The Futurum Group – Techstrong Group Acquisition with Daniel Newman (Part 1)

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, you know, we've had some big news coming out here on Textron tv. Textron Group is being acquired by the Futurum Group.

Uh, it's really exciting. It's exciting for me personally, for obvious reasons, but I think it's exciting for, for our industry and for the tech world. And, you know, there's that old Irish, I think it's an Irish proverb.

You live in May. You live in interesting times. It is interesting times and, and these interesting times, I think as the backdrop for why this deal, why this partnership, why this acquisition made so much sense.

I don't know if you know, let me introduce, well, he's been on Techstar Gang before. Actually I have, I've on it before. But for those who may not know, let me introduce you to Daniel Newman.

Daniel is the CEO founder of Futurum Group. And, um, you know what, Daniel, for people who aren't, maybe don't know Daniel Newman, they, maybe they know me from doing this. Yeah.

Do you remember kind of your story? Yeah. Well, first of all, hi everybody, and thank you so much for, uh, having me.

Uh, Alan, it's been quite a journey. It hasn't been the longest journey No. That we've been on together.

And for everybody out there that read the exclusive that we did together and talked a little bit about our history, it was a short period of time. Yep. But, uh, little background, you know, the Futurum group, now about seven years old.

We've come on very, very quickly. Mm-Hmm. Fastest growing independent research firm in the world.

Mm-Hmm. That's pretty exciting. But the background was really all about this disruption that we've all identified that you, that we identify whether it's been OTT influence, podcasting, blogging, social media, and this amalgamation of, of insights, the way that we all consume information has changed so much.

Mm-Hmm. And when we started this thing, it was really about how do we work with the tech industry to connect people that are looking for technology with the insights that are required for them to feel confident in making a buying decision. So you and I kind of came at two two, we came two ways at the same problem.

Yep. And so, you know, I started out, I'm a seven time bestselling author. I wrote a book called Human Machine in 2019 that a few people have read.

Um, I've been a professor of business and stra, uh, strategy graduate professor in fact. Um, and I founded the Futurum Group, uh, back in 2016. We officially launched, but really accelerated through the, uh, you know, through the period of the 20, 20 20 during the, the P word.

I don't know if we say that out loud anymore, but, you know, it was a tough time. But yep. We were built for speed and scale because we believed from day one like you that digital, um, and social and amplification can rapidly bring really important insights to people.

And we could use all digital platforms to do it. Yep. I, I agree with you.

And you know, I, I will add this. It's a disruptive time because of that. Look, COVID and all that helped, I think, accelerate the disruption.

'cause it moved us out of offices and working anywhere anyhow, on anything. Um, but what, what's happened is, and, and by the way, this isn't confined to just B2B Tech. No.

What we're talking about now, the issues that we're seeing Daniel, are how people consume information across the board, whether it's mainstream media or alternative media, or B2B tech media. We don't have three TV stations anymore. Right.

There was that old Bruce Springsteen song, I think it was 72 channels, and nothing's on, we have 700 channels now, and nothing's on. And more importantly, Textron TV Is on text strong tv, but people don't know how to distinguish Quality truth from dare from fiction. We don't, we don't know.

We don't know who to believe. Right. And everybody has an angle.

Right. And, and quite frankly, one of the things we've strived for at Techstrong is I hate just having a lot of vendors up here talking about how good their stuff is because they, they have a, a reason to say how good their stuff is. And I think that reflects the tech market in Hall, in, in, in general too.

Tech buyers, tech consumers, they want to know. They don't, they're not quite sure who to believe. They want to hear from a voice of authority that this works.

If this is, we, we hear what your problem is. We've looked at the solutions and based upon our considered opinion, and we're, we're not a vendor selling you a solution, but based upon our considered opinion, these are the solutions you should be looking for. And I think that's really, when I look at it, that's the key to Futur.

Yeah. So, I mean, look, the, the symbiotic relationship comes down to the problem I've tried to solve. And I mentioned kind of the bigger issue of matching buyers and, and, and, and vendors was always kind of at the biggest picture.

But how does that actually happen? And, and it, and it comes from this considerable, uh, aggregation layer that is the empirical to the ephemeral is what I call it. Mm-Hmm.

And so futurum and most analysts, right, are seen as sort of tip of the spear. We are the, the most valuable opinion when it comes to shaping a decision maker's buying journey. Maybe other than customers themselves saying, I am Bank of America.

This is what I buy. I am Tesla. This is the infrastructure and AI tools we use.

