FUNL helps companies strategize and execute using their deep experiences in data driven product development, investment and scale processes. They approach digital growth uniquely, bringing a holistic perspective of the entire digital ecosystem, an evolving data intelligence framework that captures critical learnings for optimization across the funnel, and a fresh interpretation of a modern tech stack.
I sat down with the founders to reflect on their latest venture. First, we dug into why FUNL was founded and the unique lenses through which each sees the world.
Stephanie: FUNL seems to be addressing growth and innovation from such an interesting intersection. It's part Operational Investor, Enterprise Growth Consultant, and Performance Marketing Agency. I'd love to know how all of this came together. What need were you hoping to address by starting FUNL?
Wilson: I'll jump in first. I've been angel investing for 15 years, and when I reflected with a friend, we both realized the same thing: the most successful startups we invested in were the ones in which we were most operationally involved. When we unpacked that, we quickly realized that by providing strategy, resources and hands-on support on tasks that are directly related to their core value propositions (e.g., key product and business assumptions, customer pain points, removing friction from the conversion and retention process, etc.), the founders then knew where to focus their attention, the weaknesses in their model and ultimately make risk mitigated decisions to achieve goals. This spanned both investor-backed ventures and corporate-backed ventures. In talking to Ben and Vernon, it was clear from the beginning that we wanted to create a space where we could build alongside founders. This is the foundation in how we retain our entrepreneurial DNA, by focusing our practice on the early stages of finding and optimizing product-market fit. We’re finding this approach gives the founding team more confidence and better team dynamics as well as provides authentic data for investors.
That’s our Operational Investor side.
Vernon: I spent the past 20+ years building digital products for startups and enterprises. Before FUNL, I had the opportunity to bring these two worlds together. I created a team of startup designers, researchers, developers, and growth marketers. I retooled them to practice lean and comprehensive experimental-driven work within the enterprise validation and growth context. The perspectives we brought and tools we leveraged introduced a level of grittiness and creativity that enterprises at the time hadn't yet seen before. The enterprises loved it, of course. Their teams were learning and adopting new ways of working and, as a result, were moving with much more agility and customer-centricity. Having played in the intersection of enterprises and startups, I knew that it would be important that these two ecosystems come together and learn from each other. But it's more complicated than it sounds. Even the small boutique firms that hire entrepreneurs have folks that have been out of the startup ecosystem for years. The bigger firms? Forget about it. Ben, Wilson, and I wanted to solve this problem. How might enterprises easily access growth mindsets and ways of working from the startup ecosystem? How might startups learn from enterprises in a meaningful way?
Ben: Vernon's right. You have to do both. The two ecosystems have so much to learn from each other. How do you learn from unbiased advertising campaign data? How does this startup construct its tech stack that makes it scalable while mitigating tech debt? The other problem we wanted to address, which I'm passionate about, is connected data. Enterprises use, on average, 250+ SaaS tools to make work happen. As a result, organizations have data silos, which leads to trapped data, duplication of work, manual data manipulation, and missed insights. The reason for this is the entire system has yet to be constructed holistically -- with the whole funnel and customer lifecycle in mind. When your job is to launch a new product, understand the impact of personalization on your business, increase conversion, or interact with your customers, creating an evolving intelligence framework that connects all disparate data points – online and offline – is critical. When the game is changing around us constantly with the emergence of new social platforms, data privacy regulations, the disappearance of cookies, etc., this becomes a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
Wilson: We've made the construction of a data intelligence framework the primary goal for every partner we work with and every company we build. To ensure that outcome, we had to augment and build on "the startup way" (design thinking, agile, scrum) of launching, growing, and scaling businesses. Both ecosystems benefit from an understanding of how to do that. So we have two sides to the business. We have FUNL Studio, which helps enterprises validate, build and scale new solutions and startups within large companies. And we have FUNL Ventures, where we build alongside founders as a practice of operational investing. As a venture studio, we operationally support or invest capital for equity. Studio (enterprise work) and Ventures (startup building) create immense value for each other.
Stephanie: You have this incredible team of, frankly, hackers that are on the forefront of each of their respective domains of expertise – whether it's modern technology stacks, data architecture, AI/ML, growth marketing, product ownership, etc. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of what's working. How did you approach the talent strategy?
Ben: Firstly, it's essential for us to always be "in the work". Both the partners and the team. We love to build stuff, and we never want to stop. We wanted people like that, too, because they are the ones that are active in their communities, learning everything they can and always trying to get better at their craft. We knew that another critical component for us would be to have a global, remote-first team. Firstly, because I am American and based in Serbia, and secondly, we knew that the people we wanted to work with preferred the autonomy of remote or opting for part-time work. We wanted to create flexible conditions to attract the best talent out there. While we are global, we are anti-outsourcing in mindset and practice.
Wilson: You'll immediately notice how different we (Ben, Vernon, and I) are from one another and how complementary our skill sets are. We wanted to build a team with that kind of diversity and broaden our areas of expertise. Another important thing is ensuring conditions exist to enable individual and team "drive." It comes from Daniel Pink's book, Drive. How do we create the conditions for each individual to practice Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose? In creating a team of almost unhirable people, we must ensure the principles exist to empower folks to evolve and flourish dynamically. We also just completed an exercise with the team to define our values, which is exciting.
