The following interview is a conversation we had with Adrien Menard, CEO and Co-Founder of Botify, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $82 Million Raised to Build the Future of SEO
Adrien Menard
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate to be here with you today.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Super excited to chat with you. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Adrien Menard
Yeah, sure. So I’m Adrien Menard. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Botify. So I originally come from France, but I’ve been in the US for almost six years now, developing our operations there.
Brett
What was it like when you left France for the United States? What was going on inside your head at that mean?
Adrien Menard
I think I have the typical story of any french entrepreneur who wants to make it in the US. So that was an exciting time. I moved there with the family and with, I think, a good business. So that was making, I think, the transition easier for me. And yes, six years later, we have about 70% of the total revenue coming from North America. So it’s been a journey.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And a couple of other questions that we like to ask, really, just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and as an entrepreneur, first one, what founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Adrien Menard
So that’s an interesting question because there is so many entrepreneurs that I think I’ve been inspired with. But I see, as a french person, of course, I’m a huge fan of Bernardo and what he has built over the past decades with LVMH. That’s really an inspiring entrepreneur, especially for someone who wants to expand the operations outside of the original market of France. That is a very limited market. But yes, that’s an inspiring story for french entrepreneur like me.
Brett
Yeah, I think it’s an inspiring story for anyone. I just listened to a podcast that did a deep dive on him. It was about 4 hours long and pulled the entire history and the backstory of the company and everything that they’re doing. And it was very fascinating and I think he’s just an incredible entrepreneur.
Adrien Menard
Yes, I agree with you.
Brett
What about books? Are there any specific books that come to mind that have had a major impact on you as a founder? And these don’t have to know the traditional business books. They can also just be personal books that really influenced how you view the world.
Adrien Menard
So I’m actually reading seven powers the foundations of business strategy by Hamilton Helmer and I think it’s a fascinating book about corporate strategy. What I like very much is how you can think what is going to create a true competitive advantage over time. And yes, I’m actually learning a lot from this book and I think I’m going to offer it to everyone in my leadership team in the coming weeks.
Brett
Nice. I’ve been hearing more and more about that book and it’s been on my list. Do you listen to the podcast acquired by.
Adrien Menard
Of course. This is how I’ve heard about seven powers and I jumped into it literally after I listened to the interview of Hamilton Helmet.
Brett
Yeah, that’s where I first heard about the book and now everyone seems to be talking about it. Acquired is the podcast I was listening to learn about LVMH.
Adrien Menard
I’m not understood.
Brett
Very nice, very nice. Cool. Well, glad to know we listen to the same stuff here. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company so we can think about this like the elevator pitch, but it’s really just the high level overview of what problem you solve and how the solution works. So can you tell us more about Botify and all of your different solutions?
Adrien Menard
Yes, of course. So Botify is the organic search marketing platform, some of the world’s most ambitious brands for us to be found online. So just to give you a sense of the company. So we have a bit more than 300 employees globally in different offices. So we started in Paris, as I mentioned, but most of the operations now are running in between New York, Seattle, London and Singapore and Sydney. We have about 500 enterprise clients like Nike, L’Oreal, the New York Times. LVMH is a client or expedia. And yes, so we are in the SEO space. I think it’s a great industry to be in right now. Many things are happening and it’s super exciting.
Brett
So how have you seen SEO evolve since you got started? What was it about eleven years ago or twelve years ago? I’m sure there’s been a lot of changes, but what have been some of those major changes to SEO.
Adrien Menard
Yes, so many things of course have changed. Maybe I can start by saying a few words about why we initially wanted to build bodify and then I will go through, of course, the transformations that we have been seeing over the years. So I guess with my co founders, were initially seduced by the power of organic search. When you think about it, I think it’s the true chromise of the Internet. Originally when it was about, okay, you can run a business and you can probably meet or speak with potential prospects or clients from all over the world without paying for advertising. And I think it’s really a fantastic thing when you think about it, that really Internet and search engines democratized. And that was something that was very interesting for us in the beginning.
