How I Tackle Marketplace with Chris Andrews
We connected with Tackle customer and community member Chris Andrews, COO and Head of Product at Rendered.ai to learn about his experience selling through the Marketplace thus far. Read on to hear his story and leave a comment if you have any questions or advice for @chris.
Tell us your name, title, and a little bit about what your company does.
I’m Chris Andrews, COO and Head of Product at Rendered.ai. Rendered.ai is a Platform as a Service for data scientists, data engineers, and developers who need to create and deploy unlimited, customized synthetic data generation for machine learning and artificial intelligence workflows on computer vision projects, reducing expense, closing gaps, and overcoming bias, security, and privacy issues when compared with the use of acquisition of real-world sensor data. As a 3-year-old seed-funded startup that is generating revenue, Rendered.ai has had enough time to build a production platform that has helped customers achieve success applying synthetic data to computer vision problems in diverse domains such as the medical industry, remote sensing satellite-based object detection, and manufacturing.
What has your career journey been like and how did you end up in this role?
Joining Rendered.ai in the Fall of 2022 was somewhat ‘back to the future’ for me. I started my career in very small startups, three and six people, and then spent a few years in enterprise consulting in a variety of domains. These included crime mapping, utilities & infrastructure, and real property. At some point, I decided that I was tired of jumping from tech to tech and I decided to try for a product management position at one of the bigger vendors. I ended up landing a technical business development role with Autodesk… and then after a year I was ‘hijacked’ to be a product manager. For the next 14 years, I grew progressively in responsibility until, in my last role, I lead about a quarter of the Esri product management team including responsibility for diverse domains including 3D, Digital Twins, and mobile situational awareness with around 45 products on my team. I joined Rendered.ai because I was interested in having more direct ability to influence every part of a small company in an emerging market and so far, it’s been great.
Why did Rendered.ai choose to add Cloud Marketplace as a revenue channel?
Rendered.ai is squarely built on AWS and our product is a platform that enables companies who are deploying AI to be able to create and access synthetic data for AI training and validation right in the AWS cloud. Synthetic data is a component of our customers’ enterprise AI strategy and we strongly feel that customers who buy through the AWS Marketplace are likely to be looking for solutions that can be integrated together to help them maximize and optimize their cloud investment and purchasing processes. We have a good fit for the pattern of offerings on the Cloud Marketplace in that we have a standardized, fairly simple subscription offering and can offer discounts through private offers when necessary. The Cloud Marketplace facilitates both standard sales and private offers, which is ideal for us.
What are your Cloud Marketplace goals? How do you see Tackle supporting those goals?
We started selling through the Marketplace in Q3 this year at a pretty busy time in which we also started onboarding new staff and customers. Our goals with Marketplace have been pretty simple so far… we’d like to start driving our first sales through the Marketplace so that we can get a feel for the types of buyers and buying processes, with the intent to use that initial information to better target future prospects. Ultimately, we would like Marketplace sales to be a primary component of establishing reliable monthly subscription revenue to help us grow and adapt as the needs of the market become more sophisticated.
What is your approach to sales enablement and adoption for Cloud Marketplace?
At this point, we have attempted both basic awareness campaigns and we have included references and links to our Marketplace listing on sales materials. Right now most of our sales and marketing efforts are directed at known segments or customers for whom we have domain relevance with respect to training AI. From that perspective, Marketplace becomes a purchasing mechanism option.
What is something that might surprise people about you?
I have three citizenships and have been to 50 countries. Oddly, I haven’t been outside of the US since right before the pandemic, but I’m looking forward to hitting country 51, Croatia, next summer.
