SPOTLIGHT: Skipping the SMB Trap and Building for Big Brands | with Matt Allison, CEO & Founder @ Handraise

0:06Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, A.J. Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market.

0:25Matt Allison: Are you ready to level up your go-to-market strategy for 2026? Then don't miss GTM 2025, the only B2B tech conference exclusively for go-to-market executives. Join a thousand other revenue leaders this September 23rd to 25th in Washington, D.C. for an exclusive executive-only experience. This three-day event is hyper-focused on connection, strategy, and execution. expectation. Expect hands-on workshops, in-depth strategy sessions, and curated opportunities to build relationships with VPs, CXOs, and founders facing the same challenges you are. You'll stress test your GTM approach, align your team, and leave it real actionable insights from top performing leaders.

1:06Matt Allison: Don't miss the Must Attend conference designed to help you boost go-to-market results in 2026. Visit attendgtm.com that is a t t e n d g t m.com to secure your spot today and don't forget to use the code top line for 10 % off your ga ticket. Hello everyone uh welcome to top line spotlight uh our uh our mini segment of the top line podcast which we are somewhat inconsistent about, but we're excited to bring it back to you today. It's released every Thursday except for Thursdays where it's not released. Now, each episode features a one-on-one between our guest and us, the hosts. And what we're trying to do is dive into a situation that has been a top business challenge that this entrepreneur, this operator has solved in the last 12 to 24 months.

2:00But honestly, what we're also trying to do is we're trying to get to know some of the people in our ecosystem and shine a spotlight on them. So we're really excited. Today we've got, AJ is here with me. As you know, he's the CEO of Quotapath, but he wasn't always the CEO of Quotapath. Before he was the CEO of Quotapath, he was the co-founder and non-CEO of a great company called TrendKite that sold Decision for many hundreds of millions of dollars. And his co-founder is here today with us, Matt Allison. Matt, welcome to Topline Spotlight. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. I love how that was that should be my bio that should be my LinkedIn headline non CEO of trend kite that's exactly what I'm you're the president you're the president today Matt and then mainly it's going to be Matt and AJ are very close friends so this is going to be me observing but before we get there today Matt is the CEO and co-founder of a company called hand raise and we want to give you the opportunity to tell us what is Handraise, Matt?

3:06Yes, so Handraise is an always-on media intelligence platform that we track where brands and their competitors and their industry topics are getting picked up in the news around the world. We are a heavy AI-based company, so we have robots that read all the news. We have some patent-pending technology that creates what we call narrative clusters. So for any brand, they can see the 30 ,000-foot view of how the world is talking about them. We analyze those stories over time so they can see what are the impact of those top narratives. And then in many cases, we're working with some of the world's best and most important brands today, hopefully a lot more here in the near future.

3:50And a lot of times they're using this information, a high-level strategy. When should we do a product launch? Are we in the middle of a crisis right now? lots of higher level types of executive strategy around the news. Matt, this sounds a lot like a vision of a company that we may have started together in 2012. It sounds like TrendKite. It's funny. Your non-compete has clearly expired. Yeah. Matt and I had the pleasure to work together prior to TrendKite at Meltwater, where we met each other in Philadelphia. and I found out this guy was coming into the Meltwater office, starting a new product line called Meltwater Press.

4:34And I immediately looked at his bio and it said Penn State. And I was like, hmm, Penn State. Did he really go to Penn State? So Matt and I always have this long-running joke. Matt, what did you graduate? What was your degree in? I graduated from the business school with a real degree in economics. Yeah, but yours was a Bachelor of Arts though, correct? and somehow I ended up with an economics degree in Bachelor of Science and we cannot figure this out so we both graduated from Smeal Business School and we have it so one of us is clearly never crossed paths interestingly we never crossed paths to the 50 ,000 students that was always the fun game at Penn State like oh my brother's cousin went to Penn State did you know them absolutely not no chance did you know Did you know Rick Smolin, though, when you were at Penn State?

5:25I have no idea who that is. Rick Smolin? Should I know who that is? Yeah, he's the CRO of Ship Hero. He's a great go-to-market leader. We did not, unfortunately. But Matt and I worked together for a couple years, and then we both coincidentally ended up in San Diego. And he lived on the beach. We were both super, super poor, So we lived in like shanty towns of houses there. And we were at the end of 2012. I got really into Tony Robbins, as you probably know, Sam. And Matt was into Tony Robbins as well. So we would just like chat hours on end while I was walking back from my office. Because we only had one car and Ange had it.