Adrien Menard
Maybe the second thing, it’s not only about the market opportunity, but it was also because prior to Botify, were SEO practitioners meanings that were optimizing very large websites in Europe for Google and other engines indexation process. And this is how we identify many missed opportunities because of not very optimized indexing process. So on average, we discovered that 50% of the content of a website is actually not indexed by search engines. And of course, if a page is not indexed, it means that it’s not going to rank, it’s not going to generate any traffic or contribution to the top line of a website. And simply by working on that, we understood that not only it can be measured, but it can be impacted rather quickly.
Adrien Menard
And the more pages you have in the Google Index or bing, of course, the more chances you have to drive traffic and revenue from it. So that was really the two main things that led to the butterfly’s project. One thing that is also super important is that we saw an opportunity in the market to equip the organic search marketing teams with a software and with a software that would enable them or empower them to analyze, decide and implement their strategy much faster than when everything has to be done manually. So yes, that was the main initial goal behind Botify.
Brett
Wow, super fascinating. And what are some of those big evolutions or trends that you’ve seen since launching the company?
Adrien Menard
So I guess one of the main evolution that we have been seeing is really about, and I’m going to answer first from the client’s perspective, but I think we really live in a world now where our customers have to make an impact very quickly with some very important constraints on the, you know, when you are being asked to do more quickly with less resources, I guess it brings something very important for marketing software company like Botify. It means that you really have to be focused on how can I help my customers to do changes, to decide to implement solutions automatically? Because not everything can be done manually, as actually most of the industry is still probably doing or leaning out.
Brett
And if we look at AI, what type of change are you seeing to SEO with AI and chat, GPT and everything that’s been going on the last six months?
Adrien Menard
So, yes, Gen AI is fascinating, of course. And actually, I think the good starting point when you think about revolution is to imagine how much it’s going to change the way we are interacting with technology. That’s incredibly important. We are moving away, and that’s true with Spotify or with search engines, but we are moving away from in search, from a keyword approach to a conversational approach. That’s very important. And I think it’s going to fundamentally change our industry. Our industry, I think, has been relying for a very long time on what I’m calling a monitoring and a content approach, which is that when you’re looking at most of SEO vendors, they’re going to track keywords and to report where your website is ranked and where your competition is against you.
Adrien Menard
There is incredible value here, of course, as a CMO or as the CEO of a business, I want to know if I am able to capture the audience that is looking for what I’m selling. But what I think is also super important is to understand now that we are moving away from only this approach. Now we are going to converse with the technology and it means that the search engines or the system that is going to give you answer is going to take into account the past conversations. So there is a context that is going to be much more important now than in the past. And it means that as a vendor, for example, you cannot only rely on the ranking approach.
Adrien Menard
It means that if you really want to be helpful for your customers, you have to make sure that the incredible content that is available on a website is actually used by the search engine or the system that is offering answer. And I think this is where Butterfly has a very important role to play. As I mentioned in the introduction, we really started this business because we understood that 50% of the content available on a website, on average, is not even in the Google index. So it means that if it is still the reality for websites in 2023, it’s going to be incredibly challenging to be part of this evolution. So that’s going to be super interesting. Actually, everyone at Butterfly is super excited by what’s going to happen in the coming years.
Adrien Menard
That’s also incredibly interesting to see how our relationships with major search engines evolved over the years. For example, today we have an official partnership with Microsoft Bing. We’re simply connecting the content of our customers directly to the Microsoft Bing index. And I think it’s a good illustration of where the search engine world is moving forward. I mean it’s incredibly challenging, it’s incredibly expensive, it’s incredibly difficult from the technical perspective to access every piece of content that is available on the Internet. And I’m sure companies like Botify, maybe other SEO vendors, but will play a very important role interfacing those two worlds. The world that is creating so many valuable content with the world of search engines that is trying to order the information at the scale of the Internet.
Brett
Now I’d love to talk a little bit about some of these incredible logos that you have on the site. So you’d mentioned Expedia, I see Marriott, I see Glassdoor, the big brands that I think every founder would dream of having on their website. So for you, what do you think’s been the secret? What have you gotten right in terms of earning the trust of big enterprise organizations like those ones I’ve mentioned?
