SPOTLIGHT: Skipping the SMB Trap and Building for Big Brands | Matt Allison, CEO & Founder @ Handraise
Matt Allison, CEO and co-founder of Handraise, discusses how his AI-powered media intelligence platform solves enterprise communications challenges by automating manual data processing that plagued his previous company TrendKite. He emphasizes the importance of building for high-value enterprise customers from day one and maintaining discipline in go-to-market strategy rather than chasing rapid growth metrics.
Summary
Matt Allison joins AJ Bruno, his former co-founder from TrendKite, to discuss Handraise, an AI-powered media intelligence platform that tracks where brands and competitors are mentioned in news globally. The platform uses AI to create narrative clusters and analyze coverage impact, serving as an always-on intelligence system for enterprise communications teams.
Matt and AJ's history together spans multiple companies and cities. They met at Meltwater in Philadelphia, later worked in San Diego where they conceptualized TrendKite over free Embassy Suites breakfasts, and engaged in competitive ping pong matches that helped them develop their sparring/ideation methodology. At TrendKite, they learned crucial lessons about customer segmentation and retention: tier five accounts ($2,000-$5,000 ARR) had high churn rates, while tier one accounts ($30,000+) maintained best-in-class retention.
For Handraise, Matt deliberately chose to build for enterprise from inception rather than repeating TrendKite's approach of starting small and expanding upward. The company is currently seed stage with $6.4 million raised and just started their revenue motion a few months ago. Their current customers include Walgreens, the Clooney Foundation, Hershey, and Apotex (Canada's largest pharmaceutical company). The ICP targets executive communications directors and heads of communications at large, complex organizations.
Matt highlights how AI has fundamentally accelerated product development. Handraise's current product sophistication exceeds TrendKite's maturity after seven years, thanks to AI-first architecture infused throughout the platform. Features like narrative summaries with Axios-style brevity formatting that historically would have taken months to build are now deployed quickly. The team includes two industry-leading AI engineers from Harvard and Oxford who constantly test different models to optimize performance rather than depending on a single vendor.
Regarding concerns about margin compression from API costs, Matt notes that costs are dropping consistently and they've optimized their systems through intelligent filtering. For example, they use preliminary ML processes to remove sidelinks (random article references that contaminate data) before running expensive AI model inference, reducing costs significantly.
On the broader question of whether traditional enterprise sales motion is outdated compared to PLG-driven exponential growth companies, Matt argues that his industry requires substantial software engineering to fulfill enterprise use cases. He advocates for staying disciplined and not chasing rapid growth metrics that don't apply to complex, compliance-heavy, data-intensive businesses. He emphasizes that success requires investors with the stomach to support companies that grow linearly rather than exponentially, and credits Pattern Breakers partner Mike Maples with instilling a serious "think trillion-dollar business" mentality that goes beyond typical founder ambition.
Matt recommends two influences: the book "What to Say When You Talk to Yourself" by Shad Helmstetter, emphasizing internal dialogue's importance to success, and the Pattern Breakers podcast with Mike Maples, which he credits for inspiring legitimate billion-dollar thinking rather than performative ambition.
About this episode
<p>Matt Allison, CEO and Founder of Handraise, joins us to share why he's skipping the SMB trap and building an AI-powered media intelligence platform for enterprise from day one. Drawing on hard-won lessons from scaling TrendKite, Matt breaks down how Handraise is targeting $30K+ deals with brands like Walgreens and Hershey, the importance of patience in early go-to-market, and how AI is helping them build a more thoughtful, scalable, and enterprise-ready product from the start.</p> <p>Matt also talks about:<br /> - Why Handraise is skipping the SMB trap and going enterprise from day one<br /> - What TrendKite taught him about building for high-value, high-retention customers<br /> - Why patience and discipline matter when you're building an enterprise GTM motion<br /> - How AI is helping Handraise build a more sophisticated product with a lean team<br /> - Why being AI-first changes what's possible in product development<br /> - How to build a sustainable business without chasing hypergrowth at all costs<br /> <br /> Chapters:<br /> 00:00 Introduction to Matt Allison and Handraise<br /> 01:15 Why Handraise Is Going Enterprise From Day One<br /> 08:46 The Challenge: Building for $30K+ Enterprise Deals<br /> 11:56 Why Patience Matters in Enterprise GTM<br /> 15:17 How AI Is Changing Product Development<br /> 19:02 Building an AI-First, Enterprise-Ready Product<br /> 22:43 Why Handraise Isn't Chasing Hypergrowth<br /> 26:00 Matt's Favorite Book and Podcast<br /> 28:00 Where to Find Matt and Handraise<br /> Try Handraise: handraise.com</p>
Key Insights
- Matt's TrendKite experience revealed that lower-priced tier five accounts ($2,000-$5,000 ARR) had significantly higher churn rates than tier one accounts ($30,000+), which achieved best-in-class retention, establishing the economic foundation for Handraise's enterprise-first strategy.