6:11So I'd walk like two and a half miles every day. And we would just talk about startups and the company that we were going to start together. And that was that was that we were born and was born in an embassy suites in San Diego. And the reason it was an embassy suites is because we got free breakfast. That's what they take. Taking one step back, one of the most fun ways that we got to work together back at Meltwater is the way Meltwater was structured. They had what they called pedals back then. So AJ was Meltwater News. I was Meltwater Cress. And sometimes we would get to work deals together.

6:46But oftentimes we'd be competing for the same budget. So sometimes we'd be going head to head. So AJ and I got to see, you know, full circle, both sides of each other working these deals. And it was it was a real blast working. That's not the only time we went to head to head. So we also had, of course, every startup in all of Silicon Valley and Texas everywhere had a ping pong table. And so Matt and I played hours upon hours of ping pong together. We had like literally every day. This is the key to a very successful startup, by the way. It's just if your co-founders are playing ping pong all day long.

7:19And we had this running list of all the top players. And I was like four or five, I don't know, out of like the 20 that played. Maybe there were only six that played. but Matt was always like one or two and so we would just uh we played a lot a lot of ping pong in those days but during that and anytime we were together we always talked business ideas business strategy like literally we did what Meltwater taught us really well was this idea of sparring when you spar out uh they're called called cases at Meltwater but they were opportunities for the rest of the world they had their own language um and so we would just like spar out all of these opportunities and we did the same thing when uh we started Trendkite which is just like we would just constantly go back and forth and use each other as clarifying.

8:01Basically, uh, Matt and I were the first chat GPT to exist because we were just going back and forth with each other on it. That is one of the reasons I think we worked so well together too, though, is, um, you know, we'd be able to sit in a room in a meeting, or if there was like a sales email that we're going back and forth on, or, you know, an investor pitch, um, one of us would be able to speak and the other would be able to listen. And I think we just ripped really, really well off each other. And then I think we're both just like natural hustlers and schemers. So find those two together.

8:33We schemed a lot. We did a lot of scheming and we had a lot of laughs at our schemes and our crazy harebrained schemes that sometimes worked and most of the time blew up in our face. And it was great. Well, Matt, tell us, so you described hand raise, but you know, let's hear a little bit about what prompted the founding of the company, where you are in the journey, and then to the point of, you know, the spotlight question, tell us like a challenge or a struggle that you've worked through over the last couple of months that we can learn something from. Yeah. So, you know, I've been in this industry now, I guess a little over 15 years.

9:10And when AJ and I started TrendKite, it was built under this concept where, you know, AJ and his team were really seeing that people wanted to understand the impact of their press coverage, that are just a list of news articles. And we went out to solve that problem. And I think we had the best product in the industry as we were building TrendKite. You know, we worked with about 1 ,400 brands, many of which are all the big brands that you're familiar with today. It was like half of the Fortune 500, pretty much. Yeah, it was an awesome customer list. And as we deployed that product, it still required just an incredible amount of human labor.

9:45So as I came back in the industry, you know, the same world still exists today where people use these different products. They'll use a Meltwater, a Session, a Muckrack, a Signal AI. And they get in these products. The data ends up being really dirty, so they have to export it to like a CSV file, Google Sheets, Excel. And then they have to wrangle this data around, clean it. And we're talking like thousands of rows of news articles regularly every week, month, quarter. So as we exited Trendgight to just kind of bring it back, I took about a year and a half off. I moved out here to the Hill Country, spent a lot of time.

10:21We've got some really interesting neighbors out here and just kind of took a breath of air. And then right when ChatGPT became mainstream, I was just like, oh, my God, this could solve so many of the manual problems that we weren't able to solve back at TrendKite. So got a bunch of the original team back together from Trendkite, some of our early folks. We have our old CTO from Trendkite. We have our guy that managed all of those really big brands, high-level enterprise accounts. And in a lot of ways, we're productizing the work that he did manually and taking his brain and plugging it into the platform.

11:01So, you know, you talk about what are the big problems we're facing, you know, trying to solve today and where are we at as a company. So we are still a seed round company. We raised$6.4 million total. We just turned on our revenue motion a couple months ago. And I think the biggest problem that we have been working to solve is, and we learned this at TrendKite, we had our accounts tiered out. So we had tier one through tier five based on the revenue bands, which largely coincided with the size of the business that we sold to. And what we saw over time is that our tier five accounts, which were our column like our two to five thousand ARR deals, had a very, very high rate of churn.

11:46And then our tier one, which were 30K plus, we had, you know, best in class retention around those. So the core problem that we've been working to solve here at Handbraze is how do we build a product that is really well positioned for those enterprise accounts? And how do we sell to those enterprise accounts day one and build something that's valuable enough where, you know, we can demand a or command like a 30K plus check from those types of companies? because another thing that we fell into at TrendKite is if you sell a bunch of those$2 ,000 to$5 ,000 deals, which for our first year, I think AJ can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but our ACVs went from probably around$2 ,000 to$5 ,000 the first year up to about$8 ,000 to$10 ,000 the second year up to$12 ,000, up to$15 ,000.

12:35And they were right around 25K when we exited TrendKite and sold decision 2019. So what happened with that approach is, you know, you end up working with a lot of smaller companies that just have very different businesses and very different demands than those enterprise companies. So we spent a lot of time focusing on, well, what are those enterprise use cases? And, you know, can we have the patience and do we have the stomach to not go out and sell deals like crazy day one? I mean, Trenka was a sales machine from day one. AJ and I were cold call selling, you know, before we had even a sniff of a product yet.

13:14And AJ built a remarkable sales organization around that. So, yeah, the problem that we're trying to solve right now is just, you know, can we build a high quality product in a short enough time window as a seed stage company and get enough traction where it's meaningful to go raise the next round of financing? I think we're showing really good signs of that. So we've, like I said, we started the sales motion a few months ago. We've got about five really high quality customers right now. We've got, we're working with like Walgreens, the Clooney Foundation, Hershey, just signed a deal with Apotex, which is Canada's largest pharmaceutical company.

13:54So we're very much figuring out what our ICP is. You know, it's typically senior comms directors, executive comms directors, maybe head of comms at some of the world's largest companies where they have a lot of news, large, complex organizations. I think that's been another really key learning going upstream here for us is, you know, in the VC community, I think most folks, when they hear about PR technology and when they saw the Trenkite exit, it's like, oh, wow, like there's a market there because oftentimes they think of our industry as, you know, a bunch of cute PR people running around just pitching stories.

14:31And when you get into these organizations, They're like large, sophisticated, complex communications that support the business. They go after, you know, political policy change. Like these are pretty sophisticated machines. The was it AJ? Did you tell me that Muckrec was at 100 million? I don't know if I said that, but I definitely know they're they're north of that for sure. Right now, their CEO is actually an investor and Quotapath. So, yeah. Yeah, they've the decision and PR Newswire like specifically was like the cash cow for precision. It's a really complex industry when you get to the heart of it because there's so many pieces to it.

15:18Matt, you know, one of the things that I think about with you, because I saw the product a couple of months ago and I haven't seen it recently, but I've heard a lot about it is just the rapid development that you have with AI at your fingertips. So I know when we've talked, you've said like, oh, no, these enterprise customers need this thing or need this thing. Do you feel like that there's a totally different change of pace with how engineering and how features are developed and built for you versus what we saw 10 years ago? Big time. Yeah. I mean, like I would say that our product today is not even close.

15:51Like it's dramatically more sophisticated at this stage in the game than our, like I would say it's more sophisticated than our Trenkite product was after seven years of on that thing. And the core reason to me, it's less about like you have a small team of engineers and they're supercharged with, you know, AI co-pilots that are writing code for them and making that experience better and faster. And I think for me, what we're seeing, you know, we have the benefit of getting to be an AI first company is that as we build things from the ground up, there is AI infused in every single thing that we build.

16:27So an example of that is with our narrative clusters, we're able to just press a button and it generates a summary of the narrative that gives, you know, an Axios smart brevity style formatting on that thing where it, you know, reads all the coverage, summarizes what to know. Then it looks more broadly at the world of the news and of the company that it's referencing and provides a why it matters. and historically like a trend kite that would have taken us many many months to build something like that and it still wouldn't have been at the quality bar that we're able to see today because these things are sitting on models and i think what we're seeing is like every feature that we deploy is just so much more sophisticated than the features that we were able to deploy a trend kite so it's it's less about having like superpower engineering teams and it's more about the technology that they're able to use is unlocking value at like an astonishing rate compared to what we're able it's so interesting because one of the taglines the original taglines matt's going to laugh at this of trend kite was understand what the world thinks of you and react accordingly we had a mutual friend that uh we we had the understand what the world thinks of you we came up with that before and then someone was like and add react accordingly to it and i'm like okay cool um so we have that do you feel like the and react accordingly was a huge value add i'm not sure about it i we i we joke because the mutual friend i'll just say who it is adam lions who started the zebra in uh it's his birthday today is adam's birthday today i'll send him a text happy birthday adam appreciate that um so we uh had that but matt is right we spent probably like a month and a half putting together that dream report for us to get into dream adventures but then it was always like what are they doing with that information because we're spending so much time on it same with Nathan the person you mentioned on your team that has such like managed service experience at the enterprise you put all this work together so AI being able to just offload that just basically makes these margins software margins where you can have someone come in and just like be a forward engineer or forward thinking with the organization gain the trust and then build these reports really quickly and then it's like on them to do something with it but it doesn't feel like you you're putting so much hours and labor into into these reports as well are the are the token fees or the api coffee like i'm assuming you guys didn't build your own model so is it using the open ai api is that does that change the cost structure meaningfully or is it still cheap enough or cost like token fees going down enough that you still have great margins it's still a great business?

19:11Because I always worry about, and do you worry, I guess, relatedly, do you worry about model dependence or at least platform dependence? Like, hey, we want to be indifferent between Llama, OpenAI, Anthropic, or you're like, no, what, you know, well, Sam Altman's the guy, we'll work with OpenAI, that'll be who we build the company around. Yeah, we don't really have that so much. So our team, we're a team of 12 people today. two people on that team i would say are like industry leading ai engineers one of them you know went through the harvard system and helped build ai google another one uh you know studied and trained at oxford and has a bunch of experience and i think what they brought to the table like we always joked at trend kite uh because we said that we had ai at trend kite and our one ai engineer that we had was like we have ai yeah there was like an article that was came out in the austin business journal that talked about the PE and the sharks, PE sharks are circling trend kite.

20:11And it was this pretty ridiculous article that was trying to get us acquired. But one of the things that like, in all of the machine learning that they're doing is a state of the art and AI forward. And there was a, literally a Slack comment from our AI engineer, ML engineer saying, yeah, we, we have this. It's like, I thought I'd be working on it. Exactly. Exactly. So in our case, you know, the tools that we're building are super legit and they've built. We have some different things where we daisy chain models together. Some of it's, you know, our own in-house ML that they're running. And in relation to like which models do we pick for specific tasks?

20:51They're constantly running testing and, you know, seeing which one has the best F1 score. And we're not dependent on any singular model. they're able to see which one is the most performant and then they're able to just plug that in over time with the cost you know they are they are dropping pretty quickly over time i would say that we're still able to pull pretty good margins even today with the way that we've optimized those systems so like you know one example is we're able to remove side links from coverage so you know if we ran every single piece of content through an ai model to um it'd be really expensive so we have you know an ml process that we run first i think that's something to really call out sidelines are the were the bane of our existence because they would call out some random article and say this article is about nike and it's like well it says nike in a sideline and it really screws up the whole algorithm and report itself if that gets not filtered through.

21:50That's right. And it's like in the old world, it was almost impossible to remove that content. Like everyone in the industry, other than us struggles with that immensely still today is the internet's a really messy place. Sidelinks get thrown into all the HTML. And then you end up, you know, you do a search for, uh, for LinkedIn and you're going to get all the follow on LinkedIn share on LinkedIn content. So, um, so I think the way that we approach these problems is we figure out like how can we isolate the problem down to a smaller data set that when we throw it through the model, it happens from a cost standpoint.

22:26That makes sense. That's cool. Do you, last question before we be thinking about inspiration, books you've read, podcasts you're listening to, that's the very last question. But before we get there, do you, So, you know, me and AJ and all of us, we listen to, you know, Rory and Lemkin and Harry Stebbings talk about how, and I've seen Harry Stebbings say that the market right now is hotter than 2021. but there's also a bit of pooping on like triple twice double three times in terms of i almost feel like it's a pooping on um non-plg like virality like a traditional enterprise sales motion that is going to grow linearly not exponentially whereas if you had like some kind of you know whereas cursor or replet or bolt are growing exponentially versus linearly Does that worry you in any way?

