2023 Fluvio Company Annual Report, Reflection and Lookahead
WRITTEN BY DEVON O’ROURKE, FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER
While 2023 was a broadly challenging year for the tech industry, Fluvio took advantage of new opportunities to expand services and doubled down on solving the biggest go-to-market (GTM) challenges for clients. Ultimately, resilience and flexibility allowed us to grow revenue for the fourth consecutive year.
We believe in transparency, and while we are a private company with no obligation to report on performance, we have decided to provide the public with insight into our business annually. Transparency serves as a mechanism for holding ourselves accountable. This report may be valuable for those that are interested in learning from our experience in order to more effectively build their own businesses, as well as those that are invested in our future as a client or partner. Ultimately, we believe sharing these details will help grow the product marketing, consulting, and technology ecosystems, and in turn, propel Fluvio forward in the coming year.
Key Metrics
1 Includes Workshops, Launchpad, & GTM Assessments
2 Measured via Google Form surveys, NPS benchmarks - 100th percentile across all industries
3 Measured via monthly Gusto employee surveys
Highlights
In the first half of 2023, Fluvio reaccelerated growth after a challenging second half of 2022. In fact, we experienced quarter-over-quarter growth in each of the first three quarters in 2023 (8-9% growth QoQ). While growth slowed in Q4, our ability to expand revenue streams through new service offerings afforded us a path to modest growth for the year, finishing with over $2M in revenue for the second consecutive year and a 3% growth rate. Our business continued to be buoyed by strong client satisfaction and support (voted in as a finalist for the Product Marketing Team of the Year award; +85 net-promoter-score representing the 100th percentile across all industry benchmarks) leading to renewals, referrals, and network growth. In 2022, we expanded beyond strategic consulting engagements and rolled out a full suite of products and services that help technology businesses scale more effectively and efficiently throughout each stage of their lifecycle. In 2023, we were able to reap the rewards of these new revenue streams; increasing non-consulting revenue by 507% year-over-year. Workshops and Launchpad services showed particular promise and align with trends we believe are in their infancy. While we would like to see a higher overall rate of growth for the firm, given the macroeconomic backdrop and the headwinds broadly impacting our segment – including boutique and large firms (e.g. Deloitte and Accenture) alike, most of which experienced declines in revenue and headcount – we are confident in our position as we enter 2024.
Reflection
As the Managing Partner, I dedicate time each year to review and reflect upon Fluvio’s performance and attempt to identify the key drivers behind our success in order to effectively plan for growth in the year(s) ahead.
Product & Services Expansion
While we continued to focus on the core strategic consulting business in 2023, we successfully scaled new revenue streams (6.7x from 2022) that we believe will widen in the years ahead.
Fluvio Workshops. In late 2022, we launched our Workshop service, which helps companies define or refine their positioning, messaging, or marketecture and optimize their go-to-market strategy. In 2023, we accelerated this service line, conducting 5x more Workshops for the likes of companies like Revsure, Nerdio, and Winware. Workshops provide an earlier entry point to working with Fluvio and have allowed us to expand our ICP to include startups (Seed to Series B). We’re bullish on this segment, as later stage (Series B+) company valuations have come down due to the 2021/2022 peak, capital allocators are moving into earlier (Seed to Series A) opportunities (this has been further accelerated by AI), which should increase our Workshop pipeline.
Fluvio Ventures. In March, we announced Fluvio Ventures, our nascent investment arm. Fluvio Ventures is a venture syndicate led and run by Fluvio and backed by a community of product marketing professionals, GTM leaders, and seasoned operators. Leveraging our experience helping technology and software companies install processes and mechanisms to scale more effectively and efficiently, we now invest in and advise companies that are indicating signals of product-market fit and customer traction and help them get to their next stage of growth. In November, we announced our inaugural investment in Freeplay, the end-to-end platform for software companies to ship great products with LLMs. Like Workshops, we are excited about Fluvio Ventures’ impact on our ability to service startups in addition to connecting product marketing leaders to the venture ecosystem.
Fluvio Launchpad (our hiring service). Finding and attracting the right product marketers is challenging, even for the best companies and recruiting firms. Fluvio Launchpad helps clients safely find long-term success with their product marketing foundation by ramping up promising product marketing talent during the course of our consulting engagement and graduating them into a full-time position at its conclusion. We activated Launchpad several times in 2023, and added two new client engagements in December that include Launchpad hiring to stabilize and build out the product marketing function. We believe this is a strong signal that the tech industry will experience an uptick in the coming quarters, and subsequently, sets Launchpad up for continued growth in 2024.
The Fluvio GTM Assessment. Over the course of four years and dozens of strategic consulting engagements, we have developed the Fluvio GTM Model, a comprehensive view of the effective, repeatable go-to-market process that any company can and should adopt. We frequently utilize this model with our clients when discussing and evaluating where their teams can and should spend more time developing competencies, which helps structure how PMMs deliver more value back to their business. In June of 2023, we packaged up that model and deployed it within our new product, the Fluvio GTM Assessment. Built for executives and product marketing leaders, the Fluvio GTM Assessment delivers transformative insights to gauge their product marketing practice’s coverage/maturity, identify key investment areas, and set up benchmarks for success. The Fluvio GTM Assessment is our foray into programmatic product offerings, which we believe are complementary and synergistic to our strategic consulting services.
