Startup Spotlight: Omny Studio – Podcasting SAAS

For a startup you may never have heard of, this story spans ~7 years and shows the incredible opportunity in Australia to persevere with an idea/goal and see success.

Omny Studio is a Melbourne-based enterprise podcasting software-as-a-service startup. Founded in 2012 by Andrew Armstrong, Edward Hooper and Long Zheng, the company has a rich history in audio software and services, formerly developing SoundGecko text-to-speech and Omny personalized radio, before launching the Omny Studio platform in 2015. Today the platform is actively used by thousands of podcasting and broadcasting clients, powering world-leading publishers internationally.

There’s a number of articles online about the evolution of Omny Studio and even blog posts from the co-founders. The team originally started with an app called 121cast, then SoundGecko launched in July 2012, a TTS (text-to-speech) app. They originally saw success from promotional posts from The Verge and Techcrunch.

“121cast” began as one of four companies chosen for Melbourne’s Accelerator Program.

The first hire for 121cast was Rob Skillington, a software engineer who stayed with the company for 7 months. Clive Dickens also joined as an advisor and helped secure investment from SingTel.

The team progressed to building Omny Radio, and hired Jarrod Robins in April 2013 to lead mobile development. He stayed with the company for 2 years, 10 months.

Later came the pivot to Omny Studio, an idea from their content producer Matt Saraceni who saw a more technical and functional need of the software for content producers to be able to easily get their audio online, track performance etc. This involved focusing resources and shutting down SoundGecko on March 1st, 2015.

After many months of development, their major break came after launching Omny Studio at the Radio Days Europe Conference. From there, hundreds of radio stations signed up to try the platform. Throughout the rest of 2015 their user base and profits came more from B2B than the consumer app and pushed them to seriously consider pivoting strategy.

Sharon Taylor joined the team in early 2016 to run operations and later took over as CEO.

Late 2016, with the help of Romesh Wiss, a Swiss management consultant who was keen to get startup experience while visiting Australia on sabbatical, they made the call and doubled down on Omny Studio. From there on Omny Radio would be decoupled from the platform until it could be shut down.

Triton Digital got heavily involved in 2017 and formed a strategic partnership becoming the exclusive reseller of Omny Studio in the U.S and Canada.

In 2019, Triton acquired Omny Studio and integrated it into their own service offerings. The addition of Omny Studio’s comprehensive CMS and hosting capabilities into Triton’s preeminent portfolio of streaming, advertising, and measurement technologies provides the world’s audio publishers with a one-stop-shop to increase their reach and revenue while simultaneously streamlining workflows.

While details of the deal made haven’t been revealed publicly, the business has raised at least $US1.7 million ($2.4m) in capital since its inception, according to investment tracking database CrunchBase, which would have put its valuation well into the millions.

Success didn’t come easy, Zheng said, and the business originally “struggled” to build significant traction with its personalised radio consumer mobile app. It was only after it pivoted to an enterprise podcasting service that it started seeing significant growth and notable traction.

Investments

  • May 1, 2012 – Grant – University of Melbourne – $20,000
  • November 13, 2012 – Adventure Capital, SingTel Innov8. Optus – $250,000 
  • January 2, 2013 – Melbourne Accelerator Program 
  • May 1, 2013 – SingTel Innov8
  • June 2, 2013 – Seed Round – $170,000
  • January 2, 2014 – Seed Round – $300,000
  • August 26, 2014 – Series A – $1M
  • 2019 – Triton Digital – Acquisition

Omny Studio raised a total of $1.7M in funding over 7 rounds.

#tritondigital

Triton Digital® is the global technology and services leader to the digital audio and podcast industry. Operating in more than 40 countries, Triton provides innovative technology that enables broadcasters, podcasters, and online music services to build their audience, maximize their revenue, and streamline their day-to-day operations. In addition, Triton powers the global online audio industry with Webcast Metrics®, the leading online audio measurement service. With unparalleled integrity, excellence, teamwork, and accountability, Triton remains committed to connecting audio, audience, and advertisers to continuously fuel the growth of the global online industry. Triton Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ: SSP).

Insights

Omny Studio still has a company page on LinkedIn with 9 employees listed. Triton Digital has 198 employees with 4 listed in Australia. Tritons employee growth over the past 2 years is 25% with most being engineering roles.

We’ll see what the future holds for Omny Studio in Australia. Very interesting to browse through the profiles and see the progress and career direction of the co-founders and early hires of the business.

