong referral network to secure deals with larger clients.
4. Scaling Intentionally
Transitioning from early growth tactics to scalable strategies is a deliberate process. It demands focused attention on defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), refining sales and onboarding processes, and evolving product development practices. For Paperless Parts, achieving meaningful integrations with major ERP systems marked a turning point, enabling us to streamline our focus and significantly improve our market approach and product offerings.
Conclusion
The journey from a startup to a market leader in the Manufacturing SaaS space is fraught with challenges, from the intricacies of displacing entrenched tools like Excel to navigating the complex web of industry-specific integrations. Understanding and crossing the market adoption chasm, coupled with a strategic approach to scaling, are crucial. Hopefully these lessons can offer valuable insights for the next generation of Manufacturing SaaS startups looking to make their mark.
If you're making the leap or want to compare notes, reach out to Dana!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt