Growblocks accelerates: €6M Seed Funding & Launches Product
It’s a big day for us at Growblocks after securing over €6M in seed funding from Project A Ventures and launching our beta out into the world.
By helping revenue operators manage their revenue engine, our revenue planning and execution platform (RP&E) is designed to help companies grow efficiently and predictably, even in our current economic climate.
While all of us are really happy reaching this new milestone. Hardly anyone on the team has not been part of a similar journey. And we all know that getting back to work asap is what is needed now.
But in light of this news, we wanted to explain why we created Growblocks, the belief system behind everything we do, and how we imagine modern companies will operate their revenue engine going forward.
Our beliefs
We believe that growing revenue is a science, not an art.
In other words, we believe that every revenue engine has a robust logic to it that is rooted in data. Everything can be explained. Which means everything can be improved by way of structured thinking and diligent execution.
We do not believe in the super-star AE. Or the magical marketing campaign. Sure, those things exist – and we won’t always know why these outliers are successful.
But the point is that we see them as outliers: hard or impossible to repeat at scale. And more than foolish to bank on for next year’s performance.
And we don’t mean “science” in comparison to definite sciences like math or physics. We see it much more similar to fields like economics and sociology. None of them can determine the behavior of one person exactly. But within reasonable parameters, they can explain the behavior of many people and then apply those to give predilection for events to come.
We think that revenue growth as a science achieves exactly that.
We know that using data and logic, we can explain why a revenue engine is behaving like it does. And we can use the same explanations to predict how the behavior of the engine will unfold in the future.
We think that companies that use this approach will have better visibility into not only this quarter, but several quarters to come. This enables them to make significantly better decisions now. This, in turn, results in building a revenue engine that is much less wasteful with its resources than otherwise.
We even believe that if more companies were to adopt this approach, we as a whole would live in a society that can achieve much more with the limited resources we have.
Instrumenting the science
While many of us at Growblocks are sporting fancy university degrees, no one feels fulfilled just having stumbled upon a new theory.
We were senior operators in scale-ups, and we applied this approach to running those revenue engines. While it clearly was not only up to us and the approach, the three companies we worked for reached two exits in the early nine digits, and the one that is pre-exit is currently valued at roughly half a billion.
The issue we came across, though, is that it is very difficult to apply this approach in the operational reality of companies.
This approach is data-intensive, computationally heavy, and needs to be simplified enough to be practical for revenue operators.
In other words, you need a tool. You need to instrument the science.
But … there is none.
People sometimes reflexively shout “BI” when you start a sentence with “data-driven.” But BI struggles to create logic between data points and has an even harder time projecting data into the future.
The other reflex hearing “future” or “planning” usually prompts financial planning tools. The problem with those is that they are focused on cost and use only very simple methods to project revenue.
In essence, neither of these solutions are built for purpose for modern revenue operators.
The Specter of Excel
This brings us to the only solution left for many operators out there that have come to share the same belief as we do: Excel.
In RevOps-circles, Excel is seen as the anti-tool. Or the wild-wild-west. No rules, no structure, and everything is possible. For RevOps, Excel is only a marginal step up from a pen & paper.
But without any other options available, what can you do?
While everyone but finance hates Excel for many different reasons, there are a few that stand out when trying to apply revenue growth as a science:
- Lots of admin, lots of breaking. Lots of issues, sure. But survivable.
- Data depth and flexibility is never enough. And let’s be honest, Excel was never built for this in the first place.
But what really stands out as the main issue is:
- Accessibility.
Accessibility is not about access control or governance. It is about the “Excel-literacy” needed to actually go into a spreadsheet and extract meaningful value.
I sometimes compare it to real accessibility issues like: is your office accessible to disabled people? Or is your software accessible to visually impaired people? Or do you speak the language of the country you are living in?
Because of that giant Excel-hurdle, even if you have the perfect revenue engine built, you will fail to deploy it as a tool for 95% of revenue experts in your commercial engine. And if that is the case, this wonderful “breakthrough” idea is useless. It will not create any value beyond the theoretical.
Why we created Growblocks
Our core belief of understanding revenue growth as a science drives two main missions:
- More people need to learn about this approach.
- People need to be able to actually apply this approach in the operational reality.
While €6M is a lot of money. We can’t do it all.
So for the first mission, we are organizing in a Cohort of senior RevOps folks, CROs and COOs to help each of us to get better but also to educate more and more others on our belief. If you feel you fit in and want to contribute, feel free to join the waitlist.
For the second mission, this is where we will put the money we raised to work. In fact, we already now have made significant leaps forward by working with two handfuls of customers for the last year, leading to our beta release today. Check out our RevOps platform here if you’re curious.
But, a product like this is never done. And given the complexity of the field but also the breadth of the use case, we have lots of areas to build more and better product.
If you share our belief and want to join as a customer, I’d be thrilled to give you a deeper dive.