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Startup Spotlight: Payrix (FinTech)

Payrix Payments Technology (Payrix) provides marketplaces, SaaS businesses and ISOs a flexible payments platform that enables them to unlock more revenue potential. The company provides the tools to create a seamless, embedded user experience and offers clients the choice of payment facilitation-as-a-service (PFaaS) or a full payment infrastructure (payment IaaS) product based on business appetite. Payrix is a cloud built, API-first platform that is highly flexible, customizable and scalable.

Founded in 2015 by Boruch Greenberg who has focused most of his career on commerce, credit and payments having previously founded Benchmark Merchant Solutions & Splash Payments. With Greenberg’s goal to change the conversation around payments providing vendors with a truly flexible embedded payment option, it looks as though Payrix are on track to compete with the likes of Paypal and Stripe.

Some of Payrix published clients including Real Green Systems, Storable, Perfect Gym, SimplySwim and ResMan.

Investments & Acquisitions

  • 2015 – Founded, $0 revenue
  • December, 2018 – Payrix received $22 million in funding led by Blue Star Innovation Partners and PSG. 
  • October 1st, 2020 – $50 million Series A – Blue Star Innovation Partners, PSG
  • October, 2020 – Payrix acquires Integrapay – Brisbane, Australia
  • February, 2022 – PSG and BSIP sell Payrix to FIS – Undisclosed amount.
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Investor Profile

#BSIP

BSIP is a Dallas based investment fund founded by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones alongside Rob Wechsler, an experienced entrepreneur and investor. Founded in 2017, BSIP has invested in 13 platform companies, and facilitated over 100 tuck-in acquisitions.BSIP operates out of the Star in Frisco, Texas.

#PSG

PSG is a growth equity firm that partners with middle-market software and technology-enabled services companies to help them navigate transformational growth, capitalize on strategic opportunities, and build strong teams. Having backed more than 95 companies and facilitated over 375 add-on acquisitions, PSG brings extensive investment experience, deep expertise in software and technology, and a firm commitment to collaborating with management teams. Founded in 2014, PSG operates out of offices in Boston, Kansas City, London, and Spain.

#FIS

FIS is a leading provider of technology solutions for merchants, banks and capital markets firms globally. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS ranks #241 on the 2021 Fortune 500 and is a member of Standard & Poor’s 500® Index.

Key Comments

“It has been a pleasure to work alongside the talented team at Payrix and witness their extraordinary growth throughout our investment period,” said Marco Ferrari, Managing Director at PSG. “We thank the Payrix team for their partnership and look forward to their continued success.”

“We’re proud of our team at Payrix and excited for their future growth at FIS,” said Rob Wechsler, Founder and GP of BSIP.

“Since acquiring Worldpay in 2019, FIS continues to expand its strategic payments capabilities and offerings in global e-commerce,” said Stephanie Ferris, President, FIS. “Bringing the Payrix capabilities inside FIS enables us to continue our journey of serving e-commerce as well as platform companies.

Australian Opportunity

October, 2020 – Payrix officially acquired IntegraPay, and as a result has launched into the Australia and New Zealand market. Payrix now has an office based in Brisbane, Queensland.

IntegraPay CEO John De Stefani says, “We are delighted to have found a partner that shares both our growth ambitions and core values for serving clients.”

Following the company’s Series A extension, this merger positions Payrix as an independent payment technology provider supporting clients as part of a global strategy, and will add an additional $1.75 billion in processing volume to the Payrix Platform, the company states.

Payrix CEO Eric Frazier says, “We’ve listened to our clients and many have exciting plans to expand globally – it became clear we needed to eliminate blockers that were holding them back.”

Insights

September, 2022 – With ~208 employees globally, the company has seen 60% growth over the past year and 204% growth in the last 2 years according to LinkedIn data insights. With ~17 people based in Australia presently, I’m sure we’ll see that number grow significantly.

Having recently seen company ads for local software developers in Australia I’ll be watching this company to see future growth and opportunities. Stay tuned.

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Investor Spotlight – Bluestar Innovation Partners

Bluestar Innovation Partners was established in 2016 to provide direct funding and mentorship from both the Jones Family and top executives on a variety of topics including operational guidance, strategic intent, access to capital, expert mode-marketing, branding, and go-to-market strategies.

Private investment funding is the focus of the company, which has its headquarters in Frisco, Texas. The company makes investments into a number of businesses that are active in the areas of technology, games, as well as health and fitness.

Bluestar Innovation Partners has gained recognition in a number of different regions throughout the state of Texas. Among these are their recent recognition as a nominee in the Investment Catalyst classification for the 2019 Tech Titan excellence award given out on August 23, 2019.

Key People

The following are some of the most influential people in the company’s continued success.

