The marketing technology universe is expanding fast—maybe too fast for its own good. The process of finding and testing out new digital marketing tools is becoming a massive burden for many, according to Anita Brearton and Sheryl Schultz, Boston-area serial entrepreneurs and angel investors who’ve seen the issue at play from numerous points of view. Deploying marketing tools to boost your business is table stakes these days, but the “amount of hours needed to find new tools is just extraordinary,” Brearton said.
Brearton and Schultz—known, among other things, for together heading up the Boston chapter of angel group Golden Seeds from 2009-2011—have now teamed up again, in a bid to make the marketing tech universe less overwhelming. Their Boston startup is CabinetM, which just launched a site for discovering new marketing software and quickly digesting what you need to know.
The site includes profiles on 3,500 products, and they can be browsed by category or searched for. Tools can be compared side-by-side, and they can also be filtered by function (customer acquisition, customer engagement, etc.), by whether they’re for a small or large company, by whether they’re for B2C or B2B, and so on. “The goal is to help marketers really narrow things down,” Brearton said.
Other features include a “contact me” button (that lets you get in touch with the vendors themselves); “drawers” (for keeping track of the tools you’re testing); and a virtual “cabinet” (for tools you’re using). The “drawers” and “cabinets” can then be shared around within teams, so that the best tools can spread between team members and everyone can see what is being tested. Currently, many organizations are testing scores of tools at any given time, but “there’s no way to see what each other are testing,” Schultz said.
While CabinetM is free to use, eventually the company will look to generate revenue by providing premium tools to senior-level marketers to manage the deployment of the various technologies. CabinetM may also provide premium profiles to vendors, so they can add offers, videos, PowerPoints and the like on their profiles.
CabinetM has been available in beta version for the past two weeks, and marketing tech companies are invited to come and claim their profiles on the site.
The team at CabinetM also includes VP of engineering Joachim Martin, a longtime Boston-area software engineer. The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding so far, with well-known local angel Jean Hammond as the largest investor and other investors including Golden Seeds and Crimson Hexagon CEO Stephanie Newby.