Other than that, it's, it's an analyst. It's an analyst that says, this is a company that has credible solutions, um, has high impact customers that are adopting it. Uh, they are innovative in their, in their, in their vehicles and means of delivering new solutions and services to market.

Alan, this is very, very important. And so when you have great media, it's all about credibility. So last year, our firm had 200 plus appearances on the biggest networks, not just Tech strong tv, CNBC, Bloomberg, uh, I'm Sure they're bigger than Techstrong Tv, right at the cusp.

Okay. Fox Business, uh, you know, Yahoo Finance, you name it. Our team, we're talking markets, we're talking technology.

We're talking things like CHIPS ACT and policies and Gen ai. And, and they need an why do these very prolific media outlets like Textron, um, bring on analysts? It's 'cause it's the trust layer.

Of course, they can bring all the suppliers on, they'll bring on the CEO and the CEO e say, my company is fantastic, this is everything we do. And then they go, let's ask an analyst. What do they think?

Right. Is that true? So that's the, the arbiter.

But we at futurum do things that are very complimentary. Yeah. Okay.

So the complimentary things are what I call the empirical. So first of all, you know, signal 65 is our testing performance validation. We will tear down data center chips or new PCs and actually test the performance against claims that all the vendors are making to be able to bring that and then use Techstrong as a vehicle, a distribution to be able to talk about that.

We have rum intelligence. We actually, we actually survey the market to understand market size and trends. We have decision maker data dashboards.

And then by the way, we can compliment that with the huge audience, the 15 million or so readers of Techstrong that come in and do pulse surveys Right. On your sites. And we'll be able to pull in new data, we'll continue building our data, that intelligence and then that distribution that comes out.

And then of course, CMOs and leadership and these companies have to be able to convert their marketing spend and their investment and products to dollars. Yeah. And so the old way was an analyst from a firm would write a paper, they hand it to a CMO and say, good luck.

You know, so they'd commissioned some research. We don't wanna leave them there, Alan. Right.

So the whole beauty here is we have always had this vision of something I called research led demand generation. Lots of companies do lead gen, most of them use very low quality content to do it. So you take an analyst tip of the spear most important, or one of the most important influencers in a buying decision, and then you add intent.

So something that Techstrong did that we didn't do, and the intent is to understand the keywords that a buyer is searching the company that they come from, the intent, and when they plan to buy something. And then being able to put an analyst piece of content with a mix of the media content that you're creating. com Mm-hmm.

ai. You put all this together and all of a sudden you have a full left to right journey of the most important empirical testing performance, market evaluation, all the way down to understanding a buyer who has consumed that content and might be ready to buy Ellen. I mean, look, do I sound pumped?

I hope. Well, I've been with you now a little bit. Do I sound pumped?

You're always sounding Pumped. I am always a little bit pumped Caffeine, but Oh, but no, I agree. You know, I wanna address specifically to, you mentioned CMOs to the marketing organizations of the, of the tech tool vendor or the tech tool vendors and service vendors who work with both Futura and Techstar.

We've heard you loud and clear what worked for them in 2017 or 2019 or even 2020 when, when, quite frankly, money was free, or money was cheap, money Was free, and cookies were, There's a song like that about something. Yeah. Um, but anyway, money's not free today.

They, you need to get more with less. Right. That's, that's the mantra.

We're gonna do 25% more with 25% less. And in order to do that, you need a more efficient buying cycle. You can't afford to collect people's names and then put 'em on a drip campaign for a year or, or 14 months that CMO is hearing from his CEO, the these leads have to convert to sales.

Yeah. In order to convert 'em to sales, you gotta have better buyer, not better buyers, but buyers further along in their buying cycle. Yep.

You've gotta be able to give them the information they need to rely on to make decisions. I really, that's what gets me pumped. What gets me pumped is we can marry that.

And, and much like what you're saying, we manage, we marry that analyst recommendation to not just buyers, but to buyer intent data to buyer's journey data. So we know where the visitors are on their journey, what other sites they've gone to, what else have they been looking at. And that's the kind of information that I think is invaluable to today's marketers out there in the B2B market.

You know, I can't wait to bring this to them. Yeah. Lemme tell you, when I was, you know, spending some time tearing back the covers, getting to know your business.

Now, we only spent a few months to, to realize that we had a great partnership. It didn't take us long. Shout out to Techstrong, uh, tv, longtime contributor, Shera Rubinoff, and of course rums research cybers Sphere ahead of our, uh mm-Hmm.

