Pattern89 Co-Founders, R.J. Talyor and Jeff Cunning share the origin story of Pattern89, how the High Alpha team informed their strategy, and details on the company’s path to acquisition by Shutterstock.
Transcript
Pattern89 is a predictive creative performance platform. We help marketers cut through all of those AB tests, the multivariate tests, and that gut feel decision to select the right creative or asset that helps their campaigns flourish. So with Pattern 89, we help you use data to make those decisions, make it simple and explainable so that you can feel confident in what you’re doing from a creative perspective.
I did a three month period as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence here at High Alpha where I pitched Pattern89 eighty times to eighty different customers and got six of them to say, “Yes, I will buy that if you build it.” In the very beginning, High Alpha was integral to creating Pattern89. Everything from the brand identity to our first prototype to just getting the thing off the ground. Huge compliments to the Marketing folks, to the Finance team and to the Partners for coming around us and showing us the way and fast tracking the whole thing for the whole last four or five years. We’ve been learning as we go along the way, and we’ve been really fortunate to have the High Alpha team as advisors and mentors and guides along that way we could really lean on them and their expertise to help us navigate the whole path toward an acquisition.
Shutterstock inquired about Pattern89 and what they want to do is get smarter about the content that they’re serving up to their customers. At Pattern89 all along it’s been how do we grow and build and execute this vision of being the future of creativity. We wanted to power every creative decision that marketers are making.
The Shutterstock team also wants to power the future of creative. Their core values are aligned with ours almost to the word. It was clear to us that this was the best situation. It represented a big win for the tech community here. It represented a big win for our team and the best path forward to really build and grow this vision that we’ve had all along at Pattern89.
We ended up closing the deal about two months after that initial email. So it’s a wild, quick journey, but… One that felt right from the very beginning, which is I feel really fortunate about it.
Thanks to High Alpha for believing in me and for believing in Pattern89. What an opportunity to have had that chance to learn alongside experts and accomplished a life goal.
Elias Torres
Drift Co-Founder and CTO