  • Robert Wechsler, Founder.
  • Jerry Jones, President/General Manager.
  • Stephen Jones, Executive Vice President/Player Personnel Director
  • Charlotte Jones Anderson, Executive Vice President/Chief Brand Officer
  • Chad Estis, Business Operations Executive Vice President
  • Jerry Jones Jr, Executive Vice President/Marketing and Sales Chief Officer
  • Tom Walker, BSIPartner
  • Jason Cohen, BSIPartner
  • Stuart Lodge, BSIPartner
  • Molly Slusher, BSIPartner/Gen. counsel
  • Matt Steffe, BSIPartner
  • Eric Frazier, President/ Business & Commercial Development Leader
  • Randy McGraw, BSIPartner
  • Jessica Jones, BSIPartner
  • Corey Wood, BSIPartner
  • Dan Wechsler, BSIPartner
  • Ben Kauder, BSIPartner
  • Andrew Shofner, BSIPartner
  • Brett Thier, BSIPartner
  • Tom Strachan, BSIPartner
  • Kevin Hughes, BSIPartner

Recent Investments

BSIP has a proven track record of success in identifying companies operating in a segmented marketplace that are failing at one idea that BSIP can improve upon. With this strategy, BSIP is able to add value in addition to the capital outlay.

Businesses located in northern Texas stand to gain a substantial amount of value from invested capital from BSIP. Getting supported by a collective that is deeply linked to the most senior management levels at the most important sports organisation in the universe confers a certain innate competitive edge. Specifically, this incentive comes in the form of the following:

In addition, the leadership team at BSIP is not only one of the greatest powerful professionals of its type in North Texas but also has a demonstrated record of successfully increasing tech firms. In fact, they may even be the most influential group in the region.

April 23, 2019

– Payrix  – became the lead investor with $22M raised money.

July 26, 2020

– received TravelNet Solutions

– had exit in Payrix

October 01, 2020

– Series A Payrix raised a total of $50M.

March 08, 2022

– invested in Stax ($245M)

Bluestar’s Mission

BSIP’s investment thesis is to engage in incredibly creative innovators and companies selling a service or product with an overall income between $3,000,000 and $50,000,000. This enables BSIP to enhance their expertise, access to dispersion and capital systems, and to provide different implementations with exceptional guidelines and value.

Bluestar Innovation Partners is currently working on a strategy to grow their industry by recruiting additional investors and partner organisations who share their commitment to a common goal. The company has held throughout its history the conviction that it is the essential component of a forward-thinking kind of enterprise that is able to appreciate the value of ongoing innovation.

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How Did Canva Become So Successful?

An Aussie Tech Startup Sensation – Canva, now one of the world’s leading web based design platforms actually started with humble beginnings. 

Today Canva averages 120 new designs being added each second and more than 7 billion designs in total.

Anyone with just a little graphic design expertise has likely come across this easy-to-use online tool to make stunning graphics. Canva’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface simplifies creating professional-looking graphics, social media, and advertising campaigns.

Canva has skyrocketed in popularity since its 2012 debut and now does business with some of the most significant companies in the world, like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Virgin, and over 10 million consumers have used it to make beautiful designs.

“As a leader, I feel my job is to set the vision and the goals for the company, and then to work with everyone to empower them to dream big and crazy,”

– Melanie Perkins.

From Humble Beginnings – Canva Founders

Melanie came up with the idea in 2007, when she was just 19, teaching graphic designing to a batch of students at a University in Perth, Australia.

Melanie and Cliff Obrecht, her Co-founder and to-be spouse, started by creating an online school yearbook design business, “Fusion Books,” to test their idea. Fusion books helped school students collaborate and design their profiles and articles. The yearbooks would then be printed and delivered to the students across Australia.

This initial proof of concept became quite successful and the launchpad for Canva.

It’s important to note that despite Canva’s now huge success, Melanie was turned down by over 100 investors when pitching her initial idea.

Melanie’s first breakthrough happened in 2011 when a longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Bill Tai came to Perth to judge a startup competition. A skilled kitesurfer who had backed TweetDeck and Zoom, Tai was in town mainly to play in Perth’s killer waves. Perkins and Obrecht sniffed out a dinner Tai was hosting and ambushed attendees with a pitch for something called Canvas Chef: a metaphorical pizza, with design elements as the toppings and document types—flyer, business card, restaurant menu—as the dough. “It wasn’t the most stylish analogy,” says Rick Baker, an investor who saw the pitch that night.

They didn’t secure funding initially but left a mark on Tai. With the help of common connections, Melanie succeeded in getting Cameron Adams, on-board as a Tech Co-Founder and Dave Hearnden as a Tech Developer.