Uh, cyber practice now for kind of matchmaking us. Uh mm-Hmm. You know, I'd love to give her a shout, but it didn't take us long.

And as I was pouring through some of the data, some of the behind the scenes, Alan, you know, looking at some of the data and, and, and, and, you know, I'm gonna get this a little wrong, but I'm gonna be close. Okay. And not back from memory, but like almost 60% of the people that, that you traffic tech Strong's platforms, um, are decision makers for companies over a hundred million.

Yeah. And over 90% of them are in the middle and late stages of making buying decisions, security products, cyber edge portfolio, cloud native products, uh, you know, uh, Kubernetes DevOps products. You know, you go up and down the stack, you have a very clear picture.

And I said, you know, now you layer those same technologies that are used to understand intent and you put it on top of the analyst content that we're writing the research reports, the data, the videos being done by our six five media, or, uh, we put it on top of testing reports that we're doing from Signal 65. Now you've got this empirical content with all this intent data laying on top of it. Then you've got all this sort of journalistic stuff led by your chief content officer, Mike Bazaar, who does a wonderful job.

But you really do have that in depth, you know, research and reporting all the way down to that kind of what I would call features. Yes. That, that drive lots of readership, maybe more high level or newsworthy type of items.

And you really get to understand the intent. What we're trying to be able to unpack, this is the future of the business. And, and Alan, I can tell you because I've had behind the scenes conversations with CMOs, uh, heads of communications ar for companies, product marketing leaders, and all of them are telling me the same thing.

They're telling me that where are we seeing more budget, more budget is coming if we can take this content that we have analysts work on with us, and we can turn it into measurable intent, demand generation outcomes. Meaning they can come back to us and say, that fu and report that you wrote helped us drive 100, 501 thou. Or it could be one deal sometimes for some of these technologies that could be a $50 million deal.

No, you get a big one. Absolutely. We, we've actually heard this from large, large public cloud providers, right.

That some of the, uh, activities, I mean the, the dollars spent to dollars earned ratio is like millions. It, it's, you know, it's $10 to a million kind of thing. And, and so that is Daniel.

That's huge. It's, It's massive. And, and, and if, if I could add one more thing, it's, you know, as I see it, we're super complimentary.

You know, I mentioned all the work we do with some of the more, uh, kind of mainstream broadcast in business like A-C-N-B-C or, or a Bloomberg. This is complimentary because what's going on right now is you go on those networks and a CEO gets a three minute interview, a five minute interview to talk about everything their whole business is doing. Well, we can bring on, uh, one of those CEO's direct reports or in some cases on a lot of our platforms, we'll bring those same CEOs on and say, let's spend 20 minutes, or let's spend 30 minutes.

Let's, let's tear down what you're trying to do. Let's help people understand what's innovative and differentiated about your technology. Let's get deeper into the problems that you're solving for the market.

Let's talk about the competition and why you, you're declining or growing in a way that, you know, basically the business press can't do. Yeah. And largely, I mean, let's be really realistic about the market.

Alan is the tech press has been, uh, in a very difficult juxtaposition for a long Time. It's a disruptive time. Time.

Yep. And so by taking what we're doing and combining it, it together we can power the investment of the earned media, the audience, by the way, the 100% owned audience, earned audience that you built at Techstrong. And we can couple that with the tip of the spear analyst content, and we can keep investing in building this more in depth, meaningful community.

And I really, I really do love that having that dedicated reader that we take on the journey with us. Not just a buying journey, but you journey, you know, It's learning journey. It's Been journey a while.

Journey. It's learning. It's a community.

Yeah. It's a community of technology. Passionate, focused people that have been sort of left without a community, without a place to go.

We can be absolutely Where they go. They've been orhan. I mean, so I call what you were talking about, hit and run interviews, right?

The CEO comes on for 15 minutes. He's talking way up here and it's Usually like five most Times. And even if he, even if he's talking to another CEO up here, it's very hard for that CEO to then come down to his decision makers, to his key people and say, oh, I saw this guy on M-S-N-B-C and this is what we should do.

No, more often than not today, these decisions are coming bottom up, middle end. But I really wanna focus Daniel, and, and we're gonna take a break here and come back for our next episode on the state of the tech media analyst industry as a backdrop to future text drop. Okay.

And I think maybe we'll invite that ARD guy in. We'll be back in our next episode with Mike Ard on the state of the tech media analyst industry. Stay tuned.