IVP's Hypergrowth Stories: How Attentive Changed the Conversation Between Companies and Customers

In IVP's Hypergrowth Stories series, CEOs of the fastest-growing companies share their ins and outs of company building in the hypergrowth environment.

March 2020 marked a pivotal change in the way brands engage with their customers. Email inboxes were getting increasingly crowded with promotional messages and Instagram feeds were flooded with ads. With in-person shopping discouraged due to shelter-in-place policies, companies needed to find a new way to engage with customers in the competitive ecommerce landscape.

Enter Attentive. The platform helps brands cut through the noise and build trust with their subscribers using personalized, engaging text messages. Each message shares valuable information about sales, promotions, and new product launches, directly to a customer's cell phone.

Launched in 2016, Attentive was founded by veterans of the mobile ecommerce space. Prior to founding Attentive, some of the co-founders founded TapCommerce, a mobile app retargeting company that was later acquired by Twitter. This experience left them uniquely qualified to recognize the value and potential of mobile communications with retail customers.

The company experienced massive growth over the past 18 months - Attentive had 200 employees at the beginning of 2020, and is now a remote-first workforce of 1,100 employees throughout the US. In 2020, Attentive generated over $4.5 billion in revenue for e-commerce brands. Attentive works with more than 4,000 brands, including CB2, Rebecca Minkoff, and Thirdlove, and is on track to drive over billions more in revenue for brands this year.

To date, Attentive has raised $863 million in funding. The company has been recognized for a number of accolades such as Inc.'s Best Workplaces of 2021, Forbes' inaugural list of America's Best Startup Employers for 2021, and most recently being ranked #3 on Deloitte Technology Fast500. Attentive achieved this ranking due to its massive revenue growth of 49,155% from 2017 to 2020 and ranked No. 1 fastest-growing company in the Tri-State region. This is just a peek at what Attentive has achieved in such a short amount of time.

Brian Long, who serves as CEO, discusses his experience navigating Attentive's rapid growth while transitioning to the remote-first environment. We discussed how to hire, maintain the company culture and also ask the right people to identify your product-market fit.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

How did Attentive shift into a remote work environment?

Like many companies in our space during the beginning of Covid, we had no idea what to do. We started as a company with a very office-focused culture. Now, almost two years later, we're remote-first. This didn't happen overnight, it was an adjustment for all. But we quickly began to recognize that we can be even more effective remotely than we were in person.

After we went remote, we really had no choice but to keep hiring. Over time, we realized just how efficient remote work and remote hiring were. Before, we were limited to looking at talent located in New York. Now, we can hire incredible talent located anywhere and that.

What does the future of Attentive's remote culture look like to you?

To me, what remote first means is that when we're considering any of our processes, we take it from a remote mindset at first. How would it be if we were a remote person going into this process? How do we handle onboarding? How do we handle teaching? How do we handle all this stuff where everything is done remotely? I think that the remote-first mindset is really central to our processes and culture - it's still in progress for us.

I think now, being remote has really leveled the playing field so that all voices can be heard. Everyone's kind of coming from the same level and I think that's really great.

I also love how easy it is to collaborate. In documents we can actually all pitch in and work together. For example, in a meeting we can all post our answer at once, rather than wait for one person to speak and provide thoughts. I could hear from all eight people in a meeting at once and discuss it with a follow up. You can also see the history of what they say in the document and review that and remember a certain conversation. We have become much more efficient.

Are there any elements of your company culture from being in-person that you were able to take forward into being remote?

We used to open up our in-person meetings by sharing the wins and successes of different people on the team. We've brought those into our remote meetings, and they were crucial to keep up team morale and spirits, especially during such a challenging year.

I think it's a great way to make sure that people are being appreciated and celebrated for their progress and successes. It's sometimes easy to get negative and focus on the problems - but we have a team full of incredible problem-solvers. It's important to acknowledge that there's a lot that's going well and that should be celebrated.

How have you been able to keep those startup style values alive in your culture, even as you've grown to this level?

I definitely still consider us a startup and I think that's an important mindset. When you're recruiting people, you are responsible for setting the mindset for the type of company you want this to be. We never want to get complacent, or forget the values of grit and tenacity that got us to where we are now. We want to remain nimble and strategic, and hire people that have that same mindset.

At times, people may think that we're this big cruise ship and everything is on cruise control, but how can we grow from that type of mindset? So, we like to be really nimble and push that mindset so we can get ourselves to that next level.

What approach did you take to seek out

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