Adrien Menard
Yes, you’re right. Our logo page is fantastic and I think it’s really something that I’m very proud of. And when I think about it, I think there is a few reasons behind the success with this kind of brand. I would say that the first major point is that we are actually incredibly focused on solving their two main problems. Our clients really want to impact their optimizations or they want to implement their optimizations very quickly. And this is something we have investing a lot over the years. We truly empower them to automatically implement the changes on their website and that’s something that has been key to convince them to use our platform. The second point is the capacity to generate profitable growth. Our enterprise customers there in a world, as I mentioned before, where they are being asked to do more with less.
Adrien Menard
They live in a world where the pressure on the investments made in paid advertising is very high. So, but if I have this capacity actually to forecast the impact that can be made and to measure this impact, I have the example in mind of a very large north american retailer that we closed in Q four last year. And of course they wanted to go through a sort of initial test period. And what was interesting is that in less than 60 days were able to impact the traffic of the website coming from organic search results by 16%. And then so in less than 60 days, even if the website had millions of different pages. So that’s something that is really important for our customers in the world we live. Currently, this show is brought to you.
Brett
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Adrien Menard
No, I think it’s accurate. And that’s actually a very interesting question that, of course, I’ve been spending some time to think about. I guess the first element of my answer is to think that everyone in the digital world agrees about the power of organic search. I mean, when you think about it’s absolutely fascinating to see that even if we live in a digital world where the audience of our clients is fragmented between paid organic search, paid social, et cetera, but still, organic search drives about a third of the traffic or the conversion made online. So that’s a key pillar of the audience. And everyone agrees that, yes, we have some potential there. But saying that, it’s surprising to see that most of the time our customers may invest ten times more, 100 times more in paid advertising than in organic search.
Adrien Menard
And I think so there is, of course, good reasons behind those decisions. But I think it’s mostly a heritage of the past, when SEO was not able to deliver quickly, a profitable impact. Now everything is changing with I think butterfly is leading the pack of modern SEO solutions, driving more automation and revenue capabilities. And what I’m seeing in the market is that there is two major trends. Marketers have to reshuffle their marketing investments because they rely probably less than before, unpaid, because there is less attention, there is more difficulties to measure the ROI of paid media. And in the same time, SEO is changing very quickly with new automation capabilities, as I mentioned. And now they’re starting to realize that with $1 invested in organic search, they can actually have three to five times higher return than with $1 invested in paid advertising.
Adrien Menard
So yes, I think. I’m not saying that SEO is going to replace paid advertising, of course not. What I’m saying and what we are saying very successful with our clients, is that maybe with more balanced budget or investments between paid and organic, in the end you can generate higher return. And that’s, I think the evolution that we are seeing in the market and I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.
Brett
And given the state of the economy and obviously the last, let’s say, year and a half, a lot of companies have had their budgets cut, there have been a lot of layoffs, all of the pain that we read about in the news every day. Are you seeing a shift now to more of a focus on SEO and a shift away from paid media channels?
Adrien Menard
No doubt, no doubt. So it’s clear that cmos or VP of marketing want to generate as much return as they can from their investments. And there is honestly tremendous opportunities in various marketing channels. But what is interesting with organic marketing, and this is probably one lesson learned from the COVID is that organic marketing is not going to disappear from one day to the other. And I can remember early March 2020 when suddenly there was a massive acceleration of the digital transformation of some companies, many more advertisers, and logically the cost of advertising, I mean, overnight doubled or tripled depending on the industries or the case. But some of our clients could not match this cost of advertising because simply the investment would not be profitable.
Adrien Menard
So they quickly realized that, oh, but if I stop advertising, I’m going to disappear from the surface of the Internet if my organic marketing is not solid. And I think this trend is still happening now where, okay, the conclusion is that I cannot rely only on paid investments because it’s incredibly expensive and because if for some reasons I have to suddenly lower those investments, I’m not going to be found online. And this is why I think there is a shift, maybe not a shift, but maybe a reallocation from some budgets to organic marketing with this idea to generate profitable and sustainable visibility online.
Brett
And from a go to market perspective, early on, were you focused on enterprise customers? Has that always been the focus? Or did you focus on SMBs at the start and then work your way up market to enterprise?