First Capital Investment

Now with a credible Tech Lead, they managed to raise $3 million in seed funding in two tranches in 2012 and early 2013, including a crucial matching grant from the Australian government.

The trickle of sign-ups grew to 50,000 users in the first month; by 2014, when Canva raised another $3 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures, 600,000 users had made 3.5 million designs.

Essentially, Canva’s success can be due to its ease and versatility. The company’s revenue came from a freemium model with the option to upgrade to a $10-a-month premium version with snazzier features.

In 2019, Canva raised an $85 million funding round led by Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, which valued Canva at $3.2 billion.

Exponential Revenue

After 7 years of building towards a grand vision, their growth happened fast:

  • 1 million users in 2014.
  • 6 million users in 2015.
  • 2 billion+ designs made in 2020.
  • On track for $1 billion+ annualised revenue in 2021.

Canva’s quick expansion may be attributed partly to the company’s dedication to improving the user interface and attracting new customers. The business has spent a lot of money on advertising and new product creation, which has paid off in the form of a sizable customer base. The income goals that Canva has set are aggressive yet realistic. With its healthy growth rate and customer-centric approach, the firm is in an excellent position to achieve its objectives.

Company Growth

Canva has grown exponentially since its start in April 2013. Expanded to over 300 people in Australia, the US, and the Philippines serving over 10 million customers in 190 countries. 

It’s incredible to see how far it’s come as a business when looking back at initial staffing levels. Canva has grown from a small group to a staff of over 300 employees. 

The Canva team is now 2000+ and continues to grow as Canva expands to new markets in China, Dubai, and the Philippines.

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Free Keyword Research Tool

Brand New – This new keyword research tool will help you discover related keywords and build a highly targeted keyword list.

Free Keyword Research Tool

You can also generate a list of modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match keyword variations ready to paste into Google Adwords.

I was using this functionality in other apps but figured it would be useful as a standalone tool. It doesn’t have search volumes or other SEO metrics. At the moment it’s purely for generating keyword ideas.

The idea behind this tool is to discover keyword variations and then paste those keywords into Google Keyword Planner for click estimates. Most people will know the main keywords they need to target, but will be stuck for variation ideas.

If you have some suggestions for useful features or additions, please let me know in the comments or click the Feedback button on the site.

It’s so easy to go overboard with features when developing these tools. I wanted to keep it very simple to start with and build based on user feedback. If there’s enough interest, I will keep developing it, so please let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

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Exploring UX: Little Things That Make Big Differences

The digital landscape is changing so quickly with new technologies, internet speed, mobile device capabilities etc. It can be overwhelming to think of everything you need to keep up to date with when developing a website. 

The more I look at various eComm websites and the marketing strategies vendors are using to acquire new customers, the more I am noticing the importance of good UX design.

Near enough is not good enough when it comes to conversion rates and profitability. Increasing your site performance by just 0.1% is actually a big deal when you are getting a good volume of traffic. As your site traffic grows it can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

In the next series of articles I’m going to look at various UX elements and the impact they have on user experience and conversion rates. I think there is a lot to be explored in this area and the opportunity for improvement is huge. I believe most vendors would not be aware of what is possible, and are simply confined to what their particular software platform options allow. 

When you push outside of what is the norm, you start to see dramatic results. When everybody copies an idea, it becomes less effective as users get used to seeing it across multiple different sites. 

There is something to be said for keeping to patterns that users are used to though. Simple things like putting the search bar in the top right of your website. Keeping the ‘Go’ or submit button to the right of a search field rather than assuming they will know the enter key performs the same function. When you mess with these patterns, you simply confuse and annoy users and you’ll find your conversion rates drop. 

Good UX increases come by experimenting with new ways to engage users and make their experience with your desired end result as easy as possible. Overcome their objections before they even think of them and test new interaction elements to increase engagement.

I invite you to come on a journey with me as we explore the world of UX for websites and apps on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. As these devices all have their own unique experience, it is crucial to look at your website or app separately on each device and how a user might be interacting with your content.

To be specific, we’re going to look at how we can utilise UX design in conjunction with emotional buying triggers. Fear, time, trust, value, belonging, guilt, instant gratification, leadership, and competition. Humans don’t make choices based on logic, we make them based on emotions. By leveraging UX elements that trigger these emotions you can increase your conversion rates dramatically.

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The Killer Youtube Boosting Strategy

***Disclaimer*** Google has changed the game on this tactic. They no longer publish pagerank scores. The toolbar has been disabled, and ‘follow’ links on Youtube have been pruned to a minimum.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean links from authority sites to your own website or social channels won’t boost your SEO score anymore.

This was a killer strategy back in the day for effectively sculpting pagerank from high pagerank channels on Youtube to your own channels in a very short period of time.