Vernon: Our company comprises multifaceted generalists who tend to hone in on specializations as their experience grows or fall in love with a new discipline as they gain exposure to it. 'Full stack' is a word that is used a lot, but for us, it means being able to impact all aspects of a product's success directly, and we firmly believe those aspects are interrelated. Our team considers all the factors, from branding and positioning, messaging and marketing, product UX, and development to analytics and reporting. It takes a multidisciplinary team to bring that holistic mentality to any challenge at any life cycle stage. Whether the project emphasizes marketing or product development, we always bring a bit of everything to our approach.
Stephanie: I'd love to bring this to life a bit. Can you talk a little bit about 1-2 of your favorite projects – either past or present?
Vernon: Sure, we are currently engaged in a really interesting project with a CPG company that illustrates how we can help an enterprise iteratively get from early idea to an in-market MVP. When we were engaged there were some early ideas and signals, but no validation or clear direction. We started with an extensive quant survey to understand initial customer receptivity to a new pet wellness platform idea and frame the assumptions and value propositions we wanted to test "in the wild." We quickly launched a demand test, creating a landing page with a basic wellness assessment, and overwhelmingly validated consumer interest in the idea and this channel as a cost-effective first-party data acquisition channel. Based on this evidence, we partnered with a veterinarian to build a sophisticated wellness assessment that scores and ranks multiple conditions and provides tailored recommendations. We also developed a complete e-commerce MVP, selling targeted pet wellness products based on recommendations. FUNL contributed the full scope of our capabilities: branding, product management, web, and eCommerce UX design and development, analytics, data integration and analysis, paid search, paid and organic social, email drip marketing, remarketing campaigns, and more. This multi-phase test has just concluded, and the business is evaluating the next phase. We are excited to see where it goes!
Wilson: On the Ventures side, a couple of investments to discuss. We are taking a minor operational role in one of our DeFi investments, CoinFX. The company focuses on infrastructure that powers the global crypto economy by delivering a novel stability protocol that monetizes foreign exchange slippage and redirects value from intermediaries to people and businesses. On another project, Ensemble Inc., FUNL Ventures is taking a more active role as a co-founder in an HRTech investment with senior executives that left a Fortune 500 to focus on this startup. One of FUNL's investment theses is that senior-level executives from Fortune 1000 companies that leave the comfort of their executive roles to launch startups within their domain expertise are good venture opportunities. FUNL is well-positioned to explore investments in this sector since our practice focuses on working with enterprises and entrepreneurs. Lastly, as a venture studio, we are also dedicated to incubating ideas from inside FUNL and founders from our network.
Ben: We had a company in the industrial space come to us with an exciting opportunity. They had several e-commerce websites for various brands built and managed by separate business units. There were massive organizational and data silos. Because of that, they were unable to cross-sell across the brand portfolio or activate user targeting between the business units. The first thing we did was start a rapid discovery process to understand this organization's entire data ecosystem – online and offline.This work, while tedious, allowed us to architect a holistic data framework that connected previously unconnected data sets. Armed with the resulting insights, we uncovered several low-hanging fruit opportunities. It also became the platform we leveraged while executing a series of performance marketing experiments. We tested strategies for improving user experience, educating the consumer, new creative, and new channels. We ran many concurrent experiments. The consumer data platform yielded clear yes/no answers for many of these experiments, which gave this partner the clarity they needed to move quickly. This work resulted in a scalable, proprietary database of first-party data that can be optimized and leveraged for years by this organization. It's one of my favorites because it's kind of like "Moneyball" for growth, in a way. We're collecting all of the obvious and non-obvious data points to unearth which aspects of their growth strategy are working and which are not working to deploy dollars more effectively. I'm also excited about this HR platform. We've taken a low-code approach to building the product and are leveraging APIs to get the prototype up and running and still scalable in weeks instead of months.
Stephanie: So, what's on the horizon for FUNL? What comes next?
Wilson: Although between the partners, we have about 80 years of startup and enterprise experience, FUNL is a young company, so our short to mid-term focus is to sharpen and fine-tune our Studios and Ventures practice. There is much to be done, from building excellent team dynamics to improving our working process with large enterprises and increasing velocity and rigor with founders.
Ben: The digital ecosystem is changing like crazy, and companies struggle to adapt. It's becoming harder and harder to attract, convert, and retain users. And constant changes to platform algorithms, the increase in DTC competition, and everything happening with data privacy and cookies – it's just making everything more complex. I'm most excited about building a team that understands how to navigate this complexity and demystify what organizations should do next. We've seen how technology has the power to impact every aspect of our lives. I always say it's not what we do; it's how we do it. And what I mean by that is we may be, on the surface, a team that's helping groups of people make better product and business decisions based on data, but we get up every day because we want to help our partners, startups, and friends create new things that improve their customers' lives. And we hope those products have a lasting and positive impact on society.
Vernon: It is exciting to see our vision coming to life and our values being lived every day. We are a young team but have big aspirations. We are being patient and systematic in building the foundations of our company step by step, investing in the people, processes, and systems that make us work and make us uniquely who we are. But we are also aggressive enough to take advantage of opportunities that come our way in both the enterprise / Studio space and the startup / Ventures space. It's great to know that we are making these strides guided by our values, which we all crafted together and aspire to live up to every day. The future is exciting, and I can't wait to see where it takes us.
Stephanie: Thanks, all, for your time today. It's been a pleasure.
