While the stock market tanks, the Demand Generation and Marketing Automation markets are gearing up. This week both LoopFuse and Genius.com published very positive news.
Genius.com: 200% revenue growth
Genius.com reports 200% revenue growth and a 50% increase in new customer acquistions (that’s a typo from their press release). I assume that means they’ve also increased revenue per customer, most likely because they are now selling MarketingGenius, which is an email marketing tool, which sells at a higher price point than the existing SalesGenius product (for individual sales people).
Genius.com now has over 50,000 Genius users, in over 100 countries worldwide. That is impressive. However, their core functionality (tracking of prospects’ website activity) is now also offered by Marketing Automation systems as part of a bigger offering. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Genius.com will continue to expand their offerings.
Loopfuse: Series A funding
Loopfuse, a provider of open source marketing automation and email marketing solutions, has raised around $1.4 million in Series A funding led by True Ventures.
The only thing I know about them is that many of their customers are themselves open source software companies, such as Acquia, the company behind the Drupal Content Management System. As a matter of fact, Drupal is now integrated with LoopFuse. With the integration Loopfuse tags are automatically added to Drupal pages, and Drupal web forms are submitted into LoopFuse (at least, that’s what I understand based on the press release). I’d love to learn more about this system. Let me know your feedback or testimonials.
In any case, the LoopFuse people must be in euphoria after this news, at least based on the (somewhat cocky) comment on their blog:
“To Marketo and their overpriced Toy for Marketing Tots™, and Eloqua, with their Techological Torture Device™, I say, Get some coffee and try to stay awake. If it was bad for you when it was two guys (and a dog), it’s going to be an utter nightmare now.”
Tough times ahead?
You’d say that the good times must be ending some time? Or will marketing automation be the positive exception? Will Genius.com and Eloqua go IPO in 2010? That would really put the demand generation space on the map.