Adrien Menard
No, you’re right. I mean, we started with an SMB approach, but we quickly realized that the true opportunity for buttify was mid market and enterprise. And I think it was a mistake. As an entrepreneur, we should probably have started with an enterprise approach a bit before. But still, I think, yes, enterprise is of course the best segment of the market. It’s challenging, of course, but what’s interesting here is that I think Botify is fully designed to serve the needs of an enterprise organization. And what I think is important to understand is that we don’t try to convince a single user, we actually convince an organization about the power of organic search and the efficiency of Botify to solve those problems and bring profitability technology wise. Botify is also designed to match enterprise requirements.
Adrien Menard
So initially, when we started Botify and were building the first infrastructure, were actually trying to develop some things or some technical solutions that would work ten times faster, ten times larger and ten times cheaper than any competitor in the market. And I think this is what is required for our clients. I mean, if you are not able to run your technologies for the scaling challenges of an enterprise client, it’s of course not going to work. And at Botify, I think it’s also why we initially convinced some very large websites to work with us, because simply we could technically do things that no other platform could do.
Brett
And I think that’s something that every founder dreams of is making that shift to enterprise. Everyone knows the money is an enterprise, but I think it’s very difficult to succeed and make that shift. And a lot of startups and a lot of companies never end up successfully transitioning to an enterprise. Focus. What did you learn during that shift and throughout that journey? Are there any insights or lessons that you walked away with?
Adrien Menard
Yeah, so really first, it did not happen overnight. Okay. So we of course went through different steps, but what I think is really different when you’re selling to a small company or when you’re selling to an enterprise organization is how much you need to fit with actually an organization perspective. And everything is different. This is what I just said about the user versus the organization. A single user, okay, you are going to empower the user, but with the enterprise approach, you need to empower an organization to succeed. And it means that every step of the sales process is different. You need to be known by the precise decision makers and all the influencers in the marketing organization. You need to be credible, of course, from the security perspective. But the SoC, two compliant platform, and I can tell you that it’s of course mandatory.
Adrien Menard
If you don’t have high security standards, there is no way an enterprise organization is going to select you. The legal is also extremely important. If you don’t have the insurance, if you don’t have the coverages to match with the level of responsibility that you are being given by an enterprise client, it’s really not going to work. The marketing is of course very different. We are targeting organizations at Buttify. So we of course have an ideal customer profile defined and then each company is ranked per tier of go to market, meaning that we have to craft the perfect message for each tier of this go to market. And this is really a play where we are going to the accounts that we are the most interested with because we know that this is where we can deliver most value.
Adrien Menard
When I think with SMB you are targeting all the accounts that can potentially and then you are looking at what is going to come to your website and what’s going to convert. So yes, very different place. Not that it’s really fascinating as an entrepreneur to see that if you have the right offering or the right segment of the market, then you can really build a good business that is going to grow significantly. Super interesting transition.
Brett
And from a marketing perspective, do you view it as your responsibility to really market SEO and evangelize SEO and get your target customers to understand the importance and clear up misconceptions about SEO? Is that a core focus for you or is it really more just about convincing them that your platform is the best SEO platform?
Adrien Menard
Interesting question, but I think because I would say both of mean in a sense that of course we want to convince our clients that. But if I is the best platform for answering the organic search pain points they may have. But on the other end, I also think that as probably an emerging leader in the space, but if I has a huge responsibility to promote the entire industry and that’s a fantastic industry to be in, I mean when you think about it’s an industry that is changing all the time, that is going through massive ways of innovation. And yes, you mentioned that in one of your questions that sometimes SEO is not always invited at the table of marketing channels.
Adrien Menard
We want to change this image, we want to promote SEO because once again SEO can deliver so much value for brand and especially with I think a long term and profitable approach that I think no other paid advertising channel can really claim. So it’s not opposing the various marketing channels, it’s about making sure that the SEO industry can keep investing, can keep innovating into modern solutions that are going in the end play the role of, yes, connecting clients or prospects with any business in the world without potentially paying for this connection. So that’s interesting. And I could not be more excited actually by the coming years. And I hope that what you understand from what I just said.
Brett
Absolutely. So it sounds like SEO is not dead right. That’s what I see a lot in the media, but I’ve been seeing that in the media for.