23:21Or are you, I mean, my perspective for what it's worth is good businesses are good businesses. And you're an entrepreneur working in the same space that you already had an exit with. So I would assume that there's plentiful capital available. But do you feel like you're pursuing a go-to-market motion that might be slightly outdated or you feel great about it? No, I think it's, you know, when we were building TrendKite, and AJ will probably feel this in his bones. And in the early days, it was really hard for us to raise money because our growth rate, like we were always, it felt like one round behind.

23:53And we'd have to convince investors that what we were building was meaningful. And then you fast forward. Literally, by the way, for the record, and Matt knows this, our Series A was our first round. We didn't have a pre-seed or a seed. We called it a Series A, which we should not have done. And it was a$1.5 million round on a$4.7 million post-money valuation, 2012. that was yeah we were always literally one right one round behind that's right and i think you know we were always judged off of you know someone could have been building a rocket ship and we you know be judged off of same type of um performance metrics probably back then and i think when i look at it it's just in our industry you have to build a substantial amount of software to be able to fulfill the enterprise use cases because we're literally, you know, crawling the world of information and trying to make sense of it as far as earned media and the news goes.

24:50So for me, it's just, it's staying disciplined. When I said like, do we have the stomach to stand our ground and just like build this thing out? It really comes down to not just, you know, does the team have the stomach? Did the investors also have the stomach? Because we're not going to see us go from, you know, zero to a million to 10 million to 100 million in less than a year, like you're starting to see with some of these companies. So it's a different business. And I think as long as we stay disciplined with our go to market motion today, to answer your question, I think that we're still, you know, learning and figuring out what's going to work really well for us.

25:27At TrendKite, it was largely starting off a cold call sales motion. Then we started getting an inbound motion associated with that. And I think for us, it's going to just be much more of a highly focused, high quality outreach where we're using screenshots of the product and trying to send real value versus anything that we're just, at least on day one, throwing into an AI machine to just call it spam in the TAM. Well, I think we're really good at that. You have the credibility. These are good businesses to invest in, in my experience, because you're working on the same problem. You have the same customers.

26:09You probably have a bunch of people that you can call that would buy it tomorrow once you're ready. So it feels like a good opportunity. Give us a book to read, a podcast to listen to, a mentor that you think we should know about. What's an influence that you can share with the audience? You don't have to mention my name right off the bat. Okay. You know, there's lots of books that I love. I think one that I bought for my company that I think a lot of people don't know about. It's called What to Say When You Talk to Yourself. I think it's by a guy named Shad Helmstetter, maybe. that book it's all about you know the the things that you say to yourself between your ears and make or break your entire journey on this planet you know whether it's business life professional life I just think that that is such an important book to read AJ obviously does a lot of work on those types of things as well in terms of inspirational things and podcasts I listen to other than Topline, of course.

27:18I would say my favorite right now is the Pattern Breakers podcast with Mike Maples. I was listening to that before he invested in us and I continue to listen to it today. As a founder, I tend to be like a very optimistic, I love to dream about a bigger, better future type of founder is what I am. And I think that aligns really nicely with Mike. and in working with him, what I've really, really enjoyed. And I'll just share this with you guys. Like I, you know, went out to their office when we closed our first financing with them and I was out to dinner with one of their partners and he asked, hey, Matt, like you should start thinking about like if hand raised was going to be a trillion dollar business, like what would that look like?

28:04And in my head, I kind of chuckled. And then I realized that he was like dead serious about that question. And my mind was blown because I, you know, I've never, um, I've never worked with an investor where they're that dead serious about that type of mentality. And what I've really enjoyed with Mike's podcast and in, in working with him is this concept of like thinking big and trying to build a legendary company. isn't just like something that's done for fun or, you know, for forward thinking. It's serious business for those guys. So I'd encourage everyone to check that podcast out as well. Super fun to listen.

28:42Awesome. That's great. And I didn't realize he invested in you guys. That's fantastic. That's, Henry is going to be a winner. I bet AJ invested too. I did. Well, you know, we all become capital allocators in our old days. That's what happened. happen once we turn 40 right sam exactly um matt thanks so much for being our guest on top line spotlight if folks want to reach out maybe they want to become a customer uh what's the best way to contact you yep um best way they can shoot me a note directly matt at handraise.com uh matt with two t's awesome thank you great to see you nice to meet you and uh thanks for being our guest thanks for having me guys

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29:59Thank you.