This is the third and final installment of “The Comeback,” the story of one team’s search for a good problem, and the lessons learned along the way. Read Part One: Wrecked, and Part Two: Rebuilt.
Taylor Brandt, a principal at venture firm Headline, was no stranger to the problems that stymied marketing teams across the advertising sector. She had lived them.
Prior to joining venture firm Headline as an investor in 2021, Brandt had been running a creative team at a direct-to-consumer kids’ apparel brand. Her colleague, Nicole (Nikki) Farb had also founded several companies in the beauty and lifestyle industries.
“We really do believe that some of the best advertising in the world is being done with our customers.”
Faye Campbell, Motion
Both women had seen firsthand how creative teams often lacked a voice in the decision-making process. They were treated more like an outsourced agency, largely because they didn’t have direct access to the data that could prove the effectiveness of their work.
And so, when a friend mentioned a startup that had created a data product for creatives, Brandt and Farb’s interest was piqued.
The company was early in its development, much earlier than Headline typically invested, but for Brandt and Farb, something just clicked.
“I was fairly new on the team at the time,” she recalled. “But because it resonated so much with me off the bat, I really pushed for it.”
Brandt and Farb recognized a solution that would have been a life-saver for them in their previous roles. To Brandt, it represented a whole new category of software. But convincing her colleagues of the opportunity wasn’t easy.
“I think it’s a problem that’s hard to understand unless you work in it,” she said. “When I tried to explain it to the team, they were like, ‘I don’t get it.’ They wanted to wait and see what happened.”
Time to build
Shoelace had been founded as a software company focused on helping brands set up ad campaigns on Facebook. When that need disappeared, the company transitioned into a growth marketing agency, which still operates today under the leadership of CEO Cory Dobbin.
But in 2020, Shoelace’s co-founders—Reza Khadjavi, Alexander Sloan, and David Berglas—were already laying the groundwork for their next venture.
They called it Motion, which offered an analytics product designed to bridge that gap between performance marketers and creative teams.
“We went in very eyes-wide-open the second time around, because we got the taste of what happens when the foundation is shaky,” Khadjavi said.
Initially, the trio took Shoelace’s existing team of engineers over to the new company. Sanja Smrzlic, a nurse-turned-developer at Shoelace, joined Motion in 2020. Evan Lee, who joined Shoelace as a performance marketer in 2018, would move over to Motion in 2021, and now serves as head of partnerships and business development.
Elliott Brand was another key figure brought over from Shoelace. Starting as an entry-level marketing hire, Brand would spend his free time at Shoelace drawing up entire product feature ideas. Unsurprisingly, he took on the role of scrappy generalist, joining when the team was just five people. He now serves as Motion’s head of product.
“Reza hits me up and says, ‘Hey, there’s some legs to this idea of Motion. We need a product person. We need a marketing person. Can you do both?” Brand said.
One of the core challenges for Brand and the new product team was building an analytics platform that catered to both growth strategies and creatives.
Brand said the product team drew inspiration from outside the typical B2B space, like video games, and developed features like CardView and Motion Metrics. Both tools simplified intricate advertising metrics into easy-to-understand scores, allowing all users to quickly assess and improve their creative work.
“The question was: how can we play to that lowest common denominator in such a way that, say, a videographer who creates an ad is now empowered to come into Motion and understand where this creative is working, where it’s not working, and what they can do to improve it,” Brand added.
While Brand at the team were building, Khadjavi was already seeing demand.
“We got to 600 people on our waitlist before we even launched the product,” he said. “It was very clear, even from prelaunch, that this was top of mind for so many people in our industry.”
From roadmap to rocketship
Khadjavi describes Motion today as the “mission control center” for the creative strategist.
When the platform finally launched in 2021, Khadjavi said the impact was immediate. Performance marketers, brands, and agencies were drawn by the platform’s ability to demystify and enhance the creative process. This translated into rapid growth for the startup—Khadjavi said Motion tripled its revenue every year for the first three years and amassed over 1,000 customers.
