Solfo Raises Money, Becomes 'Connectivity'
Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.
As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.
On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.
“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.
“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.
Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.
The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.