My Big Idea: business intelligence platform Crux Analytics

‍Hi Jacob! What's your elevator pitch? 

Crux Analytics is a business intelligence platform that helps key providers, such as community banks and credit unions, acquire, grow and retain small business clients. The platform replaces resource-intensive manual work with automated sales workflows, giving the bankers more time to focus on managing the relationship rather than administration.

Small businesses make up 43.5% of the American economy, but unlocking it requires a relationship-driven approach that doesn't scale. Crux solves that paradox and allows businesses to scale without expanding headcount. The result is more income, more customers, and no new hires.

What does the market need it?

Current solutions in the traditional sales enablement stack hand bankers raw data and walk away and/or sit idle waiting for users to drive them. On top of that, most solutions fall short when it comes to providing information on businesses below $10M in revenue (i.e. the vast majority of businesses across the US). Fundamentally, no platform in the market today drives revenue on its own by moving from information to insight to action autonomously. Crux does - identifying the right relationships, knowing when to engage, and executing outreach alongside sales teams.

Where is the business today? 

We’ve been live in the market for 18 months and have just released version 2.0 of the platform. Our team has quadrupled in size in the past six months, and our early customers have seen best-in-class results across engagement and product conversion. We’ve gained the support of some of the biggest bellwethers of innovation in the banking space and at the same time have started to grow beyond our initial customer base to serve organic demand from other related verticals.

What made you think there was money in this?

I experienced the pain of being a business owner while growing my last company. We checked all the boxes but had a bank that treated us like a line item rather than a relationship. They should have been our key partner as we grew but instead were a chore of a phone call every six months. I quickly discovered that this was the norm for most business owners. These are the ~40M businesses across the US that make up the most significant pillar of our economy, regardless of which economic metric you consider, so we had the inherent knowledge that solving this engagement disconnect was a massive market opportunity.

What's your biggest strength?

From a product perspective, we’re the only platform in the market supporting the foundational relationship between institutions and their small business customers. Core to our thesis is that we’re building technology to enable better human relationships, not replace them. From a team perspective, we’re great listeners, we’ve been able to iterate incredibly quickly based on customer input and have consistently heard from customers that they notice the product evolving and they truly feel heard. I think my past experience on the business side also roots us in why we’re building Crux. Ultimately, in our success lies the ability to help millions of businesses grow their own success. 

What is the secret to making the business work?

If I was to distill it down, I’d say the foundation of why Crux works is built on trust and communication, both internally and with our customers/users. We’ve been able to build an amazing team, but being able to execute your core role is only a tiny fraction of where success comes from. There’s no secret formula unfortunately, but if you build a culture based on trust and communication you’re off to a great start.

How do you market the company?

Our customers today are across financial services and are very relationship-driven. We spend a lot of time making sure we’re able to have conversations face-to-face and connect on a human level. We learned very quickly that for our industry sold outreach and wide-spread general marketing weren’t worth the time or money. As the company has grown, we’ve also leveraged our deep knowledge of the small business landscape to be a resource - we do a lot of event speaking and writing.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

Our cap table is fully strategic and it’s enough for now

Tell us about the business model

We have a fairly typical SaaS model - we charge annual subscriptions primarily, our major cost driver is headcount. There’s nothing terribly unique or interesting about how we make and spend money. One interesting thing that influences it is that we started the company right around the time that AI was in its early adoption phase, so we’ve been able to build the company as these new tools have developed. One tangible impact that’s had is that we drastically cut back our future headcount expectations.

What were you doing before?

I started and scaled a boutique innovation consultancy, which worked across industries with clients large and small. That journey informed the foundation of Crux and the business is progressing happily in my absence. My Co-Founder had been at the cutting edge of building machine learning systems in the medical industry for over a decade before I convinced him to jump down the rabbit hole with me. 

What is the future vision?

We keep building the relationship layer, we drive growth for each institution we serve but also become the connective tissue between institutions. I often think of Bloomberg as an analog for what we’re aiming to be in that they’ve built an engine that is ubiquitous across every institution that touches the public markets. We want to be that for the small business market.