The use cases seem to be endless. A24 Films, the studio behind award-winning films like Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once, uses Motion to measure the effectiveness of its trailers. HexClad, a premium cookware brand, increased top-of-funnel spend by 60 percent with Motion’s creative insights, while Meta and TikTok ad agency The Social Savannah saves 520 hours annually on creative reporting thanks to Motion.
“This idea of ‘the best of the best’ is something that gets repeated internally a lot,” said Faye Campbell, head of Motion’s revenue operations. “We really do believe that some of the best advertising in the world is being done with our customers.”
A particularly striking measure of Motion’s success is its burn multiple—which measures how much capital a company is spending to generate each dollar of new revenue, offering a clear view of how efficiently Motion is scaling its growth relative to its expenses.. For venture-stage startups, a burn multiple of one to 1.5 is considered “great,” Khadjavi said, with anything below one being “amazing.” Motion’s current burn multiple stands at 0.5, according to the CEO.
A culture set in motion
The differences between Motion and Shoelace go beyond product features and the presence – or lack – of a core software solution. Brand recalls a period at Shoelace when the team lost its sense of unity, a shift he attributes largely to the company’s financial struggles at the time.
“The scary thing about being an employee is that you can be an all-star team member, but you can’t change the fundamentals of the business if they’re not stacked correctly,” Khadjavi added.
In building Motion, the founders took a more intentional approach, Brand said, creating a culture where healthy debate and experimentation was both encouraged and expected.
“I believe culture is the single biggest differentiator between a successful startup and a non-successful startup,” Brand said.
“Our team at Motion is extraordinarily opinionated and vocal, but we’re also very willing to get our hands dirty and commit to an idea, even if we might have disagreed with it at first,” he added.
“Our team at Motion is extraordinarily opinionated and vocal, but we’re also very willing to get our hands dirty.”
Lee, who manages his own team at Motion, echoed this sentiment.
“I think the biggest thing that they do is they give us autonomy,” he said. “I’m not saying Reza just closes his eyes and hopes for the best. He’s certainly involved. But in terms of how I manage my team and how I create the culture on my team, he lets me approach it the way that I want to, which I love.”
This focus on trust has had an impact on team members like Smrzlic. She transitioned from nursing to customer success to development, a leap made possible by the team betting on her core potential. “My role would change so frequently, as it does in startups, but the trust has always been there,” she added.
“They just trust people to do great work without having to box them in with constraints and processes and approvals,” added Campbell, who joined from Vancouver-based Unbounce late last year. “I’m hoping we can keep that alive as long as possible.”
At Headline, Brandt said that Motion’s willingness to “bet on people and give them room to rise” was among the reasons she was drawn to the startup. Despite there being an initial stage mismatch, Brandt and Farb persuaded Headline to lead the Motion’s $6-million seed financing round in 2023.
“I think we’re all very happy that we decided to do that at that stage,” Brandt remarked.
Headline would go on to lead Motion’s Series A round, and most recently, participated in Motion’s $30-million USD Series B financing round, announced just last week.
Coinciding with that fundraise, Motion also unveiled a new product suite called Creative Research, which helps brands track their competitors, look at trending ad concepts, and build a swipe file of their favourite ads. The startup’s Series B round, led by new investor Inovia Capital, will help accelerate its product roadmap.
“As AI drives the cost of new creative production down to zero, the biggest questions brands need to answer is: what to create?” Khadjavi said, noting that he thinks Motion will increasingly provide teams with an answer.
Reflecting on the shift from Shoelace to Motion, Khadjavi believes the key difference between the two companies was his co-founders’ ability to tackle high-priority problems head-on.
“The thing we missed with Shoelace was that solving low-priority problems meant people didn’t have time for us, didn’t pay much, and churned easily,” he said. “Solving a high-priority problem can be very intimidating, but it doesn’t take a lot more time or effort than solving a low-priority one.”
While chasing smaller fires might seem less daunting to a first-time founder, Khadjavi learned it’s ultimately a wasted effort. “People will give you a lot more of their time and attention if you’re solving their high priority problem,” he said.
“With Motion, we aren’t afraid to go after those big problems.”
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All images provided by Reza Khadjavi.