A quick lesson on links and link building:

There is such a thing as “follow” and “nofollow” links. I’m sure you are familiar with hyperlinks so I won’t bore you with the basics, but here’s a quick explanation. In the html code behind a link it can have an attribute tag of rel=”nofollow”. If that is present then the link won’t pass any “link juice” to the url it is linking to.

A quick lesson on “link juice”:

Google gives every url (webpage) on the internet a value. This use to be called “pagerank”. It ranges from 0 to 10. If you have a link pointing to your website from a web page with a pagerank of e.g. 7, that is more valuable than a link from a page with a pagerank of 3.

The great thing about social sites or websites that allow you to create your own page or content on their domain is that they usually already have high pagerank.

The strategy is to then link out to your own domains from those pages or content you created on high pagerank domains.

Youtube for example had a pagerank of 9 on their homepage. Popular channels would have a pagerank of 5 to 7.

If you got a link on that page that pointed to your own website then your pagerank would increase quite quickly and you would be ranked higher.

Thing is… you couldn’t link to your own website. If you put in a url in the comments section it would have the rel=”nofollow” tag on it.

BUT…

What you could do was leave a comment on a channel page. Didn’t matter what the comment was. The point was that it would automatically link back to your own Youtube channel as the comment author. That link was a follow link.

That meant that you could take your brand new Youtube account channel pagerank from 0 up to 3 in about a week, and if you commented on a few more high pagerank profiles you would be on a pagerank 5 in about two weeks.

Taking it a step further. There was one section on Youtube where you could link out to your own website with a follow link. That was in the settings where you get to specify your own website urls. So if you did the work to build up your channel pagerank then your own website urls would get passed some link juice as well.

The other benefit to this was obviously publishing videos. As your channel was building pagerank quickly, your videos would get priority in the search results. Then if your videos were keyword targeted you would also rank in Google search for those videos. This exponentially increased the views you received. From there if you recommended a url or program in your video, you could link to it in the description and get a boat load of traffic.

See why this was a killer Youtube boosting strategy?

So, now that Youtube has disabled some of the effectiveness of this tactic, what do you do now?

Well, like I said initially there is still merit in finding pages where you can get a follow link. Download this chrome extension which will highlight “follow” and “nofollow” links on any web page. this makes it much easier for you to discover them.

Also…. little teaser. Check out Google+ for potential links.

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The Best WordPress Plugins For Your Community Website

As WordPress is becoming the platform of choice for websites, it’s no longer just a blogging tool. People are using WordPress for many varied functions. One of those is building a community. It makes sense wanting to leverage the power of your own website to integrate members and have them be able to post content. There are a few ways to do this but the trick is to make the process as seamless as possible for your users. Read more

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Sorting Trello Cards By Priority Across Multiple Boards

I use trello.com in my business, and I find it a great tool for organising information and assigning tasks to team members.

The only thing we find is that when managing multiple boards (projects) at once, there isn’t a way of seeing the most important tasks across all projects on one screen.

Fortunately… my business is software development, and one of our guys whipped together a cool little script that will reorganize anyone’s personal cards page by “Labels”, meaning that we can now see the highest priority tasks across multiple projects.

Would you like to use this cool little script?

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar -> Sort Trello Cards by Priority

To use this script you will need to navigate to your personal cards page – i.e https://trello.com/{yourusername}/cards – replace {yourusername} with your actual Trello username (or click the “Cards” link in the menu)

*Nice little bonus – This script will also remove the “Done” tasks so you are only seeing the tasks that are yet to be completed.

Here’s how we typically setup our Trello Boards:

organising-trello-cards

We create 5 “Lists” – To Do, Doing, Review, Done, Notes

My process is to create new cards/tasks in the ‘To Do’ column and assign it to a team member. That team member will then drag the task to the ‘Doing’ column when they start working on it. They will move the card to the ‘Review’ column when they have completed it. I’ll then review the tasks, add notes and either put it back on the ‘Doing’ column or move it to the ‘Done’ column. We store FTP logins, and any other important info in the ‘Notes’ column for easy access.

To use the script above, just add a label to your tasks (You don’t need to name them in trello. The top label corresponds to top priority) – It’s a hassle naming labels across multiple boards (they don’t save from one to the next) so don’t worry about naming them unless you really want to.

Then navigate to your ‘Cards’ page and click the ‘Sort Trello Cards by Priority’ bookmark link.

Your page will reorganize to something like this (I have removed the actual cards to protect my clients privacy… but you get the idea):
sorted-trello-cards

If you like this handy script, please leave your comment below and let me know?

Thanks
Mike

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