Adrien Menard
That’s crazy because yes, I think, and it reminds me something superintest when we started butify obviously that was the first years of Facebook and social media and I can remember when I was presenting Botify to vcs or partners or Adrien, but why aren’t you funding a company in the social media space? And because back then SEO was already challenged with this sentence, SEO is dead. Come on. SEO is not dead. SEO. And I think search, this is now an extension of the way we are consuming the Internet. When was the last time you did Google or Bing search?
Brett
Five minutes before the interview.
Adrien Menard
Excellent. When was the last time you connected to Facebook?
Brett
A couple of months.
Adrien Menard
Okay, so I think it says it all. We are searching the web all the time from anywhere and this is not going to end anytime soon. That’s impossible. There is a strong human desire to find answers to questions. They can be very commercial, they can be informative, et cetera. But this will never end. And that’s why I think it’s so fascinating to work in this space, because in the end we’re really connecting human being with information.
Brett
Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. Now, a couple of other questions here before we wrap. I know we’re getting close to being up on time, so if you reflect on your journey so far, if you were starting the company again today from scratch, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d have for yourself?
Adrien Menard
Interesting question and I think there would be many advice, but maybe the first one is just make sure to build the best team that you can imagine. That’s really. So now we have a bit more than 300 employees at buttify coming from very different backgrounds and different experiences, countries, cultures, et cetera. But I’m always amazed by how much everyone is actually bringing to the journey, to the project. And honestly, you never succeed alone. That’s really a strong message. And when I’m reflecting about the past years, yes, I can tell you that really everyone in the team or at the board, the advisors, et cetera, they really played a tremendous role into our evolution. And honestly, I don’t think we would be in a better position without this team.
Adrien Menard
So that’s really something I would pay even more attention that I’ve been paying over the past years.
Brett
And you’re twelve years into this journey now. Do you ever have days where you struggle with feeling motivated or as motivated as you did in the early days? And if so, what do you do to overcome that and maintain that level of motivation and aggression that I’m sure.
Adrien Menard
You use to start the company? So honestly, I’ve never been bored. I may have been tired from time to time, but every morning I’m super excited by what’s happening and I think it’s also because of this industry that is there is always something happening and you always have to adapt to the reality of our environment. Saying that. I also think it’s my responsibility as one of the co founders and as the CEO to make sure that my role and the team is adapted to the current step of development of the company. And it is really something I have been very obsessed with. So now we have a very senior leadership team.
Adrien Menard
I have some really talented resources who help me to be good where I am very good at, and maybe to be less involved into where I think others are going to be much better than I can be. And I think it’s really something that makes me in a position where I never feel bored because actually I can really be good. Yes, where I can be good. And that’s, I think, the secret of being an entrepreneur and to last in the job.
Brett
Final question here, let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s that future vision for Spotify? What are you hoping to build over the next three to five years?
Adrien Menard
So we definitely want to become the leader of the enterprise segment of this organic search marketing industry. And what I think is the most important thing for me is to make sure that we can deliver as much value as we can for the customers in a, let’s say technical environment that is going to change. As we briefly discussed before, the entire search industry is going to move away from a keyword approach to a conversational approach. The way the users, the searchers are going to interact with the technology is about to change dramatically. And really, I think this is a fantastic opportunity for buttify to play an even more strategic role connecting the clients with the search engines and in the end to serve the user experience of someone searching the web.
Adrien Menard
As I mentioned before, this is now for me a fundamental need, searching the web. And I think butify is going to play a very interesting role in delivering a great value for anyone searching the web. And I’m sure we can do mean with Botify being a great company. And by a great company, I mean in a company where first the clients are happy and the employees, the team is really seeing and understanding what the vision is about and where everyone has a role and an impact to play. This is really something I want to achieve in the next years that would make me incredibly proud.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and love everything that you’re building. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Adrien Menard
So I think the best way to reach out to me is through LinkedIn. And yes, for sure, if you have questions or if you want to keep the conversation going, I would be more than happy to know more about it.
Brett
Amazing. Adrien, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I know that our audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Adrien Menard
Thank you. That was super interesting.
Brett
All right, you’ve been touched. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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