Partnership & Ecosystem Growth
Content & PR. In 2023, we continued to focus on network expansion and invest heavily in content to educate and cultivate a follower base on LinkedIn, resulting in a 92% year-over-year increase in followers to over 2,500. Our most concentrated content effort has been our podcast, Embracing Erosion. Tapping our network, Embracing Erosion lets listeners inside the heads of product marketers, investors, and go-to-market leaders who tackle changes head-on and turn them into competitive advantages. At the conclusion of 2023, the podcast has reached thousands of listeners in 39 countries and continues to help broadcast our voice and champion the product marketing discipline.
Partnerships. Partnerships help Fluvio establish brand awareness, grow pipeline, diversify revenue streams, and provide unique access to key players in our ecosystem. In 2023, we increased our focus and emphasis on partnerships – pursuing net new partners, renewing existing partners, and building a cross-selling motion with our clients. We started the year with six partnerships and closed the year with eight, including a renewed partnership with Product Marketing Alliance and new partnerships with industry leaders such as Klue (our podcast is also part of their Compete Network), Ignition, and MetaLab.
Additionally, we have continued to collaborate with partners on in-person events; including attending and presenting at multiple Product Marketing Alliance events and partnering with the likes of Crafted and Mucker Capital to host meet ups and founder roundtable discussions in the Denver area.
Ultimately, high client satisfaction (as indicated by our NPS score of +85), increased exposure and perception attributed to content and PR, and partnership expansion led to pipeline resilience and helped the Fluvio team get nominated as a finalist for the PMA’s Product Marketing Team of the Year award for 2023. Unlike most businesses, we are fortunate to continue to defer spending on advertising (including search ads) to sustain growth.
Lookahead
We are optimistic about the future and believe that the tech market is showing signs of recovery. However, we remain aware of the ongoing uncertainties and the possibility of a recession that could influence our growth in 2024. Our confidence is bolstered by our proven track record of successfully navigating through some of the toughest economic challenges in recent years. We are poised to transform previous challenges into opportunities as we move forward into 2024.
Challenges
As we enter 2024, there appears to be tension between economic optimism and caution. Many financial experts anticipate steady economic growth; however, this outlook is balanced against persistent concerns over price growth and the impact of enduring high interest rates. A recent CFO survey revealed CFOs' optimism about the overall U.S. economy rated an average of 58.0 on a scale from 0 to 100 in the fourth quarter of 2023, up from 56.2 in the third quarter. Despite this optimism, there is a cautionary note as nearly 60% of firms expect their price growth in 2024 to remain elevated relative to pre-COVID norms. This economic climate may lead to more judicious financial planning that could impact 3rd party spending, which Fluvio services are typically budgeted under.
Opportunities
Despite the warranted caution as we enter 2024, we will remain opportunistic. We believe we are uniquely positioned to not just withstand the current environment, but to win within it and rise as it subsides in 2024. We have evolved our services and deepened our network; subsequently, we are fast-becoming the firm high-growth technology companies turn to with their most strategically important go-to-market challenges. As KPIs continue to pivot from top line growth to more sustainable growth metrics such as Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Annual Contract Value (ACV), Fluvio is well positioned to capture demand for strategic engagements focused on initiatives such as packaging and pricing, customer and prospect journey mapping for upselling/cross-selling, and ICP/persona refinement to to limit waste and hone investment focus areas. In 2023, leveraging our Fluvio GTM Model, we achieved notable success in these strategic areas for clients such as iProov, Enverus, and Bluecore, among others. We plan to build on these accomplishments and the valuable experience gained to enhance our engagements moving forward.
“Fluvio delivered quality work at a speed that was faster than we anticipated, all while generating internal excitement and alignment around the initiatives. Some consultants are hesitant to or won’t execute beyond providing recommendations; our work with the Fluvio team proved that capable help is a true accelerator for our product marketing function.”
“Many consulting firms position themselves as eager to take on the toughest challenges. However, that enthusiasm usually ends with an overview report and recommendations, leaving the execution and pressure-testing of their recommendations to us. Instead of delivering a presentation and walking away, Fluvio’s embedded approach gives them the ability to drive tangible impact.”
As we continue to prioritize our foundational strategic consulting services, we are also poised to further invest in our Workshops, Launchpad, and GTM Assessment products/services. Looking ahead, we anticipate these areas to experience significant growth, driven by favorable economic trends and their positive influence on the startup ecosystem, as well as budgets in mid-market and enterprise sectors.
Final Outlook
Given Fluvio’s continued success and resilience throughout a difficult 2023, we remain confident we are focusing on the right areas and will continue to prioritize hiring and up-leveling talent, refining our GTM Model and IP, investing in content, and growing new product/service revenue to elevate our brand and drive net revenue expansion in 2024. Fluvio is in a strong position to fulfill the needs of thousands of technology companies in the years ahead.
About Fluvio
Fluvio is a consulting firm built for the realities of the modern technology business, in which speed and execution are non-negotiable.
As the leading product marketing consulting firm, Fluvio helps technology companies tackle their most critical, strategic go-to-market challenges. Leveraging their Fluvio GTM Model, the firm now offers a suite of products and services to help businesses scale more effectively and efficiently throughout each stage of their lifecycle.
