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Dave Bunce

Morphio is machine-learning based software that helps protect and optimize digital marketing ad spend (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc) and saves marketers time. We monitor, analyze and proactively alert users to key trends and opportunities for improvement in their digital marketing efforts.

Tell us about yourself?

I am a specialist turned generalist. I spent the first half of my career in public accounting with one of the big four accounting firms, auditing large companies. I reached a pivot point in my career where I knew I had to decide if I truly wanted to specialize in that career or explore new territory. So I joined a company about as opposite from my big four experience and I went to a 15-person early stage marketing agency to run finance and ops. I ended up seeing how process and structure and technology could be brought into a small company like ours to produce tremendous results. This fuelled the internal R&D work that ultimately spun out of our agency to become the Morphio business we have today. I enjoy wearing the generalist hat that comes with being a CEO of an early stage company, having involvement in all functions from being on sales calls, to answering user support issues, to team building, to financing decisions.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Take more chances and learn how to truly adopt a lean start-up mentality.

What problem does your business solve?

Marketers are inundated with data, and spend the bulk of their time looking through data to identify the issues or opportunities within their results, and then an exorbitant amount of time creating reports with this data. Our software is meant to cut directly to a prioritized and objective list of where efforts are needed, allowing the marketer to do what they do best, and the part that machines can’t do, and that is building the brand strategy and positioning that will make the marketing successful.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

We were the original user of Morphio. We built it within our marketing agency initially because we first hand experienced the challenges we now solve using our platform. We knew that other agencies had similar problems through our peer to peer network of agency leaders and in-house marketers. We knew if we could provide marketers with a ‘second set of eyes’ on their account, they could be left to do what marketers need to be doing, which is being creative and strategic.

What is your magic sauce?

We have built the product thinking like the end user. I know that sounds cliche, but it makes a difference when you can say ‘we used this product ourselves and it worked because…” or “we designed the product this way knowing that marketers have this issue…” from our direct experience. Our UI/UX makes complicated data points and machine-learning look simple and understandable, which is key for our value proposition of saving time and also as we appeal to more and more SMBs who may not be digital marketing specialists.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We want to build an AI-enabled CMO for any business to hire. We believe all businesses need great marketing to be successful, and we want to make that accessible to all SMBs to fuel their growth.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

We had to invest in making the product a lot more customizable for our users to not just fit the workflow and way of thinking our agency had. Gaining adoption from an agency within large teams was a challenge until we address the customization users needed to have.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

Check us out at www.morphio.ai or connect with Dave on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidcbunce/