Building a Data-Driven Future: Matt Williamson's Vision for Vizzly

Thank you, Harshit. Thank you for the invite.

Sure. For those that don’t know, my name is Matt Williamson. I’m the co-founder and CEO here at Vizzly. We do customer-facing analytics for SaaS platforms. We’ve been around now for just over two years, and we serve over 50 B2B SaaS companies powering the analytics and reporting in their front-end applications, offering an end-to-end solution. Prior to Vizzly, I was Head of Business Development at a company called Duffel, which was a flights and payments API with developer experience experience at the core. Before that, I looked after data products at a company called Skyscanner. Building data APIs and SaaS analytics tooling and reporting products for our B2B customers. It was really during that experience, to be honest, where the idea for Vizzly was initially formed. How do you help B2B SaaS companies build good data products that they can share with external parties? I think what you find a lot of the time, at least what was quite apparent when I was a sky scanner, where you get a lot of internal BI tools that offer embedding through iFrames or white-label services. Again, that’s fine to get to market quickly, but you do get quickly frustrated at the same time with the inability to speak to the content of that dashboard with the code.

There is a distinct lack of extensibility. There’s no longevity in that solution as a consequence. Ultimately, what my co founder and I understood at Duffel is just how important developer experience is and any customer-facing component because there is so much nuance that exists from customer to customer in any customer-facing environment. We did to build something short to maintain the same time to market as these traditional BI solutions do. But we also wanted to equip the customer and the developer in that relationship with tools to build with freedom, where they’re not necessarily limited or constrained by anything other than their imagination.

I think it’s something that my co-founder and I, James, we always wanted to do. But I think instead of chasing a solution, obviously, you must lead with a problem. I think once we had enough confidence around the problem that we wanted to solve for, enough confidence conviction around that problem, we were able to take that leap into full-time entrepreneurship. But yeah, of course, it’s always been something that my co-founder and I have always been keen to do full-time and dive deep into. But I guess also for some people, maybe they feel like they need a little bit more experience, a bit more time. I was certainly one of those people. Skyscanning gave so much from an experiential point of view as the Duffel working cross-product and commercial functions. I’m sure James felt the same way during his experience of Duffel and the BBC. Just gives you sufficient confidence where you feel like you can take the initial leap. I will say in caveat, though, that you can have as much experience in the world and it will not equip you for ownership or foundership. There’s always going to be a curve ball thrown at some point that you’re just going to have to learn in the job.

But yeah, it’s something that just summarize, something that we’ve always wanted to do, something is what we’ve always foreseen doing.

We are bootstrapped. We are backed and funded by Y Comminator and a series of high-profile angel investors, we went through the summer of ’22 at Coda at YC and have been building and growing since. We never raised too much capital. We just raised what we needed. We were generating revenue at the point where We raised initial funds. We had enough conviction, at least enough confidence that we could try to do this, or at least try to fund the next stage of growth through revenue and not just external capital. That’s what we’ve been doing since. We’ve been growing pretty consistently, pretty steadily over the last 12 months. Every move we make, every investment we’ve made in the last 12 months has been very much driven from revenue as opposed to external capital.

I think I’ve already alluded to it slightly, but if you look at the BI space, it’s so competitive and it’s hyper-saturated. There are so many BI solutions. Everyone has a different layer of it or take on how BI should be done. We had a pretty preset idea that we wanted to focus on the customer-facing component, the customer-facing application. It seemed to be an afterthought. It still seems to be an afterthought for every single internal BI solution. To name some names, Power BI, Tableau, Luca, and Metabase. Yeah, sure they offer embedding, but it’s an afterthought. We wanted to make that our only thought. Where we see in differentiation is, of course, on things like developer experience. For example, you can embed Fizzly natively using React or natively through any other flavor of JS. That opens up lots of doors. But also we have a very powerful API for those who want to build programmatically. You can manage the state of the Fizzly dashboard with code. You can speak to the Fizzly dashboard with code to do things like filter it programmatically. We have callback functions for creating these custom click events, user interactions. You can inject and insert custom components.

There’s so much you can do on top of the Vizzle Dashboard. From a developer perspective, it’s a real joy to use. Of course, though, to get Vizzle Live in We set up, at least initially, we do offer no-code solutions as well. It’s trying to find the perfect balance between no-code and pro-code. How do we get someone to market really quickly, but at the same time, equip them with tools where they are confident in the longevity of the implementation, where they can take it off in any direction they want based on requirements expressed from their own user base. The summation of that is developer experience. The other part of how we differentiate is we a very powerful custom reporting capability, which means that if our customer wants, they can set up Fizzly so it is end user configurable. The end user can do things like edit views on the dashboard, they can build their own views, or they can select a list of preconfigured views. Like the experience in Striped, Zendesk, HubSpot. Again, really trying to help the everyday B2B SaaS company build these amazing reporting experiences in these top other SaaS platforms like Zendesk and HubSpot, for example.

I think that’s definitely always been a big conversation. We’re a horizontal SaaS platform. How do you narrow down the audience to give yourself more focus? We acknowledge we are a horizontal SaaS platform. We serve companies in payments, HR tech, sales tech, Martech, FinTech, HealthTech, you name it. We have customers in almost every vertical within SaaS. That does make things complex as far as go-to-market is concerned as well. But a big part of this is building a hyperflexible platform. We’re able to serve various different verticals. It doesn’t really become too much of a problem from a product perspective because it’s not the analytics and reporting requirements for a HR platform are entirely different to that of a sales platform. It just makes go-to-market, how you speak and communicate externally a little bit harder. But of course, that’s the problem that we still need to resolve. We still need to work through and try to be effective in.

One thing, we’re a pretty lean company, and so it really helps us to focus on low funnel or lower funnel activity. We want people that are are searching for the solution, they already know they have a problem, and they’re in comparison mode, which means there’s high purchase intent. We spent a fair bit of time building out things like competitor pages. For example, if you go to our website, Vizzly. Co, you’ll see a bunch of competitor pages around each one. We spent a bit of time also talking about the specifics with regards to how Vizzly is fundamentally different Again, always sounds like broken record, but developer experience, fantastic customer reporting experience should our customers want to engage at that level. So low funnel activity has been pretty good to us. Of course, as we start to maybe saturate that part of the funnel for content, maybe we move up mid-funnel, upper funnel, as we start to also become a bit more bandwidth, maybe freeze up a little bit as well. We can maybe afford to bring in a dedicated content marketer to help and assist with that. But for now, I was very much focused on that low funnel, low hanging fruit activity.

In terms of marketing, specifically, I think there’s obviously a couple of things, like SEO takes time. We’re the star of our journey in that regard. We’re maybe starting to reap some of the benefits of it now. Web traffic has increased quite substantially over the last few months, for example, but that’s taken a long time to get there. What do you do in the interim as you build out your SEO presence? We spent a lot of time building out and engaging in sales automation across and LinkedIn, for example. That’s a really healthy channel for us. We keep the copy human, we don’t overengineer the sequences, we just keep it, I suppose, fairly direct, but also fairly light. And that, we spent a fair bit of time generating leads and customers from sales automation as we build out, they’re going to content strategy in the SEO presence. But it’s just patience. I think a lot of, whether it’s marketing or building product or building sales process and revenue, a lot of this is just patience. I think people don’t often recognize how long this can take. It can take 12 months, 24 months for things to work.

A lot of the time it’s just persisting through that painful periods of I’m doing stuff, but nothing’s happening. Just continuing to persist. Then eventually the rewards will be reaped. You have to acknowledge that there is a period of maybe limbo that you just have to work through in confidence that something will happen in the near to medium term.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting one for us. As you see, it’s integrated into our customers’ application, our customers’ customer-facing application. Naturally, it’s pretty sticky. Now, our problems more lie around, let’s say, for example, We start picking to mid-market enterprise prospects and building trust because we will be in the middle of a customer-facing application. But once we’re in, and as long as our customer is happy with the experience, they will stay. We don’t have too many issues around retention. For that reason, we believe in the product massively in terms of value brings the experience differential versus market alternatives is superior. For us, it’s actually more about as we move up market, building trust with those larger players so that they, again, feel comfortable with us integrating into those customer-facing environments, knowing that retention, we’re here for the long term. When we pitch, we’re not looking for a quick buck. We’re looking for a long term partnership because we know the attention naturally is going to be high because that is the intention of our customer coming into the partnership. They don’t want to have this conversation again with another provider in 12, 24 months time. They just want this conversation once.

