Smartly.io’s CPO Arto Tolonen on building a leading Meta Business Partner

I have always been interested in the technical side of things and learned coding as a kid on my own even before learning it in school. I was considering a business degree but still ended up doing a computer science degree and went on to build a startup, where I acted as CTO but could contribute a lot on both sides. After my startup I had a stint in a consultancy in Finland doing product work and that’s when I got deeper into the design side and acquired the skills to be a good Product Manager. Only after this did I take my first pure product management role.

I joined when the business had already launched — we had low six figure monthly revenue at that point. Originally, Smartly.io’s co-founders Kristo and Tuomo were building a different startup and working with gaming companies. But they started hearing about the problems with Facebook and user acquisition. It repeated so much that they thought there was something there and they pivoted to solve this problem. They were already exposed to the customers they solved a problem for and worked with them directly.

So if you look at our core customers, they have a few things in common. One thing is usually scale. From the early days we built with large customers who are very active on Meta and other platforms. All of them are very outcome driven, whether they focus on brand recognition or performance.

If you combine these two requirements — scale and being outcome driven — it generally means you as an advertiser have a complex setup. You need to do a lot to drive performance across markets globally. When you are spending a lot of money you also need to do a lot of things to stay on top of the performance and measure everything. This is our target market.

If you build only for that segment instead of all the marketers out there, you end up with a very different product. Our value and vision is to optimise and automate a lot of processes, all the use cases that come with a complex setup.

Well it depends. We started with digital natives, customers who are very tech driven and can build things in house. But we are also moving to more traditional customers using lots of agencies. It might be that they are not building at all but trying to find something which solves all their use cases right off the bat. In many cases we have conversations about what we can do and what can the advertiser build on top so we make sure we are building for several customers and they can build their custom cases on top of our APIs.

So I would once again say that being close to the customers was the key. People say you should be at your customer’s offices building your product in the beginning and that’s literally what we did. A few people were in Helsinki in the office and the rest were sitting next to the marketing managers at the client’s office, writing code and solving problems directly there. This was the key to building something valuable.

We also got a bit lucky with having Rocket Internet as an early client, which allowed us to scale globally from the very beginning and expand in the Berlin ecosystem. We started serving APAC customers from Helsinki thanks to that partnership.

Another key for us is trying to understand the priorities of the platforms we work with — Meta and others: what are they trying to accomplish? We need to make sure we are aligned and we do not push something contrary to their best practices. We have seen a few years back how there were many dropshipping customers using hacks for their campaigns which Meta was recommending against. We decided not to build for these use cases because it wasn’t going to last and we want to focus on the long term.

The North Star metric is a difficult question because this is not something you could trivially measure automatically across all advertisers. Our customers are constantly running tests and measuring the performance of their advertising and the different approaches we take with them. They are very performance driven and they wouldn’t spend that much money without getting good results. It’s a mix between qualitative and quantitative tests which make sure we are constantly creating value.

Our customer success teams are also always helping and trying to make sure everyone is satisfied with our service. One of our core values is radical candor so we want to know as early as possible if something is not working out so we can talk about it and fix it. There’s rarely a huge surprise coming up that we wouldn’t know about.

On the quantitative side we also monitor feature adoption of different functionalities and try to follow the development and trends across our customer base. And of course we use surveys, NPS and direct calls to surface all the product information and see if there is anything we can do better.

I still think the biggest competitor we have is ourselves. We have to make sure we don’t get stuck on our internal processes. There are always so many problems in the world you can solve but as long as we solve the proper one and follow the pace at which the industry is moving we might be able to maintain our advantage.

Meta is also a very customer driven organisation. In that sense we are very much aligned. So long as we are solving their customers’ problems they are very happy. We have seen cases where they changed their product based on the needs we have been raising through our customers. They are also very partnership centric, and after Google, Meta was the other big company which built an ecosystem which really kicked off. Now everyone is following that path in the online marketing space. We see Snap and Pinterest and TikTok mirroring that strategy and successfully building large ecosystems of partners and we are excited to be a part of that.

Meta is a large organisation growing very rapidly so it is a lot of work for us to have the relationships with all the correct people at Meta and making sure everyone knows what we are doing and we are fully aligned. We discuss our roadmaps and have direct and open conversation with different levels of their organisation so they know they can rely on us.

The core of that is the fact that we have a more narrow audience. The native tools of the platforms cater to all of their millions of customers, with a massive long tail. It makes sense for them to focus on that long tail and build tools everyone can easily onboard. If I was running their business I would make sure we are getting all the new businesses on board.

What we do is focus on the very large customers — there are a lot of things we are doing on the scale side which we know is not on the roadmap of Meta or others. So that’s the USP. When we started Meta still had separate tooling for the advanced advertisers and the long tail which they combined. I definitely understand the reasoning behind combining the tools but this also opened up a position for us to build for the advanced advertisers. It could be that in the future they go the Google path and build separate UIs but previously they went the other way around.

One additional thing is that Google started closing their own ecosystem but saw all the value Meta was getting from it and they changed tune a bit to cater to partners — so there is a lot to do in this space in general since the platforms embrace our existence.

Finally, we have a lot of creative tooling which is platform agnostic so we now see other channels asking us when we will integrate them which is a good position to be in.

When we started, everything was less specialised as it is now. The early use cases were much simpler as what they are today. Starting now it would probably be insane to try and do everything because of how complex it got but our history allowed us to expand in all these directions.

Our goal is still to improve the performance of our clients via brand or direct response advertising. A few years back we figured the importance of creatives to drive that outcome. So we started building tooling on the creative side and now we even made an acquisition to keep developing our services further (Viralspace). What we are trying to achieve is combining the actual ad buying with the creatives. Let’s say you are using the templating tool to create hundreds of variations of your creatives with different localisation — we want to move these templates directly to the proper campaign with the proper targeting, which other players cannot do if they specialise in a smaller part of the stack.

These synergies make our offering somewhat unique in the advertising space and hopefully this is what our customers appreciate.