- Handraise's product at seed stage is more sophisticated than TrendKite's product after seven years of development, primarily because AI is infused into every feature from inception rather than being bolted on afterward.
- The manual labor problem that plagued TrendKite—customers exporting data to CSV files and Google Sheets to clean thousands of rows of news articles weekly—remains unsolved in the broader industry today across competitors like Meltwater, Muckrack, and Signal AI.
- Matt and AJ developed their collaborative ideation methodology at Meltwater through competitive sparring over 'cases' (sales opportunities) and maintained it through daily ping pong matches at TrendKite, creating a pattern of debate that improved decision-making.
- Handraise's AI engineers actively test multiple language models to determine which has the best F1 score for specific tasks rather than defaulting to a single vendor, providing flexibility and optimal performance across different use cases.
- The company uses a two-stage filtering approach to manage AI inference costs: preliminary ML processes remove sidelinks before expensive model inference, preventing contaminated data from consuming token budgets.
- Investors in the Pattern Breakers fund ask founders to envision trillion-dollar futures as a serious strategic exercise rather than aspirational dreaming, representing a different mentality about venture backing and founder accountability.
- Matt argues that media intelligence and PR technology require substantial software engineering investment to satisfy enterprise use cases and compliance requirements, making linear growth companies legitimate businesses that don't need to match PLG exponential growth metrics.
Topics
Transcript
Welcome to Top Line, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market. informed professionals in the market. Are you ready to level up your go-to-market strategy for 2026? Then don't miss GTM 2025, the only B2B tech conference exclusively for go-to-market executives. Join 1,000 other revenue leaders this September 23rd to 25th in Washington, D.C. for an exclusive executive-only experience. This three-day event is hyper-focused on connection, strategy, and execution. Expect hands-on workshops, in-depth strategy sessions, and curated opportunities to build relationships with VPs, CXOs, and founders facing…
Full transcript available for MurmurCast members
Sign Up to AccessMore from Topline
Forget Growth. Your Valuation Depends On Your AI Story | Tomasz Tunguz, GP @ Theory Ventures
Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Theory Ventures, discusses how AI is fundamentally reshaping SaaS valuations, sales metrics, and go-to-market strategies. He argues that the market now values AI narrative and enterprise budget increases over traditional growth metrics, while warning that observable productivity gains may actually reflect demand-side changes rather than supply-side innovations.
SPOTLIGHT: Surviving the Inbox Apocalypse | Evan Huck, CEO & Co-Founder @ UserEvidence
Evan Huck, CEO of UserEvidence, discusses building a customer evidence platform while balancing startup growth from $4M to $11M revenue. He shares his career journey from SDR to founder and explains how a long-term brand investment strategy, after eight quarters of flat growth, finally drove significant pipeline acceleration.
How To Make Your ARR 20% More Valuable To Investors | Keenan, CEO @ A Sales Growth Company
Keenan, CEO of A Sales Growth Company, argues that not all revenue is created equal—revenue generated through heroic, reactive sales practices can be valued 15-20% lower by investors than revenue from systematic, predictable processes. He emphasizes that understanding the fundamental physics of selling and the actual business problems customers face matters far more than standardizing behaviors, and that most sales organizations suffer from broken systems rather than training deficiencies.
SPOTLIGHT: AI Isn't Just Faster Translation, It's a $40B Tug-of-War for Global Attention. | Bryan Murphy, CEO @ Smartling
Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling, discusses how he led his AI translation company through a rapid organizational transformation after recognizing GPT's potential to dramatically improve translation quality. He shares his framework for managing innovation through structured R&D processes with confidence levels and time-boxing, while maintaining focus on customer outcomes.
The Unwritten Rules of CRO Survival | Rick Smolen, CRO @ ShipHero
Rick Smolen, CRO of ShipHero, discusses how AI acts as a leverage tool that can either dramatically improve performance or cause catastrophic failure in go-to-market teams. He emphasizes that AI should enhance human work rather than replace critical thinking, and argues that the best revenue leaders will become exponentially better while average performers will deteriorate without proper AI implementation discipline.