They want to do this implementation once, and they want to leave it there. For us, that’s led to a really healthy retention metric, but that’s not really the call to our problems at the moment.

Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff. Just a few things that we’ve recently launched, for example, JS Services package. Obviously, you can do all this stuff through the no code editor that we provide, that you can now create, manage, and delete dashboards programmatically. We have a plugin API now, so you can insert custom visualizations into the dashboard component. Let’s say, for example, we provide a bunch of different chart types, a bunch of different view types. But maybe there’s a niche visualization or something along those lines, civic to your industry, you can inject that into the Vizzly dashboard and it a native part of the dashboard component with the only embedded analytics provider in market that offers that level of extensibility. Those are a couple of things we built. We’ve launched already. They’re live at the moment. Then there are things coming up. We’ve dipped a toe in the AI space. We have a Vizzly AI where you can generate views through natural language. I don’t think that is the best application of AI at I think the best application of AI, and this is something that we’re yet to build that is upcoming, is more to do with the summation of insights on a dashboard.

Not necessarily the generation of those views on the dashboard, but the summation of the insights, and then trying to translate that into something tangible and actionable. I think that’s probably the most exciting component.

Yeah, exactly. It’s more to do with the end user as opposed to making that dashboard and the insights that come with it genuinely useful. So it’s not just another dashboard. It’s what we’re trying to get around. Also, you got to think about the number of ways people share data with customers, People don’t just share data with customers through dashboards. Often it’s through an API. And so Fizzly is a very powerful query engine, basically acts as a semantic layer, speaks to your database, you can model your data as configurable, built-in caches We’re getting a bunch of stuff that is incredibly valuable. We get time and time again, what our customers ask, rather, if they can create API endpoints using this query engine from that database to share with their customers. That is something we want to do as well, just separating the query engine out from the front-end visualization layer and maybe offering that as a separate product as well. I think it’d be a real step change for a bunch of our customers and how they share data with their users.

Yeah, sure. We’re actually just about to launch a case study with this health tech company. I won’t name names. The health tech company does power the health service here in the UK.

Come out soon. That’s been a really fun work on. The guys, the co, fantastic to work with as well. The reason why that has been really fun, though, is more to do with it corners the product in which they’ve touched. They’ve really engaged in customer reporting. Their customers, again, one of which is the NHS, but they have others have really taken well to customer reporting and the degree of end user configuration. Even though they’re not that data literate, they still really the customer reporting experience because it’s designed for those who maybe are data hungry but not data literate, and they’re really making the most of that as well. The developers at the company also have really engaged in all corners of our API and SDK. It’s just great to see a customer like that really make the most of the full product. Obviously, you spend so much time and energy building all these features, all these things. Customers will sometimes use aspects of the product and all the products. When you have a customer that comes along and really engages with everything, and in a way where they’re super happy and delighted about the experience as well, best for them.

Really enjoyed working with these guys so far. On a case study, it will hopefully come out at some point next week.

We’re starting to invest, like I said, a bit more on that and SEO. I think We’re a small team. We don’t have any salespeople. What we want to do is build lean and efficient revenue in a way that scales well. Content, organic, high intent inbound is what we’re after. There are various ways to drive that. For us at the moment, SEO and social have been optimal. I think we’ll invest a little bit more in Q3 this year. Q1 was a real turning point for us this year, and Q2 has consolidated that in terms of confidence around product-market fit. Obviously, I’m not sitting here as a small startup claiming we have product market fit and we’re ready to just light the fire. But as we gain more confidence and more confidence, we’re happy investing more in go-to-market. That’s where the attitude is at the moment and where we hope to go. I’d say obviously more content, moving up on a lot of content. So it’s not just like super low funnel. We’ll also engage in retargeting as well, and we will also engage in low funnel. We will search ads on the competitor pages, most likely very common practice, especially in the industry we sit in at the moment.

There’s a lot of that activity going on as well. We won’t stop the sales automation that works very well. And of course, I think the narrative that we have on LinkedIn, the narrative we have on social isn’t very salesy. It’s more to do with prioritization. Look how fast we’re shipping, look how much we’re shipping. The team I’ve never worked with such a talented group of engineers, and the rate in which they ship, the velocity, the push product is incredible. I think we just need to continue to make people aware of that fact. I think that does drive a lot of inbound interest in the process as well.

I think my favorite feeling, at least at the moment, is seeing physically dashboards in the wild. I don’t know, someone launches their reporting or analytics page or feature, and then you’ll be scrolling LinkedIn and you’ll see a VizzlyDashboard appear in the Wild. I think that is awesome. It means that we sign them, they’ve had a great time, they’re live, they’re proud of what they’ve built, and they shared it. Sometimes I’m not even aware that they’ve shared it. Sometimes Sometimes we just catch it entirely organically. I find that incredibly rewarding because it means so many things have gone right, so many things have gone well, and every party involved in the partnership is ultimately satisfied.

Yeah, of course.

For your social purposes or for work purposes?

Well, I guess, to be honest, for work, LinkedIn, I’m not massive on Twitter. Linkedin is very much the one. For me, I like sharing updates about the product. I like a lot of sharing updates about the team. I like just sharing the journey, if you will. I think some people appreciate that. Some people are on that journey with us and it’s rewarding in itself. I think I’m not massively engaged on social media at a personal level beyond WhatsApp. Everyone who’s close to me will have me on WhatsApp, and that is very much my social means of communication. That’s so simple and vanilla, but there you go.

Wow. And stuff with B2C companies and consumer tech, as far as these growth hacks go and things like that. Maybe Uber, for, for example, paying drivers to take rides to try and stimulate supply because in marketplaces, where do you start supply demand? Maybe there’s not a right answer to that all the time, but Uber, obviously, trying to stimulate supply first by artificially I’m not actually doing so, paying drivers, something along those lines, I think. It’s quite cool. I find marketplace dynamics really interesting, especially with that whole supply and demand question. I’d probably go with that as an easy answer, but yeah, that’s a tough question. Especially in the beginning of the best.

The weirdest place. Geographically.

Again, hard question. I will say, though, that even though I maybe can’t answer that question directly, I do think experience and exposure is so important to just opening how you think. I was pretty fortunate growing up as a young adult, I have various experiences working in different countries for different companies, different scales. Very first company I worked for was a small startup out in New Zealand, in Auckland. We did sports, served software to sports coaches to do booking, scheduling a payment. Incredible experience. Then I moved on to a larger company. I think just constantly exposing yourself as a young adult to various different things will be invoking the and imagination. At that period in your life, you should absolutely not stay stagnant. I think, even though, again, not a direct answer, but that would be my response to that question.

Sorry, say that again.

Very good question.

Yeah, as you can see, I’m definitely a thinker. I do overthink, but I think Something that we’re pretty good at, visibly, is biasing towards action. I think even in a state of ever thinking, just do something, just do it. Even if you’re not sure, just do it. You’ll learn. I think a movement creates information, creates data, creates learning. Yeah, I am an overthinker. I do have to force myself to action. But I think deep down, I know that biasing towards action nine times out of 10 is the right to do, even if it’s uncomfortable or maybe not, it doesn’t result in the right answer or decision in the short term.

Yeah, that’s a good one. Let’s go with Gen AI. I am incredibly boring with my use ofGPT. We offer grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, all that stuff. But to the point where we recently hand… We recently handwrote a case study for a new customer, different case study to what I mentioned previously, by the way. Anyway, I handwrote this case study, asked it through GPT to help me with punctuation, grammar, sentence structure. The customer ran it through an AI checker to see how much of this The case study was written by AI versus us. It returned 79% of the case study was written by AI, which is also just massively ironic, considering that we wrote it all by hand and we just passed it through GPT for help on basic stuff. That can make me laugh a little bit, but no, we are, me personally, incredibly boring with my use of GPT. I have tried it in the past for doing things like creating synthetic data sets to demo visibly. I think that was quite cool. You maybe feed it like a record of data. We sometimes demo this data set, payments health, for example. Maybe you create one record of data and you go, I want you to replicate this a thousand times or however many times to create a decently sized data set. Then we then feed into the Vizzlydashboard for them and demonstrate it to purposes. That’s quite fun. Obviously, I wouldn’t claim to be technical. I do hack around sometimes Python, and I have tried to stitch together a few short scripts that I’ve generated from GPT just for a bit of fun to see how it does. It obviously is incredibly impressive. It’s unbelievable with how it handles on structure data, especially.

Well, thank you for the invite once more.