Matik automates the creation and sending of personalized data-driven presentations. Just provide Matik with a few inputs (ex. which account the deck is for, and the date range), and Matik will query the data to create a Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint deck with personalized text, images, charts, and tables.
Matik can also then send the content as an email attachment to the account. Examples of content that can be automated include quarterly/executive business reviews, renewal decks, business cases, value analyses, and ROI one-pagers. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Matik co-founder and CEO Nik Mijic.
Nik Mijic’s Background
Before starting Matik, Mijic had mostly been in roles at companies that focused on helping customer success and sales teams convert and grow customers. And at LinkedIn, Mijic built internal tools that helped them leverage LinkedIn data in their presentations and be more efficient while doing so. Plus Mijic was the first non-engineering hire at Bluenose Analytics where we built a platform that used predictive analytics to engage at-risk customers and identify drivers of churn.
Formation Of Matik
Mijic saw companies creating content filled with data insights that were personalized to the account they were talking to. And the data was a critical part of building credibility between the customer success managers (CSM) and those customers as well as showing them the value they were getting from the product versus just telling.
The problem was that CSMs are responsible for creating time-intensive content like business reviews or renewal decks. Even though the CSMs would have a template in PowerPoint or Google Slides, they would still have to take screenshots, go to different places to pull the data, and put together comprehensive data-driven stories.
When Mijic worked at LinkedIn, he saw that the problem existed there as well. And Mijic had the chance to rebuild an internal tool – which ended up becoming really successful. Through this experience, Mijic started thinking: “Hey, I think there’s an opportunity to build something for the masses. I think other companies are experiencing this exact same pain point.” This is how he got the idea for Matik.
Challenges Faced Building The Company
When I asked Mijic about some of the challenges that were faced in building the company, he cited a lack of a sales background.
“My background is in product and my co-founder’s background is engineering. Early on, I didn’t realize how much selling you have to do. I mean, just trying to convince the early adopters through demoing the product and to ask them to buy,” Mijic acknowledged. “We had a small team to start, and it was tough going when you are a small startup working out of your apartment. You don’t have the same credibility that Google or LinkedIn or some of these more mature companies have.”
Did Mijic ever consider giving up? No.
“I feel like I’m a pretty motivated person, but a lot of that comes back to why I started the company. For me it was about the journey, about going from zero to one and being able to have that experience at the same time,” Mijic said. “I’m also a refugee from Bosnia, initially from Sarajevo. And a lot of why I do what I do is because of my family. I saw a lot of stuff that I would say normal teenagers or kids probably don’t see. I saw my parents have to go through a really hard time. So Matik is kind of a testament to the sacrifices that they made.”
Core Products
What are Matik’s core products? Matik automates the creation & sending of personalized, data-driven content like quarterly/executive business reviews, renewal decks, business cases, value analyses, and ROI one-pagers.
The top features include:
– Connect to most data warehouses and apps through REST APIs without ingesting data.
– Create presentation templates using Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint (Matik is not a presentation editor).
– Use simple field lookups or complex SQL queries to define metrics that can then be added to your presentation as text, tables, charts, or images.
– Use if-then logic to automate whether a slide is kept or removed.
– Send Matik-generated content as email attachments.
– Add text, metrics, and images personalized to the recipient in the email sent with the attachment.
– Pull the send list from a static list of recipients with Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, or a dynamic one that queries data warehouses and apps.
Evolution Of Matik’s Technology
How has Matik’s technology evolved over time?
“Our initial prototype was pretty basic and allowed you to connect to one data source and query data from it to generate a presentation with personalized text, images, charts, and tables,” Mijic replied. “Since then, we have built out an entire set of features that allows you to automate more steps of the personalized content creation process. We have also added several out-of-the-box integrations for the top data warehouses and apps, so users can leverage all data available to create robust personalized content for their accounts.”
Biggest Milestones
What have been some of Matik’s biggest milestones? Mijic informed me that a lot of the milestones that come to mind are the ones that provided validation that the product is solving a real problem and providing tangible value:
– Securing top businesses like Asana, Salesloft, Greenhouse, Autodesk, and more as customers.
– Having a customer expand their usage & “buy more Matik” at renewal for the first time.
– Creating 10+ integrations with various data warehouses and apps.
– Launching an app for Salesforce.
– Obtaining SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certifications.
– Getting backing from world-class investors like Menlo Ventures and a16z
– Doubling the team size in 2022.
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Mijic if he could share any customer success stories, he said that they worked with some great companies including Asana, Salesloft, Greenhouse, Autodesk, and many others:
– Salesloft initially had built out an internal tool to automate their quarterly business reviews (QBRs) but had trouble scaling it. Once they started using Matik, they were able to save 366 hours on the CS team per month, saw 98% of the customers who received a QBR renewal, and 86% of those customers upgrade – all of which led to $60 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) influenced by Matik-generated content.
– Greenhouse was able to use Matik to touch 31.5% more of their customers and provide them with a personalized ROI analysis.
– Glassdoor saved their data insights team 190 hours per week by automating the data querying process for their business reviews – that was the equivalent of hiring 5 additional data analysts.
Funding
Matik has raised over $23 million from investors such as Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Target Market
What is Matik’s target market? “Our goal is to help anyone automate any kind of data-driven content that needs to be personalized regularly or updated frequently,” Mijic replied. “While sales & customer success are our top users right now, Matik is great for any person who is trying to pull data from dashboards or queries, create data visualizations, and then put it all together to provide insights and develop recommendations (ex. marketing, finance, data analytics).”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Matik from the competition?
“Many products similar to Matik are built with the data & ops teams primarily in mind. The actual end user of the content, the customer-facing teams, often have a difficult time actually being able to use it. Meaning that even after the data-driven content is generated by the tool, there is still a lot of lift on their part to making it customer-facing and also a lot of limitations in terms of what they can do to it,” Mijic noted. “At Matik, we not only focused on making sure that the data at ops teams could easily set up and iterate on data-driven content, but we also made sure the customer success and sales teams using the content had something that would work as they needed it to and were pretty much customer ready.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Matik’s future company goals? “Our goal is to continue making it easier for teams to create more of this personalized, data-driven content as it helps build trust between teams within the company, and between the company and customers/prospects. It also helps everyone make better-informed recommendations and decisions,” Mijic concluded.
